Skunk Lighting

I'm testing out some new lighting techniques so no Lightroom or Photoshop tips here, apart from standard sharpening in Photoshop.

Don't be too hard on yourself

This image was made with two exposures and auto aligned in Photoshop CS3. This feature is fantastic and allows you to blend images without a tripod. All you need to do is bring both images into Photoshop CS3, drag one image to the other image, then select both layers. Go Edit>Auto-Align Layers... use the default mode in the dialog box that comes up. Once the layers have been auto aligned, the last step is to create a mask on the top layer and use a black or white brush to blend in the layer below.

Lightroom's new Painter Tool

The Painter tool is new in Lightroom 1.1

When viewing a collection or folder and you're in grid view in the Library Module a spray can icon appears in the grid tool bar. The spray can has a vertical tag icon and the tooltip says "Painter". On rollover we see some dots emerge from the cans nozzle. So you select the spray can and it comes off the tool bar (there is a darker circle showing where it belongs). Clicking on the circle puts it back. But you find yourself wondering what the hell does it paint. With the tool selected a partial answer is evident because you now see "Paint : Keywords" with a text field next to the Painters circle. It turns out you can type keywords in the text field and then "paint" them onto multiple images. In fact successive paints will toggle the keyword (i.e if the keyword already exist it is removed. Nice :o)

But wait there's more! Keywords is one option of many. You could also choose to "Paint" a :

Label
Flag
Rating
Metadata
Settings
Rotation

Settings is pretty interesting as it lets you paint on one of the presets (i.e Sepia tone, Grayscale, sharpen) or your own user defined settings. Rotation is sort of fun as you watch a whole row of images rotate clockwise.

It still feels sort of odd to be "painting" on keywords or a rotation. But ignoring the metaphor it's a very useful tool if you use any of these attributes. I use keywords to order my collections and I use ratings when working out image preferences. The keywords I use in bulk. Though ratings I tend to use on one image at a time. But I'm sure we all have very different workflows so this will suit different users in different ways. Give it a go. I'll be posting a video on the Painter soon.

Two shots in the top 0.1% of images on flickr.com

Flickr has a very interesting stream called "Explore," in which they give a shout out to what they think are really cool photos.


The rankings in Explore for all dates change all the time even for dates in the past. Photos are uploaded to Flickr at a rate of around 400/minute and are constantly being viewed, faved, and commented by millions of members. Interestingness rankings are recalculated for all photos many times per day. Photos uploaded a day, a week, even a year ago, are still receiving activity in the form of views, comments, favorites, etc. And all of that activity affects each photo's Interestingness ranking, even for photos that were uploaded years ago. Explore is very dynamic. When you browse through Explore on any date, you are viewing what the Interestingness algorithm has selected as the highest ranked photos at that moment.

So to get your images on this selection you are competing with 500,000 additional images every 24hrs.

Lucky for me I have a ranking of 67 and 120 for these two images. Rankings change very quickly so you can be dropped at anytime.

Sharpening in Lightroom at the Howick Camera Club

I will be giving a short tutorial at the Howick Camera Club on Mon 24th Sept. It will cover image sharpening and making sense of the four Detail sliders.

Lightroom Catalogs

Me preparing for my Lightroom tutorials

I should be able to get this week's video out by Friday.

Maree Turner - Portrait Photographer

Maree Turner is a Wedding and Portrait Photographer. She's asked me to run a few of her images through Lightroom/Photoshop. Things are definately easier when you have fantastic images to deal with first. Maree's work is a joy to play with. Here are a few images I've tweeked to make the images pop.

Here are Maree's contact details:

Maree Turner
Photographer
Associateship Photographic Society of NZ
Qualified Member of The New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers
Multi Award Winner
maree.design@xtra.co.nz
www.mareeturner.co.nz
09 271 5406
0274 741 479

I'll be giving a few details in the comments section of this post this afternoon.

Lightroom, where does it fit in?

Before I start on the up and coming weekly video tutorials, I want to mention a few things about where Lightroom fits into the family.

Firstly, it's been built from the ground up for photographers. You can use Photoshop if you like but not to the same speed as Lightroom. Being a database driven application, it moves at a blinding pace so best get your coffee and chocolate all set before you start as rendering is a thing of the past.

Lightroom has five main modules and these will expand to more in the future. But for now we have The Library for sorting, working with metadata and managing your entire library of images. And they can sit anywhere. On a local hard drive or any number of external hard drives.

