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!

Continuing with turtles:

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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.

This question is asked of every photography instructor and workshop leader. My answer is simply, “Before you trip the shutter, think about it.”

Think about what the subject of the image is and what you are trying to say with the image. If you don’t know what the image is about, neither will the viewer of the image.

 Think about how you can use the other elements in the image to draw attention to your subject or how they can be used to add emotional impact or mood to the image.

Think about how each element in the image relates to the subject. If it does not add impact to the subject then think about a new framing that will eliminating that element from the composition.

Stopping to think about these three things may slow you down and you may take fewer pictures. But that’s ok; because the images you do make will be stronger images. Read more »

Like I said in last week’s UW Wednesday, I’ll be showing some turtle images from our recent trip to Grand Cayman for the next couple of weeks.

I found this guy munching away at the base of  this barrel sponge (the whiter area above his left front flipper in the image below). By the about that has been removed I’d say this guys visits this sponge on a regular basis.

As I approached he turned toward me and gave me a look like, “What are you doing interrupting my lunch?”

And then swam right over me; literally inches away.

A very exciting encounter. Read more »

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 »

During our recent trip to Grand Cayman we had a number of encounters with Hawksbill Turtles. There has been a lot on news programs about how the environmental disaster in the Gulf is, and will continue to, affect sea turtles. So I think I will post a few turtle pix over the next few days. Hope you enjoy them.

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