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.

Sometimes processing raw files is a compromise. For example when adjusting the exposure to make the sky look its best results in the foreground being too dark. There are things that can be done during capture to mitigate the problem. Use of a Graduated Neutral Density filter will darken a sky relative to the foreground exposure. Or taking an exposure bracket sequence and process as an Exposure Blend or as a HDR. But what if we didn’t do these things and the dynamic range is just to too great to have detail in both the highlights and the shadows from a single file? One solution is to take advantage of the “hidden” dynamic range of a raw file and to process that raw capture twice, once for the highlights and again for the shadows, and to then blend the resulting files in Photoshop.

As with most things in Photoshop there are a number of ways to accomplish this. Here is one way that is efficient, relatively quick, and straight froward. Smart Objects are at the heart of this technique. Yesterday I did a post on Smart Objects. So if you haven’t read it, now might be a good time to take a look at it.

  Read more »

I started to do a How-to post that shows a technique to Double Process a Single Raw File inside a Photoshop document. Since the technique relies heavily on the use of Smart Objects I thought it would be helpful to explain a little about Smart Objects first.

In Photoshop a Smart Object is a layer that contains a copy of the original referenced Photoshop or Illustrator file.  (And yes it does make you file size a little larger but IMHO that a small price for the huge benefits.) From a practical point of view this means that you can edit the version of the file in the Smart Object nondestructively by opening the file in it’s application. For example, if you bring a raw file into Photoshop as a Smart Object, you can re-open the file in ACR and make edits to it. When you do this the original version of the file is not modified. Only the version within your Photoshop document, the Smart Object, is edited. That means that the preview for the raw file in either Bridge or Lightroom will remain unchanged because the edits are not applied to this version of the file. The Smart Object version of the file is independent of the original file. Read more »

This tip falls into the category of pretty slick but from a practical standpoint it’s not something that you will do very often. It has to do with outputting custom sized versions of images directly from Bridge/ACR without have to go into Photoshop. This is; it’s a procedure to mimic, in ACR, what can be done in Lightroom’s Export Dialog.

When CS4 was introduced the hot new feature in ACR was the ability to perform localized edits. With this added capability,  for many images, there was no compelling reason to bring the image into Photoshop for additional editing. All edits could be completed in ACR.

Until recently I thought that the only way to specify the size of the output was with the Workflow Options link at the bottom middle of the ACR dialog.  It looks like a hyperlink and when you click it the Workflow Options dialog opens. This is where you specify how you want your image sent to Photoshop or output directly as a tif or jpg file. In addition to specifying the size the Color Space, Bit Depth, Resolution, and Level of Sharpening can be changed. Read more »