Photoshop Tutorial

It is amazing how photographers will take a photo and shelve it based on small little errors when in reality you can use editing software to create something wonderful that makes your subject truly stand out. In this blog I will do my best to give you a blow by blow blog about a Photoshop edit from a recent photo I created.

This photo was taken at recent shoot I did for a city council hopeful and the venue was amazing. I want to first thank The Royal Hotel for allowing me to shoot in their lobby. I am really looking forward to going back there to capture more photos. I would also like to thank my subject Menu who is a super lady and a whole lot of fun. Now onto the edit.




This first photo is the original shot. I have said it before and will again a great edit starts from a great photo and I really like how this turned out. It has all the sharpness I need, the skin tones are nice and even and there is an interest that has been captured. That being said there are some negatives about it as well. I find the leaves dangling in front of the window very distracting, I don't like the sign poking out from her shoulder and lastly the phone cord drives me nuts. Finally there will be a little enhancing of Menu's already perfect smile and hair. Let's get into it.






Whenever I am editing a photo I always change what I dislike the most so for this photo I didn't like how contrasty it was. When this photo was shot I was using a flash with a 6x8 inch soft box which mounts to my speedlight. Even with the flash I still shot quite high ISO so the flash did not have to fill in so much light as to make the photo overly bright.

Step 1 the first thing I did was soften it a bit with a bit of noise reduction.

Step 2 was to bump up the exposure about 1 stop of light; it was just a bit dark but still had so much detail in the highlights and lowlights.

Step 3 was to replace the window I had a photo of this window in my catalogue of stock photos and I thought this would dramatize the photo just a bit more. Replacing the window is just a matter of cutting it from the original pasting into this photo and blending to make it look right.

Step 4 I used the clone tool to remove the phone cord

Step 5 grab the brush tool, sample the colour of her lips and "fix her lipstick" Now this step could have been done before the shot was taken but it was spur of the moment and neither of us thought about the fact her makeup was fading that late into the evening.

Step 6 is perhaps the most important. I used levels to brighten the photo and then with a layer mask I blocked out the section I didn't want brighter. What that equates to is just highlighting her hair and face.

That is pretty much it, now some purists will say that I changed the photo and they are not wrong. What they will fail to recognise is that I could have done the same things in a darkroom with film and hours upon hours of dodging and burning. Photos have always been manipulated to one degree or another and even the most amazing photographers in the world spend time cleaning up irritations in their photos. The difference between film and digital is time. What I can do now in my post editing software is instant, whereas what I did in film could take hours if not days.

Anyway here is the after post photo. As I said before, this photo had all the elements of a good photo to start with; I just perked it up a little. Hope you enjoy and please comment below and like my Facebook page to follow everything I do.

Sardis Digital Clickers

I have had a lot of time consumed lately with a new project. Coming in September I will be facilitating a camera club/learning program. Meeting the third Tuesday of every month at Sardis Library, in my home town of Chilliwack BC, we will have fun learning and exploring all aspect of photography.

http://www.fvrl.bc.ca/programs.php?programType=All&fromDate=&status=1&programSearch=Search+for+Programs&library=Sardis&toDate=

So if you want to learn more about how to capture great moments, or some editing techniques, or just want to help others please come down and check it out. Oh and don't forget your coffee/tea and your camera.

For now I will leave you with an image I shot 3 years ago. It was quite dull and bland until I found a mask technique called luminosity masking. Pretty powerful editing style.

Vancouver Skyline

Hope you like it.

Learning to Shoot in Manual: Photography tutorials (Part Two) Exposure triangle

Here it is. The secret to shooting in full manual mode. Three little words, ISO, Aperture,Shutter. When you understand these 3 elements you will achieve optimal exposure.




So let's break it down. Shutter, most of you probably know, is how fast or slow the opening inside the camera opens and closes.When you press the button, known as the shutter button it causes the sensor inside your camera to be exposed to light. If you use very high shutter speeds then it will freeze action whereas if you use slower shutter speeds it creates more blur or softer images. Now why in the world do you want blurry images you ask, or you might say "that's why I'm looking at your blog because most of my pictures are blurry", there is a difference between out of focus and blur. If you look at a photo and everything is blurred then chances are it is either out of focus or you were shaking the camera. When things are creatively blurred then  most of the photo will be sharp, but a section will have blur to suggest movement or speed or softness.

Looking at this photo on the left you see how crisp all the details are except the bus. This is a great example of creative blur. It gives the feeling of motion and speed and the subject is clearly defined with composition (rule of thirds, more on that later) and the crispness of everything else in the frame.








Other examples of longer shutter speeds would be water that looks like mist, or light trails as shown on the right.

Now you cannot just alter the shutter speed alone. If you increase the length of shutter speed like I did, to capture these effects, your photo will come out like a white piece of paper, perhaps with some grey shadows here and there. The reason for this is because there was light coming into the camera for too long and your sensor was filled with light particles. A very good analogy is to imagine the sensor on your camera is a platform covered in buckets, you want your buckets to be filled just to the top. Overfill, and your buckets will leak water everywhere and wash out your photo. Don't fill the buckets enough and your photo won't have enough light and things will be dark to black. So how do you get the buckets filled when changing your shutter speeds so the buckets are filled to jut the right level. That's the other parts of the triangle.

