I get teased alot for taking the time to edit my snapshots. I tend not to hand out any images that I have not make a quick pass for color adjustments, cropping and minor clean up. Sometimes though, my cleaning up can pay off nicely. In the following example, my six year old was jumping on a air powered rocket that would trail bubbles. But the bad news was she had her back to me for a good bubble shot. But then as I kept shooting, she flipped sides and now she was facing me but the bubbles did not have a nice look. Can’t win huh? Not exactly! Through the magic of Photoshop, I was able to make a decent snap in just a few minutes of work.
The trick is to pick the keeper image and then swap out the subject for a better version. Portrait shooters do this all the time in swapping out heads, eyes, smiles and more to get that perfect portrait. I just wanted a nice snapshot of a fun moment so I swapped out Sara’s back side shot to the one of her facing me and put it on the good bubble shot. The magic in this type of swap job is in how to use masks and the pain brush. This tip is pretty much effortless since we do not have the cut out the subject, just get around the subject.
Here are my two original shots.
Bubble Rocket Back View
Bubble Rocket Jump Front View
You can see that the front shot is more interesting since it shows her face but the bubbles are more fun on the back shot. Here is the final product after I used CS4 to paint in the correct version of Sara on the right bubble background.
FInal version after painting
So how did I get there from the two originals? Easy..
Photoshop Masks
I made two layers, each with one version of the image and each with a mask. The first image is my subject or the subject I want to see and the second is my background I want to keep. First, we need to put the two images into alignment and to do that, you can use auto-align to line up the images or you can do it manually. I used auto-align and painted (blended) manually. You can find the auto- align tool at Edit – Auto align layers and choose automatic. Do not blend, you need to do that part by hand
The subject I want
Here is the second layer with my background.
The wanted background
With the two layers in place, I paint in my top subject layer at 100% on the subject and then fade in the borders at 50% and 25%. I also use a Wacom which lets me blend with pressure which gives me considerably more control over the blending. Once I have a good blend job, I then apply global adjustments for color/contrast etc. And whammo! I have a nice snapshot of my daughter launching her bubble rocket with good bubbles AND her face showing. Total time was about 10 minutes in Photoshop.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Improve Photos Fast With Cropping (pcworld.com)
- An Introduction to Focus Stacking (digital-photography-school.com)
- Creating a Coloring Book Effect in Photoshop (brighthub.com)
So I’ve been on a high key kick of late with Lightroom and Photoshop. I mean, EVERYONE does black backgrounds or vignettes and it’s old.. very old. I stumbled over something of a Hybrid High Key look while working on a junk image several weeks ago. I even posted an entry here on it and how I made it from junk to art. That just got my interest up as a new business angle. So for the past weeks, I have gone from fooling around with it to writing a Lightroom preset called “White out” to working in Photoshop to “paint” the final image.
Now I’ve extended it further with the use of Corel Painter 11
Photoshop CS5 has some basic painting elements now built in but I find them more of a play toy than anything ready for serious painting. But, they will get you by on the cheap if you already have CS5 and would not rather not sprint for Corel’s software OR you would rather not learn a new software package. I also feel that these basic brushes in CS5 are just the opening move for CS5 to move into Corel’s space. I think if Corel were smart, they would offer plugs for CS5 that extend CS5 more into the Corel way of painting. At least the 800lb gorilla is not quite as ready to step on you if you are a partner of theirs. Just my opinion and I dont know diddly about what goes on in the backroom of Adobe or Corel.
White out conversion
So here is a picture that shows my original image plus the basic reworked image that has the background replaced with white and the levels reworked using my Whiteout action plus some manual tuning. I also used Portraiture to smooth out the skin.
I took this image, added about two inches around it in white and saved it as an eight bit TIFF file and brought it into Painter. I cloned the image and added a layer to the clone. Then I used the basic blender brush called “grainy watercolor” and painted out the edges. Then I used the same brush in various sizes to brush out fine details and to blend tones. I did add some color to places like the nose and lips which had blown out to white in the processing. I used black to add some lines to other blown areas, just a touch of a line, a hint as it were. I might add some color background but that defeats the point of a high key look in white.. but I might do it anyways. I also did some heavy retouching on the reflections in the glasses. Since I wanted the black dots on the hat and the black glasses to provide a counter point to all the white, I needed the glasses to be almost solid black with just a bit of reflection to provide the texture. Smooth black in my mind would be too much.
