Access Digital Photography

One of the things I like to do with photography is create artistic effects for gallery or illustrative purposes.

I just created everything you see here by “messing” with features that are already a part of Photoshop, by using Pre-sets in Lightroom, or by using third-party filters. Any combination of the types of techniques you see here could be used to give a unifying “effect” to a collection of photos for an exhibit or for a series of ads.

I often create several of these effects on different layers, then mix them by a combination of masking the layers, changing their blend modes, and choosing different layer effects.

I’m going to show you the “before and after” of a couple of examples. I will describe for you the “process” I used on each of them. Once you “get the idea” there will be no end to the variations you can make.

The picture on the left is straight out of the camera and Lightroom 3. I wanted it to have a bit more “pop and style” on its own, so the first thing I did in Lightroom 3 was to just click on the Direct Positive preset to give the base image a lot more “color pop.” There are hundreds of these presets available on the Web and quite a few more that come with the OnOne filter set.

Then, in Photoshop CS5,  I duplicated the image as a layer, made a Freehand Lasso selection to put a loose frame around the image, then used the Refine Edge command to show me a preview of how much feathering I wanted to use to blend the effects I was going to create on the new layer with the original image below. When I liked what I saw, I just clicked OK.

Next, I choose Filter > Artistic > Plastic Wrap. There was enough distortion in the bubbles that I though it would be fun to just stretch parts of that same layer using the Filters > Liquify filter. See if you can guess at what I did to get this next effect:

Hint: It’s all Alien Skin’s Color Efex fault.

I won’t say that this is THE workflow for getting the maximum HDR effect, but it’s certainly an effective one. It’s great for shooting and processing scenics, still-lifes, product photos and anything else that doesn’t move. It gives you complete control over the contrast and detail that can be seen in all areas of the image and the freedom to choose any of several methods for doing so. One end result is shown below:

Your chances of getting perfect exposure and tonal values are pretty close to 100%.  I’m considering “scenics” to be anything from nature to street scenes to long shots that are taken as orientation for an event or story shoot…including night shots. Here’s the step-by-step routine:

1.    Use at least a 4GB, better 8GB, memory card so you’ll have room for all the sequence shots you might want to shoot. Remember, you may be shooting 4-7 RAW files at a time.

2.    Set your camera to shoot RAW.

3.    Set your camera to shoot in Aperture Priority mode. You DO NOT want the camera to change aperture while you’re doing the sequence shots because the same objects in difference shots could have blurred details that wouldn’t register when the HDR is merged.

4.    Set the aperture at f/11, but change it to F/16 if you shoot from a tripod or your basic exposure reading is for a shutter speed of at least 1/50th second when shooting hand-held (1/20th second if you have good image stabilization). If you do shoot hand-held be very careful not to move the camera. Photoshop and most other HDR programs are very good at registering images in a stack, but don’t take any unecessary changes.

5.    Put your camera in rapid sequence bracket mode, with a difference between shots of as much as your camera allows. If that happens to be 2-f/stops, cut that back to 1.5 f/stops. If youíre given a choice of more or less shots in the sequence, take at least 5 unless youíre really cramped for memory. One of my favorite cameras only allows for .7 of a stop difference between exposures, so I have to shoot 5 shots to get the (close to) 1.5 stop difference I want between the first, third, and last shot. Hereís a Lightroom “contact sheet” screen shot of the series that was taken to create the finished image you see at the beginning of this blog.

6.    Set your camera for matrix metering.

7.    Use a tripod whenever possible, which means you should be sure to carry it with you. You’ll always take more time to study the scene and will compose more carefully. That is extremely important in the success of a scenic. You’ll also become independent of shutter speed and IS (Image Stabilization) for keeping your shot steady.

I always process my photos in Lightroom 2.4, so I have the choice of making an HDR image by selecting two or three of the shots (depending on the overall tonal range of the sequence), editing multiple shots as layers in Photoshop (easy way to bring in a sky and a foreground), or simply using the Recover, Fill Light, Adjustment Brush, Graduated Fill, Tone Curve and HSL panels. You’re not restricted to Lightroom, though. As long as you’ve got the detail exposed properly for all areas of the picture and haven’t lost a lot of extra time in the process, you can do much more in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to fine tune the final result. I find the Exposure dialog in Photoshop especially useful for the final tweaking of the HDR.

Most people who’ve done any digital retouching at all have depended heavily on Photoshop’s Clone tool. It is very useful if you’re smoothing skin near the edges of a selection…such as one that might separate facial skin from hair. That’s because it won’t try to blend texture that’s outside the selection and cause a dark “blotch.”  Most of the time, however, the three most efficient retouching tools are the Patch Tool, the Healing Brush, and the Spot Healing Brush.

