Alternative Presentations

Here is another composition from my short trip to Ricketts Glen State Park. (The other composition.) And I want to take the opportunity to say a little about the possibility of showing more than one interpretation of a digital shot (capture).

A while back I did a post titled Digital Has Changed the Way We Shoot. In it are links to a few of Brooks Jensen’s audio podcasts. These particular podcasts were about the differences in how he used to shoot with film and how he now shoots with digital capture. In part, he talks about when he shot with film needing to capture the tonal values the way he wanted them to show in the final output (print). But with digital he wants to capture, not necessarily the best looking image, but rather a file that contains the most data for future post processing. Read more »

Making lists seems to be a popular way of blogging. (Maybe we are getting too much David Letterman.) Anyway, at least for this post, I’ve decided to follow the heard. Photoshop CS 5 (and Lightroom 3) have been out for a while and I’ve had a chance to revamp how I work on images because of the new features in them. In order to make the list the feature must have a significant impact on how I work on images. Here are my top five new features in Photoshop CS5.

1. Updated Refine Edge
2. ACR’s Process 2010
3. ACR’s updated Lens Correction
4. Enhanced Noise Reduction in ACR
5. Content Aware Read more »

There are two types of contrast that can be used to make images more interesting: color contrast and tonal contrast. But for now I only want to talk about is tonal contrast. And specifically the two types of tonal contrast: overall contrast and midtone contrast, and how they can be modified during post processing. Read more »

For those readers that are “local” to the West Chester PA area,  I’ve published the classes and workshops I’m offering this Fall and Winter. I have them listed on two interlinked web sites:

• The Workshops and Classes Page on this blog
• The It’s All About the Light Tours web site.

There are a couple of new entries: Advanced Raw Workflow with Lightroom and/or Adobe Camera Raw Workshop and a Digital Black and White class for the Chester County Night School. Both of these are relatively short, at three sessions.

And if you are not local. can’t fit a class or workshop in your schedule, or prefer learning on your own you can visit this blog’s Resource Page for book recommendations. If you buy a book , or anything for that matter, after clicking through to Amazon I get a few pennies and you get a warm felling all over because you helped keep this site going. Thanks!

In my post on how to Double Process a Single Raw File I showed the two different ways of creating a copy of a Smart Object (SO) layer. To summarize, if you simply duplicate the layer both SO layers are “linked” back to the same version of the raw file. And any changes you make to one will be reflected in the other. But if you choose New Smart Object via Copy then you create a second independent SO. The resulting 2 SO layers can be modified independently from one another.

On his Adobe Photoshop Killer Tips site Matt Kloskowski has a short video that shows the differences in these two ways of making a copy of a SO layer. If my explanation leaves you scratching your head, check out his 2 minute video.

Have you ever had a problem getting the crop marquee to stay where you want it. Especially if you are only cropping a small portion and the marquee is near the edge of the frame. You drag out the marquee and it snaps back to the edge of the frame.  The reason for this behavior is that, by default, Snap is enabled and Document Bounds is selected. (Located in the View menu shown on the left. View > Snap.) To permanently disable that behavior you can click either Snap or Snap To > Document Bounds to remove the check mark and disable the feature.

But a faster way to work is to temporarily disable snapping by simply holding down the Control key while dragging the crop boundary. This will allow more accurate placement of the outline when placement of the crop is critical. So when you are trying to place the crop marquee near the edge of the frame and it jumps back to the edge; holding down Control and then dragging will enable you to place the bounding exactly where you want it and it will stay there. Give it a try.

Last week I posted an image of a Union Solder’s Coat. This is an updated version of that image.

I did two more things in Nik Silver Effects Pro for this update. The first was to add a control point to add contrast  and slightly darken to the bottom of the solder’s jacket. This accentuated the folds in the coat and created more depth.

The other was to add a bit of a vignette. Besides the usual framing to draw the viewers eye into the subject, the vignette added to the chiaroscuro-the visual interplay of highlight and shadow to make the coats the focal point of the image. Read more »

Anyone who has taken any of  my image editing classes knows I’m a strong proponent of nondestructive editing in Photoshop. And I’m always surprised by the number of experienced Photoshop users that don’t know it’s possible to do a nondestructive crop. So I thought I would do a post to show how simple it is.

First off, some basics. In the default Photoshop workspace the Tools panel is a vertical bar on the left. This bar hold all the tools, including the Crop Tool.  And across the top of the workspace, just below the menu bar, is the Options Bar. Every tool has a unique Options bar that lets you set various options to determine how the tool will behave. And the Crop Tool is a little unique in that it’s Option Bar changes after a crop outline is made. Here is what the Crop Tool’s Option Bar looks like when the tool is selected but before a corp outline is made:

And here is what it looks like after a crop outline is made:

Read more »