The Develop module, for processing your RAW, JPEG and TIFF images. You can do all sorts of things in this module that doesn't require you exporting your images to Photoshop. 90% of your time you will find spent here for image manipulation. Maybe 10% of the time will require you sending the image to Photoshop for some deep pixel massaging.

The Slideshow module blows Bridge out of the water, I can't see why anyone needs bridge any longer. All Bridge does, Lightroom does better and faster.

The Print module is simply fantastic, no need to go through 35 steps to make sure all the setting are correct for printing at home as is the process in Photoshop, here in Lightroom we are in a better happy environment, it even smells better.

Finally we have the Web module. With a little digging you will be able to post galleries in html or flash form on the web, but I will be covering this later.

So follow me along next week.

Bob Jones knows good wine

I popped over to a good friend's place yesterday morning to help him out with Lightroom. As I was leaving he gave me a bottle of red...oh my it's good! Thank you Bob and if you need another favour, just let me know!

Lightroom 1.2 Update

Not a ground breaking update like 1.1

But, in Lightroom 1.1, some photographers had complained that the software applied overaggressive noise reduction when importing raw images, the unprocessed image sensor data without any in-camera processing. Adobe apparently took heed with Lightroom 1.2.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.2 Update

Corrections for several issues including XMP auto-write performance, Vista grid display errors and noise reduction for Bayer patterned sensors. Additional camera support for the Canon EOS 40D, Fuji FinePix IS-1, Olympus EVOLT E-510, Panasonic DMC-FZ18 and more.

Lightroom weekly video

I've been thinking about the best way to post lessons on Lightroom. As many don't know the first thing about it, I've decided to start from the beginning. I recently promised to give twice weekly video tuts on Photoshop and Lightroom. What was I thinking. I don't have the time.

My new approach is to give a weekly tut on Lightroom starting from the absolute beginning. I'm in the process of setting up the videos so it may take a week or so to get the first one out.

Light Control and Lightroom

Here's an interesting question that may get your brains working.

Apart from the fact I did use Lightroom to close the image of Shelley down, another reason exists for having such a dark background and it happened at the time of shooting, not during manipulation. The image was shot at midday in my lounge with the ambient light flooding into the room. It was bright!

So how is it possible to make the background go almost totally dark while exposure properly for the subject? Any answers, fire away!

Shelley in Black

This is an interesting composition of my lovely partner, Shelley. As usual, click on the image to make it bigger.

I used Lightroom to establish a white balance. Went with a warmer tone than Lightroom initially picked. The best way to find a white balance that works is to take a look at what Lightroom dishes out first, then if you don't like it, swing the temperature slider way left and then way right, a little like a swing in the play ground. Continue to swing each way with smaller and smaller swings until you settle at a point that suits. This is of course an artistic choice so it's totally up to how you feel about it.

Then I reduced the exposure and brightness somewhat to darken the blacks, I also applied a vignetting to totally close the image down. You may be aware that I almost always shoot as bright as possible and then reduce the values in Lightroom after the fact. This is one of the few occasions that I exposed the image normally as I knew that I was going to reduce the exposure/brightness anyway so wasn't too concerned about shooting bright in this instance. Remember the brighter you shoot the great detail you will have in your image.

Then I increased the Clarity Slider to about 30 and increased the vibrance. I finally used the Details Panel to sharpen the image the way I wanted it. I used 35/1.2/20/70 respectively from top to bottom (I'm talking sliders here). I then exported the image to Photoshop for some final sharpening.

Questions - Fire away.

Fixing Blurred Images in Photoshop

This image was sent in by Margaret Penney from the Manukau Photographic Society and also Pukekohe Franklin Camera Club. It's a tough image as the jeep is blurred beyond what I would normally tackle, but for the purposes of demonstration, I'll take you through the steps I used.

First I selectively increased the saturation of the yellows and reds with a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Most greens you see in trees and grass are made up of more yellow than green.

The jeep is moving which works to our advantage as I can selectively motion blur the surround and give the jeep a subtle sharpening effect. The contrast between the blurred surround and the sharp jeep will make the jeep look sharper. Gota use any method available for this one as the jeep will never be tac sharp.

So how did I do this. Firstly I duplicated the background and applied a motion blur to the top layer at a similar angle to the movement of the jeep. I then applied a mask to the top layer. The mask will be white, so all I need to do is select a soft brush and paint with black over the jeep. (make sure the mask layer is selected). This will cause the jeep to have no motion blur.

