It's The Simple Things

Sometimes we make "hard" the point of what we're doing. Today's image "looks" pretty simple, but it took more work than you might expect. Things that should have happened in the camera didn't. The light spillage on the background made it a very dark gray rather than a pure black. The angle the stem comes into the shot was steeper than what's apparent and the "in camera" crop was too tight to allow for any rotation. Basically it should have been scrapped and reshot. Instead it became a Photoshop project. If the potential of an image doesn't start to develop in the first couple of minutes or if it looks like it's going to take an inordinate amount of time, it gets to the point of ending up with the image relegated to the "never was" bin. The early days of messing around with an images for hours on end just isn't necessary any more. I have discussions with people, see articles in magazines or view tutorials online where very clumsy methods are used to accomplish a task. When face to face with people willing to learn (as I like to think I am) and hear that they're using a method that works, but means fighting to get the job done, I'll put my two cents in (politely of course) and show/explain a technique I've incorporated into my workflow. They can take it or leave it. (After all, free advice is worth what you pay for it.) I've spent about ten years studying (actually studying) Photoshop. Methods I used six, seven or eight years ago have been supplanted by much better, easier techniques that not only produce better results, but are typically much quicker. Rather than fighting with an image I work with a image to do what needs to be done to bring out its potential. To find out what needed to be done to today's image, hit the "read more".

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Setting A Mood

Sometimes you want to set a mood with an image. That's the case with today's image. It has a couple things working for it. It's toned down to show the darkness of the forest in the early morning light for one. Another is the use of the reverse vignette. Not all vignettes have to be from a lighter center to a darker edge. Here we see the image fading off. The branches of some of the trees can be seen going out into the softening edge. There a few things to consider when you have this sort of image. Just the same as a properly produced music album (CD) has an ebb and flow to it, so should a gallery show. If every image is bright and cheery there becomes a sameness and the show quickly grows boring. Again, like a music album, you want to have a break in what's expected. A rock band with a ballad or two space out within the selections gets more attention than "just another" rock song. Broadway shows are the same. Take "Les Miz" as an example. A pretty sober story about redemption where the hero dies in the end. In both acts you find light moments with the innkeeper and his wife. They bring the mood up before going on with the morality play. The same thing, like the music album or the Broadway show, holds true for a gallery show. Today's image was the lead image as people entered the building. Further along they came across many of the images you can find here on the blog. Scattered about were images of total whimsy, meant to put a smile on the face of the viewer. What I consider to be the "best of show" image wasn't the last image in the walk through. It came just a couple positions before the end. If you'd like to find out more about how today's image was finished, hit the "read more".

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The Importance Of A Vignette

I was at a meeting last night and one of the folks there asked me how often I put a vignette on any of my images. My response was "every time". Today's image gives an example of the improvement that is made to a shot simply by adding one more step to your processing. In order to make sure the effect of the vignette can be seen in the "for the web" version of the shot it has been left pretty ham handed. If you look at almost every image posted here on the blog you may be able to see a vignette on the image. A notable exception (since it's the posting just below this one) is the highly graphic type of image recently featured. Today's discussion is a little unusual because to shows the finished image, the next to last step and the vignette itself. We'll take them in order. The shot on the upper left has been color corrected, selectively blurred and sharpened. (Blurred and sharpened is not as strange as it might seem.) Lower Left is the vignette itself and the right hand image is the finished shot. To find out how the vignette was made and applied, hit the "read more".

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Using A Bald Sky

Over the past month or so we've had three or four posts about replacing bald skies. A straight replacement, a replacement when a mask was needed to clean up some stray highlights and using a replacement to tone down highlights in areas other than the sky. Typically, bald skies are the kiss of death for an image, but in today's image the bald sky is an major element, it's the thing the sets off the shot. If the drab, gray sky had been left in the image would have been a muddy mess. With the stark contrast between the lines, mast and spars and the completely blank sky we end up with a powerful image. The spot color of the red stripes of the flag, positioned just below the intersection of thirds in the lower right corner draws the viewer's eye to the important "statement" of the image. The message of the shot becomes very clear. We realize the primary element of the image is a "tall ship". A symbol of the might of the nation when it was young. We call attention to the country the ship belongs to by the spot color in the flag. To find out about how this image was created, hit the "read more".

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Is Architecture Editorial?

I think just about everyone knows or has heard stories of the perils of editorial shots being sacrosanct and nothing can be done to them to alter the reality of the scene. Photographers have been fired for adding or subtracting elements from their shots. The dilemma for today's image is, has the "reality of the scene" been altered? Looking at the shot it does pass as a straight shot, something right out of the camera, but. ??? Was it? Well, it should be sort of obvious that "something" was done if the question is being asked. The entire interior is exactly as shot. The only things done to that portion of the image are things that are definitely permitted in editorial usage. Color correction, sharpening, straightening the shot up, a vignette and possibly removal of sensor dust that shows up in the shot. All within the realm of what's permissible for editorial. So, if everything inside the building is "within spec", the discussion has to center on what's outside the building. To hear about what's going on beyond the building, hit the "read more".

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Sometimes You Feel Like You're On Top Of It All

First thing I'd like to do is give a shout out to the folks over at ALLTOP. Alltop is a news aggregator where you can plug in a search term, such as Photoshop, Photography, Lightroom (the three I use) or just about any other topic you might be interested in and it'll gather up a large array of sites based on the subject you've specified. I use it every day to do a quick catch up on the things that directly influence things around the gallery. Well, if you were to do an Alltop grouping of all things Photoshop, The Kayview Gallery will now show up on the list. It's an honor to be listed among some pretty select company.

It sort of rare to find a landscape image with the diverse color range that we see in today's image. Coming directly out of the camera as a raw file it looked very little like what you see here. It's one of the few shots I've had where every single color was muted. At first glance it was a pretty dull, drab looking set of pixels. Contrast was another problem and there was no snap. If ever an image went from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan (by comparison at least), this was it. Is it the definitive shot of the Grand Canyon? No, but it does capture, for me, what I saw stand on the edge of the abyss. To find out how this shot was "developed", hit the "read more".
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Playing With Post Production Lighting Effects

If today's image looks somewhat familiar, not only do you have a good eye, but you've been reading this blog since the wee small numbers. A similar shot (same flower, different pose) was used back in May '09, more the one hundred posts ago. I was flipping through the files, looking for something to build a topic around and came across the session where the shots of this flower lay. I wondered if I could figure out how to resurrect an image that had been passed over before. The problems with today's raw shot were many. The flower was tilted toward about ten o'clock, the stem came directly out of the southeast corner, there was too much negative space above the stamen and on and on. It looked sort of bleak. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it, so I gave myself a limit of five minutes to make it look promising and no more than a half hour to complete the transformation. As soon as I did a Select All (CRTL A) and Free Transform (CTRL T) I thought I had something. Turning the flower from the thirty degree angle to the near vertical did a couple good things, and several bad things. The good included giving the flower a much more pleasing appearance while bringing the stem out from the absolute corner to a more manageable location. Since the shot was reasonably tight, it also gave blank white triangles of non-image in each but the northeast corner. To find out what trickery I used to fill in the corners and "light" the flower, hit the "read more".

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