Photoshop Actions

I've recently been using a lot of actions in photoshop and came across this site called PanosFX. He has loads of free photoshop actions to try, I used an action called 'the big picture' on a photo I took of a poppy field a while back. It takes a few moments to run the action as it needs to cut out bits and create drop shadows and that sort of thing but once it's done it gives quite a nice effect. There are other actions to try but I thought I'd post this as it is one of my favs.

Another Portrait

Hey folks, I thought I'd put this one up of one of my nieces who was over recently, I did a bunch of photos of her and her brother in the studio, both were very photogenic. I liked this image because of her eyes.
I've been experimenting with some photoshop actions as I find them a little more effective that lightroom presets, I can't quite put my finger on why. Actions, like presets, are recorded steps you can apply to several images very quickly and they are a great labour saving method. There are plenty available on the web, some are free and some are, well...not.

Aged, distressed look

I have been working on aging or distressing some photos recently and thought I would post this example. There are some good presets in lightroom for an antique look but these rely on usually lowering the saturation of a photo, adding a brownish tone and a vignette. It is a reasonable effect but to take it a step further you need texture. This image has 3 textures layered in various blend modes to give a decent aged effect. I also reduced the saturation with a Hue/Sat adjustment layer. The textures can be anything from old brickwork, woods or metals. The texture used in this one was from an old wall with decaying plaster.

Astro Photography

I haven't done a great deal of astro photography, largely due to a lack in focal length but as it was a relatively clear evening I decided to slap on the 100-400 and a 1.4x tele extender and see what I got. The tele extenders increase your focal length by either 1.4x or 2x, but you loose a stop of light with the 1.4 and 2 stops with the 2x, with this type of photo I wasn't too worried as I wanted to be at about f11 to start with. You also have to manually focus with the TX's, again shooting a moon this isn't too much of a problem. A tripod is essential as is either a cable release or using the cameras 10 second timer and I've just remembered mirror lock up, in this example I forgot about mirror lock up but if you have it under your custom functions use it as it reduces shake further. I started to appreciate that the moon is traveling at over 2000 mph and it soon moves from your viewfinder so you need to keep adjusting. When it comes to processing I found the histogram to be quite narrow so you need to stretch it a little either using levels in CS3 or the blacks and exposure sliders in Lightroom (or the tone curve) this results in more contrast. I also had to crop in quite a bit, this can be solved by attaching you camera to a telescope ;-) I took this around sunset so the sky was still quite blue but I converted to mono and dropped the blues right down. The info for this was f/11, ISO100, 560mm, 1/200sec.

Panoramic Photography

I took this one a few months back up in Whitby (the abbey was behind me in this shot). There are a few important points to remember when getting panoramic photos.

• Always shoot in portrait mode, this gives more height to the finished shot.
• Set your tripod level with the horizon, some tripods have a spirit level on them if not you can get hotshoe mounted ones for a few quid.
• Shoot in manual keeping your aperture, shutterspeed, iso, focal length, focus point and white balance the same for each shot. Meter from where the middle of your panorama will be, if you meter from the sunny side everything else will be underexposed, if you meter from a relatively dark area you risk over exposing the brighter bits.
• Keep an overlap of about 30%, so if you are panning from left to right look for a feature, such as a tree that is about a third of the way in from the right then when you pan your tripod right, frame so that tree is on the left of the shot. That sounds more complicated than it is.

If you get these basics right you should have a good set of say 4-8 photos that can be stitched using CS3. Photoshop has a really good automatic stitching program (file - automate - photomerge) there are other programs such at PTGui that do a good job too. This panoramic was taken at f/16, 1/4 sec, 43mm at ISO100 I had an 0.9ND grad filter to balance the sky. The file has been drastically reduced so it has a smaller size.

More Mono Mayhem

I was out shooting with a photo buddy yesterday in the peak district national park. The weather was glorious and I tried to pump up the colours further by pretty much using my polariser on every shot and trying to shoot perpendicular to the sun. I knew I would be converting the majority of my shots to mono as I thought the bright sunlight wasn't moody enough for my landscapes.

There hasn't been a great deal of processing with these 2 images, I converted them in Lightroom, took them into CS3 where I added an unsharp mask for contrast (settings: Amount 35, Radius 200 & Threshold 1) and a Black & White adjustment layer. I think mono images are quite striking and you don't need to shoot during the golden hours.