I now flattened the image and applied a selective sharpening of the jeep with PhotoKit Sharpener, I used the haze cutter tool which works similarly to the Clarity Slider in Lightroom. I then applied an export sharpening for the web.

Comments are welcome.

Black and White in Lightroom

Black and White in Lightroom is a joy. All you need to do is go to the HSL/Color/Grayscale Panel and click on Greyscale. Then click on the little target at the top left corner of the HSL/Color/Greyscale Panel and go to your main image. Click and drag up or down on various tones in the image and you have excellent control over how dark or bright you want those tones to be. Sweet! You'll notice the Red/Orange/Yellow/Green/Aqua/Blue/Purple/Magenta sliders move as you change the tonal values.

Changing the feel of an image

Above is the Raw Image

Photoshop and Lightroom are tools to create the feel you experienced in an image when you made it. The thing is, it's impossible for others to appreciate the sensations you felt at the time. That's when you need to use tools to create the feel you experienced and that will allow others to get an idea of what it was all about.




Above is the Completed Image

As always click on the image to see it bigger.

The image at the top is the "Raw" data, the one underneath incorporates Lightroom and Photoshop manipulation to magnify the feel of the image.

It was cold and windy this morning so I wanted to impart those feelings in some way. When I get very cold I feel my vision becomes more focussed on a single point. My peripheral vision reduces. I sense a feeling of white and blue colours. You get the idea.

First things first - lens choice, I decided to go with a lensbaby with a wide open aperture to give a heap of blur away from the focal point, I then increased the shutter speed up to 1/640 sec for two reasons, one because I was at F/2.8 and two because I wanted to underexpose the ambient by a couple of stops (you know that cold feeling) so now I had to use a flash to bring up the exposure on the subject.

After I got home I imported the images into Lightroom, I cropped an image the way I wanted it. Then I changed the white balance temperature to something cold. I then increased the clarity and vibrance in the image to make it pop and little. What the heck is Clarity. It allows you to add punch in the midtone contrast. So now you know what the slider does. You'll find you'll put it up to at least 40 on most images. I then popped down to the Lens Correction panel to create a vignetting effect, to close down the image a little, you know that cold feeling.

I then exported the image to Photoshop and removed skin problems by using the Spot Healing and Healing Brush tools. I wasn't keen on the hard shadow under the nose created by my small light source. It would have been better to increase the size of my light source when I shot the image but because I didn't I applied a subtle smudge along the shadow line under the nose with the Smudge Tool.

I created a new layer, filled it with 50% grey, changed the blend mode to Soft Light and used a white brush at 10% to whiten up the knuckles a little (cold cold cold).

I then used PhotoKit Sharpener (plugin) to selectively sharpen Shelley's left eye and thumb and a bit of the scarf. And selectively smoothed out her skin with a tool in PhotoKit Sharpener.

Finally I applied an export sharpening for the web. Done! Any questions. Fire away.

Got a Great Idea!

Okay here's the plan. Send in any image that you want to change but are at a loss on how to go about it. I will then show the before and after images and show the steps I used to get from A to B. If I get a huge influx I may not be able to cover all images. Let's see where this goes. It will also be an opportunity for comments on the images sent in.

Photoshop Reflections

Michael from the Henderson Camera Club sent me the top image asking me how I would remove the branch from the bottom left of the image after cropping in tight.

The steps are as follows.

Duplicate the background layer

This is a tough one as I think the bottom part of the image needs to be cleaned up a bit. I thought about it for a while and came up with the idea of copying the top part of the image by selecting it then press Ctrl + J (pc) to move the selection to a new layer, then flip the layer vertically. Then move the copied part of the image on top of the reflection to match the original reflection.

I've had to edit this post as a person commented that reflections don't compress and of course he/she is right!

Step two was to create a mask on the flipped layer and brush out the areas I didn't want. Ahhh the control you get with masking.

Any questions, fire away.

Here comes another one just like the other one

This image is similar to the before and after image of Shelley. Again, only one light has been used. I had a strobe shooting through an umbrella high camera right. The strobe is doing two things. FIRSTLY it's lighting the subject and SECONDLY it's creating a specular reflection off the background which also drowns out any background shadow. (Like playing billards with light) If you look at the face of the subject you will see a soft diffused to shadow transfer zone which has been created by the large light source.

I'm presently shooting IR only as I blew up my D200. Had something to do with my camera touching one of the umbrella spokes while taking a shot. Somehow the camera shorted in the process. I'm sure Canon users will have something to say about this!

This image was sharpened in Lightroom using the four new sliders in the Details Panel.