The Clone stamp is most useful when you want to cover part of the image with a particular pattern that exists in another part of the image, such as blades of grass to cover trash on a lawn or the clouds in the sky that were interrupted by an accidentally twisted lens hood.

When it comes to retouching faces, the three ìhealingî tools are much faster and do a much more credibleî job than the Clone stamp. To remove something like a scar or eye bags, you just choose the Patch Tool and drag a selection around that “unwanted” feature, then drag the selection to a nearby “clean” area that has the same texture. If, for instance, there were no freckles where the bags were, don’t drag the bags selection to a bunch of freckles.

A lot of folks use the Burn and Dodge tools to “re-shade” a large area of a face. The problem is that using the Burn and Dodge tools changes the pixels they affect on the layer that uses them, so it’s difficult to fix those strokes when you make the little messes that most of us make when we’re burning and dodging. Besides, unless you have CS4 (and youíre not telling me what youíre using), the Burn and Dodge tools can also change the color balance of the affected area.

So what you need to do is create a new layer, fill it with 50% gray, put it in Overlay mode, and then progressively Brush on a low percentage of White (to Dodge) and Black (to burn). The best part of this is that if the client or AD want to change the degree of the burning and dodging, itís easy to do by simply “painting over” what you did before. You can also change the tone of the burning and dodging by changing the Opacity, Fill, or Blend Mode  of the layer (Multiply and Darken, for instance).

One thing you really have to be careful of is the edges of hair: Though you might want to remove (neaten up) some of those, taking them all out is a dead giveaway that something “phony” has been done. Some people just “cop out” by using the Blur tool to smooth the edge of the trimmed hair. But this “fakeî depth-of-field” rarely looks authentic. Always lift the head and the area surrounding it to a new layer (select, feather, Cmd/Ctrl + J). Then, on that layer, Use the Extract Filter or Background Eraser (if you have CS4) to erase the background without erasing the little streaks of flying hair themselves. Another option is to use Photoshop’s Image > Image Calculations dialog when the original background contrasts strongly with the face. It’s a complicated process, but well worth learning. Truly, this is one of the hardest things to do when retouching, but virtually no pro client will accept anything less. So you’re going to have to put in a lot of time and practice in the meantime…not because I say so, but because it is so.

It’s also really important to understand exactly what your purpose is when youíre retouching. For instance, are you creating this version of a portrait for use on a magazine cover? For use in a business resume? Both will require a sharp, high-impact one-on-one connection of the subject to his/her audience. In both instances, you’ll probably want tight control over the lighting, background, clothing, make-up, and accessories. Then it comes to retouching. For a glamour portrait, the retouching should ‘idealize’ the subject. In a business portrait, you want the person to look like someone you’d like to know and trust.

If the portrait is for a magazine cover or ad, you may have very strict requirements for color accuracy and the placement of type in the image. Thatís why most of these shots use a white or solid color background. You’re also going to want to crop the image to fit the magazine cover.

I surf the Net for inspiration and new techniques. I found one technique that changed a nice photo into something abstract. To view a video tutorial showing how to use the technique and convert the steps into an action, click the following link:
Pixelicious Podcast: Episode 32.

I’m sure you’ve photographed what you thought was a lovely scene with an impressive cloudscape only to find that the sky was a little flat in the resulting image. Although the image is properly exposed, the details in the clouds are not like you remember them. There’s a relatively easy fix to this problem in Photoshop: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a well known fact that digital cameras cannot capture the dynamic range of film. This doesn’t present a problem until you capture a scene like a sunrise or a sunset. If you set your exposure to capture the highlights, you lose detail in the shadow areas. If you set your exposure to capture details in the shadows, the highlights are washed out. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve got an image that lacks contrast, you can easily add it in Photoshop. The traditional approach would be to use the Brightness/Contrast command under the Adjustment menu, or to add a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer to the image. The problem with either method is the adjustment is linear to all pixels. I use a method that increases contrast by darkening the shadows and brightening the highlights. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes your digital camera doesn’t do a scene justice. When you open the image in Photoshop, it appears somewhat drab and colorless compared to what you remember. You can easily make the image pop with just a few steps. Here’s how: Read the rest of this entry »

Photoshop CS2’s new Smart Sharpen filter does a wonderful job of sharpening images. However, there are times when you need to sharpen details, for instance the blades of grass in the foreground of an image, or the petals of a flower. When you want to make an image pop by sharpening fine details, you use the Layers palette and a menu command that’s been around for a while. To sharpen details in an image: Read the rest of this entry »

Many photographers use their camera’s black and white mode when they want to create a black and white image. Others convert the mode of the image to grayscale in Photoshop. Both methods have disadvantages when you want to print the image. Because there is no color information, many of your printer’s heads do not fire, which can cause banding or other display problems. To alleviate this: Read the rest of this entry »