Back to Mono

I was reading a black and white photo book and felt compelled to get out and shoot some monochrome images. I waited till to sun was low and went out on my quest for foreground interest. I didn't come away with a great deal, the sunset was great but I broke my own rules and came away about 10 minutes too early, I had to walk home backwards looking at the colours getting better and better! Anyway a polariser was used to really bring out the blue of the sky, I was at 90 degrees to the sun as this is where you get maximum effect of the polarising filter and I could get the light hitting the fence and grass. In photoshop used an unsharp mask to add a bit of contrast then some dodge and burning to selectively add contrast. Next I added a BW adjustment layer then flattened the image and converted to grey scale mode and then to duo tone mode, then I set to tri tone and used black and a 2 brown tones (can't remember the pantone codes). I converted back to RGB mode and saved. This split toning can be done in lightroom but I fancied doing it in CS3.

Warm Sky

I took this earlier today as I was out expecting a good sunset but in the end it was just windy and a little too much cloud. I used a 3 stop ND grad, to balance the exposure, which I set to manual, 1/5sec f/16 24mm at ISO 100. I couldn't find much in the way of foreground interest but I wanted to make the clouds the focal point. I processed the RAW file in Lightroom and added a warm up filter in CS3.

Octuplets

This bunch came in for a shoot the other day but the studio wasn't big enough so we had to improvise and get some informal shots. I have no idea why they were all dressed the same.

This is another rainy day project that you can do if you have nothing else on. It's a simple enough technique if you have a tripod. All you have to do is take each image without changing any exposure or focus settings, in fact leave everything on manual. Use a good size aperture, this was f/11 so everything stays reasonably sharp. Then in photoshop put each photo on it's own layer and just add a mask to the top layer so the next layer shows through, then join the top two layers and repeat until everyone is on the same layer. I added some effects in lightroom as the colour version was a bit plain. I'm not overly enthusiastic about this but its great for all the narcissists out there, Robbie Williams (remember him?) loves the effect, sing when you're winning album cover.

Photo Restoration

I was given a CD with a bunch of super old slides that had been scanned, by super old I mean sort of 1900's. Anyway they were in a fairly poor condition and they were still negative images. I will post before and after images. I opened them in Lightroom but this can be done in Camera RAW (photoshops RAW processor) even though the images were jpegs they can still be processed to a certain extent using RAW converters. Anyway the first step was to remove any colour as this was due to age, the photos will have been in Black and White or sepia. Then, in Lightroom, I dragged directly on the histogram to make the tonal width as wide as possible this meant dragging the exposure to the right and the Blacks to the left (It's a strange system but this boosts both the blacks and the exposure) as I did this the picture started to come out, I then increased the clarity (boosting midtones) and added a little more contrast.

The image was then opened in photoshop and a simple invert adjustment layer was added, this converted the negative image and then I added a B&W layer and tinted it sepia. It was really interesting to see some of these old images as a lot of them were composed really well, I guess it was because you only had a camera then if you knew how to use it! Surprisingly there wasn't a great deal of metadata attached to the image, I doubt the glass was as high tech by today's standards and I imagine the camera was moved by crane!

Back Catalog

I was looking at a friends photos on a certain social networking site and decided to play with some older photos as it's been far too cold to go out for landscapes recently, although I'll be out pretty quick if any snow settles. Anyway these two have been fairly heavily processed to get their full dynamic range (HDR photography) you can make it look a little more realistic but I was experimenting today. CS2 & 3 has HDR facilities and also photomatix is a popular bit of software, if you are into this sort of thing. It basically relies on you capturing multiple exposures of a scene to capture all the detail in the sky and also the relative dark land and then the software joins the images and you tweak the results. This is done by setting your exposure compensation to (typically) +2, 0 & -2 for each image. It's handy if you don't have time to fool around with graduated filters and the like. Anyway hope everyone had a good new year.

Merry Christmas Boxing Fans

Check out the date and time, I was up super early to open some presents but more importantly to edit some photos!These were some I took yesterday as an impromptu boxing match broke out after my nephew watched Rocky III, it wasn't the fairest of contests by any stretch of the imagination, I would estimate a weight difference of around 11 stone (154 Lbs) but the little one managed to tuck his opponent up with some lightning left jabs before unleashing his hammer right cross square to the jaw. The second image showed how this electric fighter had the crowd in absolute pandemonium.
It seems in this contest of David and Goliath, David not only triumphed but Goliath ended up eating his Christmas pudding through a straw!

