Digital Photography Tutorials » Digital Manipulation

Highlight / Shadow Adjustment

lau — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 07:00:26 +0000

The Photoshop function that I tend to use more and more often is Highlight / Shadow Adjustment.
You can find the “Highlight / Shadow” effect in the Image -> Adjustments menu.
This function is divided in two sections.
One section is dedicated to Highlight – here you reveal details on the sky (for example), darken the overexposed areas.
Another section is dedicated to Shadows – here you reveal the details from the shadow, darker areas.
Depending on the type of photograph, you can have different levels for each adjustment.
Be careful that by pushing these effects over the 50% limit, the picture will loose quality: noise and artifacts will appear.
Here you have some examples:
Ex1:

Ex2:

Ex3:

I usually bring the Radius near to the 50% because otherwise I will get unpleasantly hallows at the edges of the objects in my picture. It sort of looks like a HDR image.
Color Correction and Middtone Contrast are helpful for “last minute” adjustments. It’s not necessary – these can be done later from Brightness / Contrast and Hue / Saturation options from the same Image -> Adjustments menu.

How To Organize and Back-Up Your Photography

lau — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:27:22 +0000

How to Organize
There are many articles on the web that talk about how to organize your photos. Now I want to tell step by step about my way of doing this, a way that never failed me when I was looking for something inside a huge archive of 100GB.
1. The first root directories I have are the name of the cameras used to take the pictures:
Canon
Nikon
Whatever else comes to me in hand
Not ones I’ve been asked what camera did I used – how could I know that if all my files were in the same folder?
2. Second then, there are directories that look like this: year_month_day_place. Most of the time, the place is more important, but I like to keep tracking my progress and compare older photos to new ones. Sometimes I come back to the same place and have different folders of the same place.
3. These directories are split into 3 other directories: original, photoshoped, web
4. The files in the photoshoped directory are photoshoped at full size and can be printed, while the files in web directory, have approximative 900 pixels wide and 190kb – the strongest requirements for one of the forums where I put them. Also, these files are watermarked.
5. A totally different category is a directory called stock. Here I put my pictures that I shoot specially for stock websites.
6. As for the program I use… well, I like picasa because it’s fast, but, other softwares have other advantages. I often need to see the exif data of image: it’s not just a requirement in many contests, but also helps to see the effects of certain camera settings.

NOTE: If a directory contains too many files, It will load the thumbs very slow. I keep about a maximum 2BG pictures in one folder

How to Back-up
As for the back-up, I make two back-ups:
ONE: on dvd-s
TWO: on an external hard drive (currently 500GB)

Video Tutorial: Introduction to Photoshop Lightroom

lau — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:32:01 +0000

Have you not yet found out how to process your image? Do you want to know what can you do to improve your pictures in Photoshop Lightroom? Have you just purchesed Photoshop Lightroom and you want a quick tutorial to go thru the functions of this software? Then this video is the start point for digital image processing.

Video Tutorial: Drawing Attention to Your Subject’s Eyes

lau — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:03:53 +0000

I got a few tutorials for you that will help improve your portraits in the post-processing. There is something to learn from each of them. One shows that the eye can be multi-colored, other shows that the white space of the eye must also be taken under consideration, and, not as the last thing, you can do adjustments in order to lighen and sharpen the eye to draw the attention to it.

Video Tutorial: Increasing Dynamic Range

lau — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 09:01:18 +0000

Step by Step:
Increase the dynamic range of a RAW image by creating two exposures in Camera Raw and then merging them together in Photoshop.

Video Tutorial: Selective Color in Photoshop CS3

lau — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:59:31 +0000

Let’s take a look at how to add selective color to a black and white image using adjustment layers in Photoshop CS3.

Video Tutorial: Detail Sharpening

lau — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:55:38 +0000

Video Tutorial: Creating Vignettes in Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom

lau — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:50:40 +0000

This Photoshop CS3 tutorial shows 3 methods for creating a vignette.

This tutorial shows how to create virtual copies in Photoshop Lightroom, a technique that lets you experiment with multiple versions of the same images without sacrificing hard drive space.

Video Tutorial: Teeth Whitening in Photoshop CS3

lau — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:41:47 +0000

This tutorial shows how to whiten teeth using a Curves adjustment layer in Photoshop CS3. In Portrait Photography, no matter how pretty the model is, how well lighting is and how good your white balance setting is adjusted, teeth may still not be as white and pretty as they should in order to make a picture become a magazine cover.
However, this video also teaches that the teeth should have a natural white, which is not pure white. The change is subtile.
Before making the change to teeth, do this in order to avoid any other changes of the rest of the image:
Duplicate the background layer.
Fill the background layer with a gradient that looks like fire.
On the duplicated layer, use the Extract filter to remove the girl from the background.

Upload Your Photos from Photoshop to Flickr

lau — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:44:05 +0000

Most of the photographers I know use Adobe Photoshop CS or Lightroom for editing their pictures. So do I. On the other hand, most of the photographers I know, if not all of them, have a Flickr account to share their photos.
As a result, Photoshop and Flickr should have a link between. But there is none…. or… at least not an official one.
The frustration of not beeing able to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to export your photos into Flickr gallery is over because Xof at digitalfreak.net unleashes a little hack. I have to addmit this spares me some time.

—> In the Flickr Uploadr application, select the App then right click > Make Alias
Then you need to locate the â€œExport Actionsâ€ folder, which is in your Home/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/
Once the alias moved into this folder, all you need to do is to select â€œFlickr Uploadrâ€ in the Post Processing options tab from the â€œExport Photosâ€ dialog box.