Blend Mode Magic

Which of the colors in today’s image is the real, as shot, color? Any of them “could be”, but only one color in the shot has been left alone. The others have been changed using Blend Mode changes to alter the colors. As they were laid down they looked like a child’s painting, with blocky, opaque colors obscuring any detail. Getting to know how Blend Modes work and what they can do for your image is an important part of learning Photoshop. I was talking to a friend the other night and he said, “but there must be four or five different ways to do the same thing in Photoshop”. I replied that there was probably fifty ways to do anything in Photoshop. After thinking about it I decided I might want to modify that statement just a little. There probably “is” fifty ways to do something in Photoshop. The problem is that forty-nine involve pain and suffering and one is the ray of light shining on the spot of the problem. When someone (anyone) starts out using Photoshop they quickly feel overwhelmed. It’s a massive application with more elements (no pun intended) than a person could use in three careers. The more you learn about it the more “tricks” you pickup. The more “tricks” you have in your kit the easier to becomes to accomplish a task. The purpose of today’s image is not to show that I can change the color of wood, but to show that you can modify colors in a natural way. The applications of being able to change things while making them believable are wide ranging. The same techniques used today can be applied to changing a women’s makeup, making it more dramatic. Delicacy is the key to using many of the tools and techniques available in Photoshop. This holds true for most of what you do in Photoshop. Playing with Curves, you don’t make wild swings (unless you’re going for a solarization effect. The Liquify Tool, found under Filters, very soft movement enhances an image. Wild changes distort an image. With Photoshop, everything in “less than” moderation might be the saying. To find out what Blend Mode was used to change the colors in today’s image, hit the “read more”.

Read more!

Preserving The Past

How many times have you gone to the family album or the box with all the snapshots from generations ago and flipped through one or one hundred pix, only to say “I wonder who these people are?”. Today’s image is my attempt to solve this problem for members of the family included in the group shots. With Photoshop there are several ways to isolate individuals and identify them. As you can see, some of the people in this group are young children. One of these days they’re going to be the one owning the box of old photos and the keeper of the family history. Of the forty-two people in the shot, chances are the tweens and young teens don’t know who half the people are on the day the shot was taken. The possibility of them being able to point out individuals to their kids or grandkids someday in the future is probable (most certainly) non-existent. Today we have the ability (easily) to make a template that we can markup and use to identify who’s who. As you can see, there’s a fairly large space between the header and the group. Using the numbering system it becomes easy to determine which person belongs to which family group. In this family there happened to be eight children with anywhere between zero and five children each. Several of the original siblings had passed on and those left were pushing eighty. So there were parents, their adult children and spouses, their adult children and spouse and several fourth generation kids. By the time you got down to the third generation they could have passed each other on the street and not known they were related. Photoshop was used to make outlining the individuals easy and is the subject of today’s discussion. It find out how, hit the “read more”.

Read more!

You Can Fool Some Of The People All Of The Time...

A few years ago I put today's image into a competition. It had a theme of "reflections". I attended the show to see how the print would do. When it came up in the lightbox a couple of the judges got up, walked up to the print and obviously spent some looking at the wine glass. Apparently they were "looking" for the reflection. I don't know what they were thinking, but all I could do is remember the old adage "can't see the forest for the trees". There is a reflection in the wine glass, but the fact that the entire image is a reflection seemed to escape them. While they were studying the glass they missed the writing on the bottle being backwards. Also, on the subject of the glass, the shape itself should have been some kind of hint. Maybe the biggest clue was the fact that the surface of the wine in the glass is on about a thirty degree slant. Whatever it was, they miss read the image by a mile. I had to smile (or maybe smirk) when they returned to their seats and scored the image. I find it sort of amazing that some people try to find something hard, where the observable is easy. I've seen this same type of thing in areas other than photography. People get to the point where they have, what they feel, is the answer they were looking for and stop. They don't ask the follow up question. The one that's critical to the success of operation at hand. I used to work for a company that would come out with the most amazing products, because they "could". I don't think they ever asked themselves if they "should". I was listening to the radio in the car on the way to a gig several years back. The show was a technology call-in talk show, specializing in computers. They just read about a new technology and were howling about what a dumb idea it was. No one would ever get into this, they said. They went on and on about how useless the "add-on" to a common devise was. Because of the position I had at a cutting edge (and I mean bleeding edge) company I knew the piece would gain wide acceptance fairly quickly. I haven't run into the hosts in several years. I had "appeared" on their show shortly before this episode. I am willing to bet that both hosts now own the common device with the add-on. Mainly because it's hard to find a cell phone without a camera in it today. Another example of not being able to "see the forest". Today's image is pretty easy to do. If you'd like to check out the technique, hit the "read more".