I would go into detail about how these shots were taken and processed but it is Christmas morning and I have a few errands to run, Merry Christmas.

Goldfinger Girl

I'm putting this one up as I have a nude assignment coming up so I had to brush up on my techniques. The reluctant model needed a little persuading to let me put this photo up but it's tastefully done and thought it would be good for illustrating the technique, she agreed. This was taken on full manual mode at ISO100 1/200 sec f/8 at 48mm.

This was shot in a studio with a light either side of her but you can use any photo with a bit of variation in the shadows. As with most fine art nudes the photo was taken in colour but converted to black and white during processing. The effect used to get the shiny metallic look on the skin is called the Sabatier effect. Good old wiki has an entry about it here. As with a lot of old school techniques this can be replicated digitally but also is easy to over cook and time should be taken to get the effect just right.
Once you have your desaturated (B&W) photo add a curves adjustment layer in photoshop. A box will appear with a line running from the bottom left to top right. To the left of this there is a pencil, click this to draw your own curve, then starting at the top left of the box draw a smooth W shape. This will undoubtedly give you a very odd looking photo, if you then click on the points adjuster (icon next to the pencil on the left) you can then move the curve at each point, I remove a few points here by dragging them out of the window, you only need 5 or 6. Then it is a case of adjusting them until you get the desired effect. I'll repeat this can be very hit and miss but thats the beauty of digitally editing.

Retouching Portraits

I haven't added many portrait examples so here's one I was processing last night. The thing that struck me about this shot was the size of the girl's eyes and how the catch lights really add a sense of depth to them. I was also practising some air brushing techniques to make the skin really flawless, but still maintaining the dimple. There are thousands or retouching techniques out there but I'll give a quick run through of what I did.
Firstly I removed any obvious spots and marks, very quick using either the spot healer in photoshop or the spot remove tool in lightroom. The next part takes the longest, I use the healing brush, always on a new layer (ctrl J to duplicate the original layer) and sample from really clear bits of skin and repeatedly go over any blotchy parts. I then duplicate this layer and do some dodging in the eyes, on the whites and the irides (plural for iris apparently, I never knew that). Anyway after brightening the eyes a touch I then ran a surface blur filter (under filter, blur) with about 15 for radius and pixels, the result of this will look very odd so you must then reduce the opacity of that blurred layer to get back the detail in from the layer below. To selectivity sharpen areas ie the eyes and the lips just add a layer mask and paint in black (or grey) over the parts you don't need smoothing out. That's pretty much it for retouching, the key is usually less is more, you can always measure your progress by alt clicking on the eye next to the background layer this will reveal your original photo only.

Adding a Professional Border in Photoshop

One of the simplest and most effective ways of presenting your photographs, be it on screen or printed out is to add a border, this gives a photograph a much more professional look. With photoshop this can be done in seconds and you can also record an action and apply it to as many images as you like. Here are 3 different border ideas for your photographs. Examples of these borders can be seen above. Before you start adding borders make sure you have flattened your image and the background layer is locked and active.

Black Mount – This is great for low key and monotone images or images that don’t quite fit a traditional white border, simple but effective. To Apply this border open the canvas size option under the image menu, make sure the relative colour box is ticked and select whit for the extension colour. Set the width and height to 0.1 inches and click OK. This will add a thin white border to the image. Now go back to the canvas size command and change the extension colour to back and enter 1.5 – 2 inches for both boxes and click OK.

Hairline Border – This is a good border for high key images (images with lots of lighter tones) as the white edges just get lost without some kind of border. For this technique go into the canvas size command and, with relative checked, set the extension colour to black and height and width to about 0.1 inches and click OK. You can also add a further 2 inches of white border to highlight the effect.

White Frame – This is a contemporary border that will really add that extra something to your photos. It uses the same technique as previous examples but you are adding 3 borders, the first is a 0.5 inch white canvas extension then a thin 0.1 inch black extension and to finish another 1.5 – 2 inch white extension. This adds a thin gap between the image and the border which makes the photograph stand out more. Note these canvas extensions can also be inverted to have black-white-black.