Whiteout when painted
You can see that while the painting looks good, there is still some room for improvements here and there. That is the trouble with this style of post reworking, you can get so caught up in refining things, you never finish it. I love to paint and I have several ideas for my business revolving around using painting as a tool. But like the basic art of photography, this will require a fair amount of practice on my part or yours if you want to try it also. I would warn you not to get too discouraged at first. Painter is not intuitive or at least I dont find it that way. Some of my Photoshop commands transfer but by in large, it’s a completely new set of skills and commands to learn. This is the attraction of trying to see how far I can push the new bristle brushes in Photoshop CS5 where I already feel comfortable.
Tools used in this article:
Related articles by Zemanta
- Turn a Photo into an Oil Painting with Corel Painter XI (brighthub.com)
- Review: Wacom Intuos4 Wireless (macworld.com)
- The Art of Digital Photo Painting [Book Review] (digital-photography-school.com)
Sometimes you need to be reminded what the priority should be and not what your think it is. I decided a few weeks back I wanted a new website where the site and the blog were one and the same. I dislike most “Photography” blogs since you end up with miles of images to scroll down through. I like blogs that are informational like what I’m doing right now. I dont like pages of stuff just to look at. The website has images and key info but it’s pretty static, too static in my opinion for today’s customer. So I start to look around. This blog is based on WordPress and I can use a “Theme” to divide up the content and give a “look and feel” to it that fits with my branding or my personality.
So I started “theme shopping” and there are ALOT of themes to choose from. But I did not find one I really liked till a few days ago. I liked the demo and so I bought it for a very cheap price. There was a reason why it was cheap. Just to get the basics to work right, I had to hack my way through a few pages of code and work out what they had done or not done. No biggie so I think, I can do this. After all, I am a geek and a pretty damn good one if I say so. The problem was that I have now spent almost four days on this stupid template and I was very much caught up in it and into it. I do like coding when I have a project like this and I can and have wasted hours on projects like this.
So today I’m listening to a podcast called “This week in Photography” (TWIP) and they are interviewing the owner of Livebooks.com. One of the things that was mentioned just jumped out at me. If you are working on your site, you are not shooting pictures. Sounds like a no-brainer but when you are down the rabbit hole, you dont always see the light till someone shines it in your face.
In my case, I was way down the rabbit hole and I needed the light really bright to remind me that while coding is fun, it’s not helping shoot, get business, develop new skills like photo painting and more. I need a site and I need to do it with the minimal time and effort on my part. So my template efforts are being put on hold for now and I’ll stick with this simple blog for the time being. It’s not very fancy but it is serviceable and I dont think it is ugly, just kinda of plain.
I did look at Livebooks since they also made some very good points about trying to keep up with the various media players to support like the iPhone, iPad, Android etc..etc. Again, another time sink that I should avoid. I do have a plug in for iPhone support and it was free and fast to install. That worked well but spending time to develop or to hack something into working for me is not what I should be doing. I need to making images.. I need to be bettering my skills with photoshop, Lightroom and other revenue generating skills. After all, people who pay me want pictures and choose me for my skill at making pictures, not for my coding skills or website design.
So if anyone knows a really cool but easy to set up template for a blog/website, let me know.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Review: LiveBooks photo site (crunchgear.com)
- LiveBooks Review: Great Looking Online Portfolios Made Easy (digital-photography-school.com)
So i have been playing around with a “hybrid high key” look that I like on certain images. I originally did it as the result of salvaging a “eh” picture but I really liked the look. So I worked out how to take my history of the image and flip it to be a preset. Not only that, but the preset works pretty on other images with some minor tweaks.
My first image was a happy accident but this one is the result of my new preset plus some extra work in photoshop to really dial it in. I applied the preset then loaded it up into CS4 to paint in some color, apply some blur with a mask so I could even out tones, fix the eyes using MCP eye doctor actions and painted in some eyelashes.
Jo Version 2
Now I had the look I wanted, how could I save the look and use it on future images? I need to make a preset for Lightroom. So I created the preset and then I needed to test it on other images. Now the question was could I get the preset to work on a picture of a different tonal range? Here is my original image. You can see she has dark hair and darker skin than my first model.
Basic Bridal Image
So I apply the new preset and tweak a few things like the vignette and the exposure a touch. And this is what I came back with.
Testing the preset
I’m pretty happy with the results so far. My new preset gets me within 80-85% of where I want to be with the image and I just need to fine tune the development of the image to bring it exactly to the point I want. The Photoshop edits are a topic for another blog post 
Now, how did I actually make the preset? I used Lightroom 3′s history panel. I made all my adjustments and then made a snapshot of the history.
Lightroom 3 History Panel
Once I had the snap of the history, I highlighted the new snap and I went to the preset panel and clicked on the + sign to make a new preset. It’s that simple.