Read more!

You Bought The Computer, Now Use It

Back in the "olden days" of the manual everything camera we used to say that a camera was a light tight shoebox that you could attach some glass to. To prove it to those new to photography we'd get a shoebox (literally, a shoebox), a piece of 4 x 5 Tri X film and go out a make an image. We'd go to considerable lengths to put a hole in the box, cover it with aluminum foil and very carefully put the smallest pinhole we could make into the foil. It was the definition of a pinhole camera. Due to the "aperture" of about F 9000 the exposures were quite long, so any "camera shake" due to opening the shutter (pulling back the paper covering the foil) was nonexistent. On the other hand, camera movement due to a gust of wind blowing the "camera" off the rock it was sitting on was a real danger. Depth of Field was typically amazing, going from just outside the shoebox to infinity. It was a great way to convince "newbies" (that wasn't even a word at the time) that the lens was much more important than the box you'd attach it to. The same can't be said for today's cameras. No longer are you buying an empty box that you attach lenses to. You're buying a pretty sophisticated computer that is capable of doing millions of calculations per second. I'm not going to say today's cameras are smart, computers are just pieces of sand if they don't have clever programming telling them what to do. On the other hand, they can process data at a blinding rate and make recommendations about shutter speed, aperture, focus and other things we used to have to worry about. Today's speedlites (flashes) are also little computers. By the time you've bought a camera, lens and a couple of flashes you've invested several thousand dollars in "computers". It seems to me that once you've bought these little computers, to get the best return on your investment, you really should let the computer do anything related to calculations and keep the creative stuff for your mind to figure out. To hear about what was done to today's image in the "little computer" as well as the big one on the desk, hit the "read more".

Read more!

What Passes For Fine Art

I happened onto a website the other day offering "fine art" prints. The prices were pretty exciting to say the least. Here was a person I'd never heard of offering ink jet prints for as much as $1000.00+.  A quick check using Google confirmed that, basically, no one else had heard of this individual either.  I looked at the portfolio being offered and saw shots that looked like the early days of my pushing buttons in Photoshop just to see what would happen. One looked like it might have been taken in Italy somewhere and had a four point posterization filter applied. Another looked suspiciously like an image with a Water Color filter stuck on it. If someone is going to just push buttons and pass it off as art, they'd better rethink their pricing. Today's image took a lot more steps than a single button push. To find out what was done, hit the "read more".

Read more!

The Start And The Finish

Today's image is another one of those that has a fairly dramatic change from what came out of the camera to what ended up in the frame. The thought process was that the image needed to be much "darker" in mood than the light, airy window scene that was shot. Producing the drama was a project that does take longer than the quick "corrections" that we normally do to create a fine art piece. There are several major changes to get to the final print. Cropping is obvious, as is coloring the sash, the liquids, the stoppers, and the floor of the bay window. The number of individual layers adding up to the result is considerable. Each color change is on its own layer. Each burning and dodging has its own layer. Every angle of the mullions (center dividers in the window) has its own coloring and layer. There are clipping layers, blending changes, and flips from RGB Mode to LAB Mode and back. The layer panel looks like a scroll rather than a panel. If you'd like to find out more about the changes in the color of the liquids, hit the "read more".

Read more!

How To Get A Model To Pose

Based on the title of today's post you might think it's a little "tongue in cheek". It's about impossible to get a "critter" to pose, unless the little guy is of the inquisitive sort. Some animals are shy, some are bold and threatening, some are just curious. I'd like to say we snuck up on this guy out in the tall grass, but the truth is he was in the St Louis Zoo. Max (that's what I'll call him) and his buddies were wandering around their enclosure, popping up on their hind feet every once in awhile. They'd sit there for a moment or two and then scamper off to play. The key to isolating a "model" like Max is to use a shallow Depth of Field (DoF). Keeping the subject sharp and creating some bokeh as a background serves to "pop" the subject out from the background. Some people object to zoo animals in photograph. Their thinking is something along the lines of not enough suffering went into "getting the shot". I don't know? I don't "suffer" a whole lot when I set up a top table or do a product shot with a light tent in the gallery. I'm nice and warm (or cool, depending on the season), I have a beverage nearby, I'm controlling the light and life is good. There are times when a field trip is called for and hunting down an elusive whatever is the way to go. If a client is paying you for a shot of a mountain goat in Rocky Mountain National Park you'd better not try to fool 'em with a shot taken at the local Cabela's. If you'd like to read the story about how we happened to be at the St. Louis Zoo, read the "read more".

Read more!