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Archive for July, 2006
Find Detail in Your Photos That You Thought Was Lost… in Five minutes or Less!
If you’ve ever wrestled to get a decent shot of the outside and inside when shooting indoors on a sunny day, or been disappointed to find your subject silhouetted when shooting into the sun, we have your fix.
Our pal Josh, shown here holding his imaginary camera, has a nifty trick that will let you fix those shots in a jif. All you need is a copy of Photoshop (almost any version will do) and about five minutes.
You can use his technique to improve nearly any photograph where extreme lighting fools your camera into underexposing your image.
Watch our quick video to learn how to do it!
Photojojo’s Five Minute Photo Fix
www.photojojo.com/content/tutorials/five-minute-photo-fix/
p.s. We’re gonna try publishing on Monday & Thursday instead of Monday & Friday. Love it? Hate it?.
p.p.s. Photojojo was mentioned in The Wall Street Journal on Monday. Hot dog!
If you’re used to printing and sharing your pics just the way they came out of your camera, we think you’ll find this simple editing tip useful. Even if you’re a post-processing pro, we hope you find something useful here.
Why Does it Happen?
Very simply, your eyes are able to see a much wider range of light and dark values than your camera can record. Even our eyes have their limitations: if you’re trying to see the night sky but there’s a street lamp nearby, it’s very hard for your eyes to make out the stars. Block that lamp out, and your eyes adjust so you can.
When faced with wildly differing light and dark values in a single frame, your camera can’t record everything, so it has to make a choice. Usually, it does its best to meter for the average light in the scene. That means the bright stuff ends up being too bright or the dark stuff too dark… or a little of both. Those dark areas aren’t lost, however. Often, they’re hiding detail that the camera just barely saw. Make a few subtle adjustments in Photoshop, and you’re on your way to an improved image!
How to Fix It
http://www.photojojo.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/JoshKeayPhotoshopTouchup3.mov
Joshus Keay is a product designer living in New York City, though everything he designs winds up looking like toys. You can check out his portfolio at JoshuaKeay.com and at Monkey Business Labs.
Help with Remembering Things in Photoshop
No doubt about it Photoshop is a complex program that requires you to learn a great deal in order to use to its full potential. Most users develop or collect various tricks and techniques to achieve what they are after, but remembering all that can be a challenge sometimes. Adobe thoughtfully provides a Help system, but it doesn’t always have everything you wish it did. Thankfully, the let you add your own content. Here’s how.
First, find your Photoshop installation folder. On most Windows systems, this will be at “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2.” On Mac OS, it will likely be “Macintosh HD:Applications:Adobe Photoshop CS2” Inside this, you should find a folder called “Help” which will in turn contain a subfolder called “additional how to content.” If you’re following along at home and there are files called Add_001.howto and Add_001.html in the folder you are looking at, you’ve made it to the right place. The content for each new Help menu entry you create will need to be placed in an html file in this folder and indexed by one of the howto files.
First, create an html file containing the information you want to add to the Help system. You can either create it from scratch or use the existing Add_001.html as a template. Be as creative as you wish.
Next, using your favorite text editor, open the Add_001.howto file. You should see the following text:
"How to Create How Tos" "Create your own How To tips" HowToInstructions.html |
Photoshop uses the contents Add_001.howto and any other howto files to render additional items at the bottom of the Help menu. Each new Help menu item is created from each howto file entry.
The format of each line in a howto file consists of three parts, the category, the topic, and the name of the html file that contains the content for the topic and html file like the one we made above. Thus, if a howto file contains:
"This is my category" "This is my topic" my_topic.html |
The Help menu will end up containing a new entry called “This is my category” with both of your new topics underneath. If Photoshop is running when you create your new files, you’ll need to restart it in order for it to pick up your menu changes.
You can create any number of howto files, each with as many html file references in them as you need. Photoshop will read all your howto files when it starts up and sort everything in alphabetical order to build your Help menu additions.
If this sounds all good and well and you’re up for another neat trick, you can actually replace the name of the html file in your howto file with a full URL to a webpage on the internet. For example, you might want to create a file called earthboundlight.howto containing, perhaps among other things, the following line (your web browser may spead it over more multiple lines here, but you should type it all together on one line):
"Earthbound Light PhotoTips" "This Week's Tip" http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips.html |
But only if you really want to of course….
Just a few ideas of what can be added to the Photoshop Help menu
Foregrounds – More Bang for Your Buck!
One of the most effective techniques for adding that “WOW!” factor to your landscape photographs is to include an interesting foreground which complements your composition and helps the viewer to see what your subject is. If you plan and design your photograph carefully, the foreground can lead the viewer’s eye from the foreground, through the image, ending at the subject.
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If you look around at the images that you admire by world-renowned photographers you will see this technique employed time and time again. Barely an issue of “Outdoor Photographer” or “Outdoor Photography” magazines will be published without images that use the foreground as an important part of the composition. To see the technique from its early days it would be worthwhile studying the work of David Muench. Whilst we know that all things are subjective- and right and wrong is a tricky thing to define in the art of photography- there are some things that we can all try to bear in mind before we press the shutter that may help us show the viewer why a scene captured our attention in the first instance and to show the subject to its best advantage.
Of course, these pointers should never be used as rules – even the most ardent proponents of compositional techniques such as the widely accepted (….and somewhat misnamed) rule of thirds would agree that this is a guideline rather than a rule and in photography, as in life, the oft quoted ‘rules are there to be broken (or at least bent)’ applies.
However, even within the loose parameters of artistic vision, there are fundamentals we can all think about at the moment of “The Click” that will help bring life into our images.
Leading lines
Perhaps the most often discussed are ‘leading lines’ and whilst this can apply to composition in general it is doubly important for effective foregrounds. In its most basic form what we are thinking about here is trying to create a visual flow through your composition that will take the viewer from one area of the image to another. Ideally we strive for this journey to be a smooth and pleasant one, rather than jerky and disconnected.
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In Figure 1 at right it seems clear to the viewer that the subject is the mountain in the top of the frame: - the singular direction of the frosted reeds in the foreground lead the viewer’s eye from the bottom of the frame to the mountains in the top of the frame. Here the frosted reeds lead the eye along to the conclusion of the image – the day’s last light hitting the tops of the mountains.
Straight lines and geometric patterns such as these can be found all over nature (if you are actively looking for them!) and will always provide assistance in trying to frame your shot. Be patient and look for foregrounds that complement the image and effectively lead the eye to the main subject. In Figure 1 the impact of the frosted reeds would have been much less if they were piled in a jumble. The direction of the reeds, coupled with the light frost, is what makes them an effective part of the composition. |
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Once again nature geometrics are giving our viewer a helping hand here. The ridges in the foreground of Figure 2 at right are leading towards what is our final vision for the image – that wonderful sunrise over the cliff tops.
Now I can already hear you saying ‘but wait a minute, that’s simple if the rocks form those lines!’ Well, here’s the deal – I guarantee that if you look hard enough you will find ‘something’ in your view that will be able to act as leading lines. The devil is in the detail and being able to separate everything else from the composition and taking the time to find those lines. |
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