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Tangents

what you see …

March 17, 2010

… is not necessarily quite what was there in the original scene.

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alive for 365 – week 10

March 10, 2010

This very colourful 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 colours even more, I used my favourite Photoshop plug-in, Topaz Adjust 4

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alive for 365 – week 9

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 colours 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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alive for 365 – week 5

February 3, 2010

My entry this week for the Alive for 365 project is this enigmatic landscape.

While on a hike in Magoebaskloof in South Africa (Dec ‘89), I wanted to portray some of the eeriness of walking through the misty forest that morning.  I remember it being very quiet. I kept looking for *something* to photograph .. something that I could focus my attention on.  But there wasn’t anything specific.  Just the trees and the sloping mountainside fading away into nothing as your gaze wandered further.  Then I realized that that is exactly what I wanted to encapsulate in a photograph.

So instead of trying to find a specific “thing” or a specific part of the landscape, or geometry or pattern or composition … this was just how it was … stark trees in the mist.  Nothing else.

This is why this particular image appeals to me.  I felt that this simple lateral movement in my mindset, got me closer to photographing the essential aspect of this particular landscape.

In finishing the image for the Alive for 365 site, I simplified the original image slightly …

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Photoshop tips – avoiding moiré when resizing

January 7, 2010

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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Photoshop tips – making your images pop (2) – Topaz Adjust

December 14, 2009

I’d like to present another in the ongoing series on giving your images more ’snap’ in Photoshop. This time, I’d like to specifically look at Topaz Adjust- a neat plug-in for Photoshop.   What I like about Topaz, is its simplicity of use – but if you want, you can delve much deeper into it.  The possibilities are wide open.  (Also nice is that it is relatively inexpensive as software goes.)

There are hundreds of ways you could use this program, because you can blend the different effects in different ways on a single image.  So what we’re going to cover here is but one way of using this program to enhance an image in Photoshop.

This image of our model, Anissa, is nearly straight out of the RAW converter.  I did retouch a few skin blemishes and stray strands of hair.  But the starting image here is essentially un-retouched.  By the way, the lighting is entirely available light – the open shade behind a building.

Here’s the original image:

 

.. and with a sprinkling of some Photoshop fairy dust, we end up with this image above:
[ click on either photo for a larger image ]

The Photoshop fairy dust in this instance is a combination of different effects in Topaz Adjust,
and blending them in a specific way ..
(btw, if you’d like to order any Topaz product through that affiliate link, use the discount code ‘planetneil’ for a 15% discount off any item in your shopping cart.)

The effect in this instance was done by over-smoothing the image, and then running two effects on that over-smoothed layer which both accentuates the overall contrast and local contrast in some way. Even if you don’t use Topaz Adjust, it will be of interest to see how things are done, since you could try this combination out with other Photoshop effects with good results.

Let’s have a closer look ..

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favourite image of the week ..

December 1, 2009

My favourite image of the week is this one from a sequence taken during the romantic portrait session after a wedding.  The wedding took place in Florida, earlier on in November.  (It’s my favourite image of this week since I am only now catching up on a backlog of work.)   As a wedding photographer in New Jersey, it is quite a treat to do a destination wedding – someplace a little more exotic than the Garden State.

Not only was it a destination wedding in Florida, (timed with a flash photography workshop),  but this also happened to be the first time that I photographed a same-sex wedding.   And I felt particularly honoured to have so much faith placed in me with a special event like this.

The reason why this image is my favourite is that it shows a wonderful couple together in a spontaneous moment.  It is  very much *them*, and I am sure their friends and family will instantly recognize this image as capturing the essence of who they are, and how they are.

This is where a lens like the 70-200mm f2.8 is essential .. it allows breathing space between you and your subjects.   The light is all available light.  No flash necessary with the soft early evening light.

But I did a little bit of work on the image in Photoshop, so let’s see how I got there ..

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Photoshop tips – making your images pop (1)

November 30, 2009

As much as I am a firm believer in getting it as close as possible in camera, by using proper exposure and proper camera settings, and good light .. most often an image can be enhanced in Photoshop with a few simple techniques.  

There is an entire industry built around software and plug-ins and add-ons and action sets for Photoshop to enhance and manipulate images in Photoshop.  However, I’d first like to go over some of the simpler ones that you can use in Photoshop without additional software.

These Photoshop techniques are well-known to the more experienced digital photographer, but I thought this might make a great on-going series on simple Photoshop techniques.  As always, I’d love to hear everyone’s input, especially since my own Photoshop skills can’t quite be regarded as skillz yet.  ; )

The first technique that I’d like to cover, is quite simple:
 - you add an adjustment layer (such as Levels) to your image;
 - change the blending mode to Soft Light, and then
 - adjust the opacity to taste.
 - erase the layer mask of any areas you want to bring back (or close) to the original.

Here it is in a bit more detail.  Starting with this image ..

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a little less gray ..

October 20, 2008

I love colour.  I see in colour.  I really favour colour over B&W images.  But strong B&W images do have impact that is often lost with the distraction of colour. 

Even though most of the photographs on my wedding photography blog are in colour, there was a recent wedding which I showed as a set of B&W images instead.   What happened was that when I started editing the images from that wedding for the blog, first one image, and then another, looked really good as a warm-toned B&W … and then I decided to go all the way and create a blog entry that consisted only of B&W images.

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I’ve had a number of queries about how I process my black and white images with that warm tint.  It is usually very simply done in Bridge, using a preset I created in ACR.  This way I can select multiple images and then select this specific preset.

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a solution to a persistent Bridge CS3 problem

June 8, 2008

A few days ago I posted on an online forum (DWF) about a persistent problem I’ve been having with Bridge CS3.  The problem arises when I open Bridge and navigate to a folder, in that Bridge doesn’t show any thumbnails but will just show a blank grey right-hand pane.

Just a few hours later, one of the most knowledgable photographers on the forum, Brian Tao, came up with several possible causes and solutions.   Since I believe that the probem is quite prevalent, and the solution not obvious at all, I thought that it would be of benefit to a lot of Bridge CS3 users here if I posted the solution here.

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