Lightroom 3 snapshot dialog box
But, you can also see that the whole process of making snapshots and presets can be a VERY powerful aid to your workflow. You can make a preset of virtually anything you can do in Lightroom and use as much or as little of the settings as you want for the preset. In my case, I unchecked a few things like lens corrections since I’m not always shooting with the same lens.
Lightroom 3 Preset Dialog Box
Now just what is in a preset? A preset for Lightroom is just a text file that has all the settings that Lightroom will apply to the image when you “develop” it. These changes are non-destructive which is why you have these text files. If Lightroom had been made several years ago, they would have edited the image directly which is why some of us have alot of copies of the same file scattered around because you never, ever edited the original. This way is much better! Here is the contents of a preset file. I have hightlighted in yellow a couple of setting we all know and love. Both of which I changed in my development of the preset. This file captures those changes and will apply them each time I apply the preset.
Lightroom Preset File Contents
Now I can make any image more or less the same using this preset. I dont have to try and remember how I did it or guess at the settings. I can apply it to one image or to many images at once. I can apply it at import or at a later time if I choose. As I said, presets are a very powerful tool for your workflow in Lightroom.
One of the most classic looks in photography is Black and White. It is very interesting to me how even with our fancy digital cameras and ultra clean image files, we strive for a retro, grainy old school look without color. We will use all kinds of tricks to make our clean image look like the old Tri X or illford or TMAX. We add grain (noise), we unsharpen the image, we do all kinds of things to “ruin” the digital perfection that we as photographers pay dearly for.
And why? Why do we do this thing that we do? Because we have a collective embedded memory that black and white is artistic, it’s clean and pure and it really can make you focus on the image, not the colors. I’m sure there are a lot of other reasons but those are what come to my mind as I’m writing this missive.
I remember learning photography years ago in a community college and being very disgruntled to learn that my first semester would be just black and white. I thought it was going to be a terrible semester, why did we need to learn this old crap when we had Kodachrome and E6 slide film and more. Who even WANTED black and white?
That sure changed by the end of the semester to the point that when I signed up for my second semester, I took a second semester of black and white film studies. I lived in black and white film, I lived in the dark room with it’s chemicals and red light. I pored over catalogs looking at exotic papers to print my B/W images onto. I learned how to make my own developer to tweak the film into a direction I wanted it to go. Only then did I start to explore color.
But technology marches on and B/W became a niche player with color owning the world. Then came digital and really changed things around. Color was everything, saturated was better, grain or noise was the great evil and we strived to get as clean of an image as possible and some of us thought we might have lost a piece of our soul in the process and chase.
So now I see B/W more but I see really bad conversions where the folks end up with a monochromatic middle grey image and call it “Black and White” because that is what the preset says it is. With this thought, I’m going to write up a few entries on my ideas of B/W and how I got to certain pictures that I really like. My first one is a high key look where it’s dark blacks, stark whites and very little grey. It’s also a study in how to salvage an image that otherwise was not much to look at.
So lets start with the original image, no retouching or other processing. It’s got a bit of lens flare since I was shooting a 1.4 50mm wide open against the bright white background.
Original Image - No retouch
As you can see, aside from the killer body, technically speaking, the image is not very special or very strong. But lets see what we can do with it. I always start in Lightroom since that is my workflow. The very first thing I do is apply a camera profile preset which brings in the various settings to match my camera, in this case, a Nikon D300. Then I will apply a B/W conversion preset and do some basic adjustments.
BAM – FREE Camera Dojo free Lightroom preset.
WOW BnW_02 – FREE Jack Davis B/W conversion preset from his How to WOW series
Highlights +40
Darks +75
Shadows -19
sharpness -80
The sharpness has been dialed down to let me run the noise clean up, then I reapply the sharpness as needed
luminance +54
color noise +27
sharpness +40
After Lightroom Conversion
Now I bring the image into Photoshop to fine tune it and to clean it up.
I first apply a curves layer with a sweeping curve that starts from the lower left corner and bows to the left and up the right hand corner. This brings out the whiteness of the skin
Now I make a duplicated layer and start to sample the image and paint it using the samples. In this case I evened out a shadow under the chine, I made the eyelashes darker, whites of the eyes brighter and so on.
After Curves Adjustment
I then apply a blur to a duplicate of the painted image. But I apply a layer mask which hides the new blur. Then I use my Wacom to paint in the blur at something like a 20% opacity.
Final Image after retouching
Now we have a pretty sweet and dramatic black and white image. It really shows off her eyes and the overall beauty of her face without the distraction of lens flare, color and other attributes. Print this on black and white paper or aluminum and you have killer wall art.