Adjusting aperture gives you the ability to lengthen or shorten shutter speed based on need. Your aperture controls the size of the opening through your lens and therefore the amount of light that is allowed in. Now what is somewhat confusing is that the lower the aperture value, f1.2, f1.8, f2.0 the larger the opening in the glass. Lenses with a lower number f stop such as these are referred to as fast glass, because you can shoot at much faster shutter speeds in lower lighting conditions. If you increase the aperture number to f12, f18, or in the case of the photo above left f22 and on the right f9, you can then slow the shutter speed down considerably because the opening is so small the shutter needs to be opened longer to fill the buckets on our sensor.

Is that the only purpose of aperture, to control the speed of your shutter, of course not. If it was then photography would be much easier and everybody would take breathtaking photos every time. The other purpose to decreasing or increasing your aperture is to create back and foreground softness. If you look at the photo below you can see that just the main subject is in focus and everything behind begins to become softer and out of focus. 

This is one of those creative styles used in photography and especially portrait photos. If you  shoot landscapes or broader subjects where you want everything in focus then using a higher f stop will provide greater focus. These shallow and great focuses are what are referred to as depth of field. A shallow DOF is simply very little area in focus along one distance from the camera. Take for example the the photo above, the focus point on the subject is x feet away and everything in the photo that is that x distance away is in focus and everything else is not. Now look at the photo below, everything in this photo appears to be in focus and will so even if enlarged and that my friends is the simple truth of shallow vs. broad depth of field.

                              

Now to be fair there are other ways to change depth of field using different lenses, prime vs. telephoto, but lets leave that subject for another day. For now I want you to go out and play with your depth of field and shutter speeds. You will discover that one is reflective of the other and both need to be in harmony to achieve a good exposure.

Oh wait what about the third part of the triangle, ISO. Well I think I will leave that to the next post as you have more than enough to chew on for now. ISO while important is not quite as difficult to understand as these other two and once you grasp shutter and aperture ISO will fall quietly into place. So till next time keep playing keep creating and have fun

Learning to Shoot in Manual: Photography tutorials (Part One)

When I began shooting, as a small child, I was fortunate enough to have a great teacher to show me the ropes on a SLR camera. My Grandmother was a shutterbug in her day and had a very nice Olympus which she carried around to all the family reunions and trips she took. When she got on in years and was no longer able to get out with the frequency she wanted she allowed me to continue using that camera which I did right up to just over a year ago. When I made the switch to digital I transferred the camera strap from her camera to my new DSLR and now every shot I take I feel like a part of her is instilled in the picture.

Anyway I reminisce, The point I was going to make was although even then point and shoot cameras existed, Polaroid, Kodak, and a variety of others, I always shot on a SLR. The difference though is that those SLRs did not have an auto function at all, also the price for failure was somewhat expensive. After my Grandmother passed on and before I purchased my DSLR I equipped and used my own darkroom which helped cut some of the costs, but still it was quite pricey to make a mistake. That my friends is the beauty of the digital age. You can make mistakes and it costs you no more than time.

So I guess my question to you is why are you still using your camera in auto mode. You don't have to, going full manual is fun, exciting, and will feed a side of you just begging to be born. Now I'm not saying to turn off auto and never go back, if you are shooting something very important and you don't fully understand manual, stay in auto then when you have time to explore and practise go back to manual.

In this blog series I will endeavour to take you on a journey of exploration and excitement. We will together have moments of joy, at getting that perfect shot. Moments of frustration, trying to get that perfect shot. Finally moments of anguish when we entirely miss that perfect shot, but in the end we will grow and learn from each other.

So grab you camera lets go and make some mistakes. I promise the experience will be rewarding and you will feel that same sense of accomplishment all photographers get when they get that perfect shot.

The first step is of course getting your camera into manual. Now you don't necessarily have to have an SLR it's just that I do, many cameras today have manual or semi manual modes, it's just a question of finding it on yours. You can check your cameras manual, if you still have it, or look at the top of your camera. All DSLR have a button on them with different "modes" M being manual.




You can see all the different modes in the picture to the side. We will look at these modes in depth as we go but for now I just want you to locate manual mode. Remember that this is the first step to opening yourself up to a whole new side of creative photography so make the switch and without doing any thing else take some pictures.Leave your camera lens in auto focus and just shoot. What do you see? The odds are nothing, very few of you might see some sort of picture but most will either see nothing but black or white but certainly not what they shot. You see there are a few settings you must adjust to get the picture you want.




You see what your camera used to do on it's own in auto was adjust 3 variables that you as a photographer needs to become intimate with. They are ISO, Aperture, and Shutter speed. This is known as the photographic triangle. each of these plays off the other and none can be ignored or the photo just won't turn out.

For now just keep in mind that each of these three elements go hand in hand, I will explain them each in depth, but for now put your camera back in auto and look at the settings when you take a picture. From there, looking at your cameras manual, figure out how to adjust each of these settings. Don't hesitate to play around in manual mode change your aperture, change your shutter speed just watch the exposure indicator to ensure that a proper exposure is being met. If you don't know where the exposure indicator is then please open up the owners manual and read through it, things will be clearer as we progress through this series.