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September 8, 2010
Chuck Arlund is a Fashion Photographer whose elegant photography is made even more impressive with the simplicity of his set-ups and use of lighting.
Chuck’s previous guest spot here on the topic of on-location lighting techniques using reflector & flash, was very well received. Therefore I’m very happy that Chuck is graciously sharing more of his ideas with this guest post. Also, check out Chuck’s workshops and mentoring sessions.
Inspiration and Homage,
compositing and multiple lights made to look natural
This photograph is from a recent fashion story, and has a couple of elements going on. There is an obvious Americana theme, and in that, there is the homage to Norman Rockwell. Who captured that spirit better than Norman Rockwell?
I’ll just tell the story of how the image came about and then describe the technique behind it …
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August 24, 2010
Photoshop Tips – retouching for portraits
When retouching portrait photographs, I have a certain look that I (currently) like – a slightly ‘polished’ look, but still natural. Definitely not ‘plastic’. With a few steps in Photoshop, and a few steps that I may or may not add, I can easily get to the styling in post-processing that I want. Some of the steps are specific, but others are added depending on taste or ‘feel’. Some of the steps involve Photoshop plug-ins which are essential for me …
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August 11, 2010
reducing the blue color cast in white clothing
Often when working in the shade, or anywhere we need Cloudy or Shade white balance, we’ll often see a blue tint in the white clothing. I suspect this might be due to detergents being used which give a blue-ish tint to white clothing to make them appear cleaner. Or perhaps this is from UV light when we’re working in cloudy conditions or in the shade. However it might be, we will often get that blue tone in white clothing, as in this photo below …
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August 7, 2010
The best way to deal with digital noise in photographs is to start with having a correctly exposed photograph taken by a high-ISO capable camera. Then digital noise mostly isn’t an issue unless you start pushing the upper limits of what the camera is capable of. But sometimes (hopefully only sometimes), you have to deal with an under-exposed photograph from an older camera … and then the digital noise becomes apparent. Then we have to use software to clean the image up …
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June 20, 2010
what white balance should I set my camera to?
… that’s a question that baffles photographers who are just starting out with digital photography.
You have a few options in setting the WB on your camera:
- you could shoot in auto white balance (AWB), and hope your camera nails it. And then you can also feel excited as each new generation of camera offers better AWB.
- you could set your camera to one of the preset WB settings, such as Daylight, Cloudy or Incandescent. And hope your camera’s preset is close to the correct WB.
- you could do custom white balance readings and save it as you encounter and work in new situations. These custom white balance readings can be done with all kinds of white balance cards and discs.
These all work … usually. However, what we need to understand is that quite often, there is no ‘correct’ white balance setting. What we are after is a pleasant white balance …
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March 17, 2010
… is not necessarily quite what was there in the original scene.
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March 10, 2010
This very colorful street scene is – if I remember correctly – in the quaint town of Macroom in Ireland. It was one of the towns we visited while exploring the beautiful country-side near Cork, Ireland last year.
It is my choice for this week’s entry for the ongoing Alive for 365 project.
To enhance the colors even more, I used my favorite Photoshop plug-in, Topaz Adjust 4 …
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With the run-up to WPPI 2010 in Las Vegas, I didn’t have the time to mention my latest entries to the Alive for 365 project. My choice for week 9 is this image which I titled a very obvious, “Cappuccino”.
The slightly surreal image is part of a London cityscape, with a double-decker bus whizzing past. The lettering in the sky is actually the lettering in the coffee-shop’s window. I had flipped the image around to have the word read correctly. I also juiced up the drab colors a bit with Topaz Adjust 4. Big news! Topaz just improved on it with a free upgrade to version 4.
If you do order Topaz Adjust (or any Topaz product) through that affiliate link, use the discount code ‘planetneil’ for a 15% discount off any item in your shopping cart. (There is also another time-limited discount in effect on their website.)
The effect that I used was the Psychedelic setting in Adjust 4. I pulled down the opacity, and even then masked the sky to reduce the effect further on the sky …
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January 28, 2010
I am sure the designer of this phone box intended for it to have this distinctly cartoon-like face. When I saw this, it instantly drew my attention. It really looked to me like a constantly-surprised wide-eyed face. Something out of Disney’s animated movie, Beauty & The Beast. This then is my choice then for this week’s entry in the Alive for 365 project.
The photograph had some Photoshop work done to it to give it much more snap than the straight-out-of-the-camera version. Oh, and the lighting was bounce flash with available light …
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January 7, 2010
Photoshop tips – avoiding moiré when resizing
When you resize an image with repetitive patterns, you stand the chance that the pattern itself will form another pattern. This is called moiré. When I resized this image for web display, I had to take care to make sure the blue window shutters didn’t generate a moiré pattern.
Here is the full image resized for web. The image here is 600 pixels wide.
Click on the photo to see the image as a 900 pixel wide image.
By going from the original 12 megapizel image (4288 pixels wide), directly down to 600 pixels in a single adjustment ..
.. I get an image where the detail looks like this:
You can see the moiré pattern there in the blue window blinds as a diagonal shaded pattern. You run the risk of this happening if you do a massive jump in resizing in one go.
But by doing the resizing as 10% reduction steps, you can most often avoid that. Here is how it looks when resized as a sequence of resizing steps:
Instead of changing the pixel dimension from 4288 pixels right down to 600 pixels wide, instead do it as approximately 10% jumps in size. You would now change from 4288 pixels (as an example), 3900 pixels wide. And from there you would change to 3500 pixels, all the way down to the size you want your image to be. The diagonal moiré pattern has now been nearly completely eliminated.
Sharpening an image (as you have to when you resize an image for web use), also enhances the pattern. Therefore, with this image, I removed the sharpening for the window shutters to further reduce the effect.
Of course, doing this kind of step-by-step resizing, is best done as an action. You can create your own, or use one of the many available on the internet. The best actions also provide some sharpening as an intermediate step for best results.
A little bit about the post-processing of the image …
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