Photoshop Tips | Real Photography

hello, my name is traci, and i'm a lightroom ADDICT.

Mar 07, 2008

My lightroom pusher photographer friends were right. It is awesome.

If you know of awesome presets that I need to buy, please link me up in the comments section below. I have a feeling that with the right set of presets at your fingertips, there would be no end to the awesomeness that is Lightroom.

After one day of basking in Lightroom, here is what I have to say…

What I love about Lightroom:

– It is fast. If you are used to waiting for your RAW previews to load in Bridge, Lightroom makes Bridge feel like you’re running Windows 97.

– It is pretty. At first, the interface totally annoyed me. Why is it that a person can own 1 million Adobe applications (Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign, Acrobat Professional, etc, etc, etc, etc) and not be able to intuitively follow ALL Adobe applications? I was like “listen up, people. i am not going to spend any more time learning how to use your ridiculously steep-learning-curve programs.” But then I made room for this one, and I’m glad I did. It’s really pretty inside. It feels all slick and artsy cool. And pretty is good.

– When you scroll through your list of folders, holding your curser over each folder immediately shows one of the pictures that is inside. This is KEY for the girl who files her family snapshots in yearly folders, then monthly, then daily. If you’re searching for “that one photo where Will was in a white onesie, that day when he was playing with his pirate ship that was like a year ago” this can be very very helpful. In Bridge, I would have to open each individual folder and then wait for the previews to load. In this instance, I get an immediate idea of what the folder contains (for all those months before I wizened up and started naming the folders things like “1 Aug trip to zoo will in red,” “2 Aug Will and Nic sleeping on sofa,” etc)

– When you import the images, you can add all sorts of info to them (like tagging with keywords, copyright info, etc)…you can do this in bridge, but I like that here you get to do it while it imports the images

– If you are a jpeg shooter, you can make all the cool adjustments that are normally limited to RAW shooters (although this won’t make me start shooting in jpeg)

– It saves all the adjustments you make as notes about adjustments, NOT altering the original file. So you can easily have a black and white and color version without actually having two copies of the original file.

– Did I mention that it was fast?

I have only just scratched the tip of the iceberg that is Lightroom and I already love it. I can’t imagine how much more I will learn to love it as I learn more!

That said, who needs to give Lightroom a try?

If you already have Photoshop and you’re a casual shooter, you can probably do better things with the money (invest in better glass, buy two pairs of designer jeans, etc). If you process a lot of images, Lightroom could make things a lot faster. If you shoot in jpeg and want to be able to make some of the tweaks that RAW shooters are spoiled with (exposure, white balance, etc) then this would be hugely helpful.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s new feature: Scrapbook Saturdays.

Posted in Photoshop Tips

Photoshop Fridays: Week 1

Mar 07, 2008

We have (Photography) Tip Tuesdays, and now Photoshop Fridays…and I even have a plan for Saturdays, too (luckily you don’t have to wait long to find out what it is).

Photoshop has to be one of the most common image editing software programs around. Odds are it’s on your computer–even if you didn’t purchase it, you probably downloaded an illegal copy of Photoshop 7. (If you are receiving money for your photos, I beg of you to purchase a legal copy of Photoshop. It’s ridiculous to ask people to pay money for something you created with stolen goods.)

Even with all of those copies of Photoshop floating around the world, there are still many people that have no idea what it does or how to use it. So Photoshop Fridays are here to help. Sometimes it will be basic tips, sometimes things for a more advanced user. If you have specific Photoshop questions, just leave us a comment and I’ll either answer it, or find someone who can.

Lesson Number 1: Photoshop is not a magic wand.

The key to photoshop for the beginning user is subtlety. It is NOT the sort of thing that you should dive into thinking that you can make magic with. One of the most common beginner photoshop errors? Adding a person to the scene.

I give you exhibit a (and why I felt no guilt about showing my “Bad Picture” of Nic on Tuesday’s Photography Tips):

(Just as a disclaimer, I was not drinking before this picture was taken. But I can’t decide whether that helps or hinders my case.)

This picture, as you can immediately tell, is two pictures. One, of a snowy background:

And the other, of me trying on a hat at Disneyland:

To amuse himself one night while we were dating many years ago, Nic decided to send me a picture to show me what it would be like if I was there in snowy Virginia with him. I remember that he could barely tell me to go check my email he was laughing so hard at his own picture joke.

To create a composite picture is easy enough. You open one photo (in this case, the snowy background). You open a new photo (in this case, a ridiculous picture of me at 18). You drag and drop your first photo onto your second photo. Go to your LAYERS menu, and under the opacity box (which right now will show 100%), lower it to around 50%–now you’d be able to see the picture of me under the snowy picture. Then grab your eraser tool and start erasing that top layer (in this case the snow scene) to reveal me beneath it:

don’t try this at home

When you’re done erasing, you pop the opacity of that first layer back up to 100%, flatten the image and VOILA. You have something. And the word is SOMETHING.

The thing about most photo composites is that even if you’re very careful with your erasing, the picture still won’t look right unless you know what you’re doing. If you’re taking two pictures from two different scenes, dates, etc, the lighting and white balance will be different. In this case, we have a picture with direct flash, and an orangey no-flash, streetlamp lit picture.

To fix that, you either need to pull pictures from exactly the same day, angle, and lighting, or spend a lot of time trying to make the two pictures look like they were from the same moment. My advice is to leave it alone.

Here is a case where photo composites work (in this case, the infamous “head swap”):

(this is the part with actual advice, as opposed to a “please don’t do anything ugly like this” plea) For large groups, head swaps for photographers are probably inevitable. With dogs or little kids I *plan* on doing headswaps. I put myself in a single position and fire on burst mode. I get a ton of exactly the same shot with slightly different expressions on everyone’s face. That way if a person blinks or dog looks away, I can layer the photos, erase just that one area, and have it look seamless, because the two pictures were identical in angle and lighting.

Bottom line: Unless you set out to do it from the get-go, or really know what you’re doing and plan to adjust shadows and white balance and lighting effects and scale/angle, leave separate pictures as separate pictures. Otherwise they’ll look like a drunk cowgirl in a snowstorm.

Posted in Photoshop Tips

my name is traci and i'm a lightroom virgin

Mar 05, 2008

Lightroom is the latest thing in the photography software world. And by latest, I mean, it’s a year old. (It recently celebrated it’s one year anniversary, which basically means the world is waiting with baited breath for Lightroom 2.0.)

I am the last photographer on earth to adopt it. I have downloaded the trial version no less than four times. Each time I open it up, and the idea of importing all of my pictures into lightroom is enough to make me close it, forget about it, and then re-download the trial the next time I hear raves about it.

This time (trial number four) I’m determined to give it a decent try. Actually import some photos into it and see how things go. I’ll report back on my findings. But feel free to roll your eyes at the thought that Trial Number Four is going to be The Time I Actually Try It.

Posted in Photographer Tips, Photoshop Tips