Tag:fun with photoshop
Pre Photoshop, an image was worth a thousand words and proof of something’s existence. Post photoshop – yes, the camera does lie. IG influencers with shoddy photoshop skills share images making themselves thinner or curvier. We now have experts, hunting down photo fabricators, examining pixels and EXIF to see if the image is doctored. Prestigious competitions demand you have a RAW copy of the image if they want to check its authenticity. There is even an app now for businesses to weed out fake IDs.
If you arent one to enter competitions with said rules, or you aren’t submitting the image as true and newsworthy, then Photoshop is a whole heap of fun. It takes your image beyond simple cloning out distractions or adding the odd bird here and there, opening a whole new world of composition related art.
Obviously, I was not in a boat in the arctic with three polar bears but it was fun to imagine the scenario and bring it to life. Photoshop also played a big part in the image below of my nephew. This image required no compositing as we created our set and shot the photos – but photoshop turned it into a whole different concept.
The Concept
I wanted something along the Game of Thrones, north of the wall look. We setup our backdrop and dressed our subject in medieval costume. From there I took the images into photoshop.
The Editing
To get that cold, blue look, in ACR, I brought the temperature down to 3100. I also upped the whites to +42 and dropped the highlights to -76. From there I ran a few of my favourite actions from Greater than Gatsby (they have a 35% off sale on at the moment too). I also used the Detail Revealer brush on the face, turned the eyes blue (another GTG action), and using a selective cool workflow brush cooled down the skin tones. Lastly, I added two snow overlays from Summerana.
The whole edit took about ten steps and 10 minutes. I do love photoshop. But I don’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel and spend hours on one image when there are tools out there to speed up my workflow. Why handwrite a 5000-word essay when we have computers? To me, it’s the same thing. It’s just time management. Yes, there are a lot of crappy actions out there, but there are pearls among them and GTG stands out. They are in fact the only ones I now use having ditched all the crappy free ones. And no, it’s not a paid endorsement.
If you haven’t got into Photoshop actions yet, give them a try. They will speed up your workflow immeasurably as well as create work you didn’t think yourself capable of.
Should landscape photographers manipulate images? (take vs make an image) Manipulating an image, is it acceptable? I would have to say, straight off the bat, that I am firmly in the camp of making the image. While I hope for a great sky or light when I shoot, I am not against swapping in a new sky or adding light to create a better image. When the circumstances or conditions have given me lemons, I make lemonade.
Straight from the camera?
I also realise that some of you are throwing up your hands in horror and reminding me that this is totally unacceptable when entering competitions. However, I don’t enter competitions, and should I enter one, I wouldn’t use an image that has been heavily manipulated. Apart from that, I love manipulating an Image. Painters don’t necessarily paint what they see. They take artistic license – and people accept that as normal. With photographers, though, there is a large school of thought that the image should be as it was photographed, without adding or removing elements. So I tend to regard myself as someone who paints with a camera. I guess I could call myself a creative or ‘fine art photographer’ as it seems that you can change elements in fine art.
This school of thought seems to apply almost exclusively to landscape photography, and to a lesser degree, portraits. For an image that is obviously a composite or more in the digital manipulation section, adding or removing elements is not only acceptable but part of the process.
Changing a sky
Back in January, back when the world was still chugging along, oblivious to the oncoming pandemic and associated lockdowns, I enjoyed a quick overnight trip down to Portland where we stayed at the Cape Nelson Lighthouse. Coming back, we stopped off at a lavender farm. The sky was a bland white; the lavender wasn’t a lovely purple without sunshine. Had we been there in perfect conditions – I could have gotten the shot I wanted. However, at home, with Photoshop and Luminar, I edited and created the image that I could have gotten had the conditions been right… as a painter could without criticism.
Making the image doesn’t mean every image I take is manipulated, but I am not against having it in my bag of tricks. I also believe that if an image does have a swapped in the sky, it’s a bit dishonest to pretend it’s not. But, at the end of the day, my images are for me. I don’t sell them (no one wants them, LOL). I don’t enter competitions. They are just for my enjoyment, so I am not cheating or fooling anyone.
With the new Luminar Ai due out before the end of the year, this topic will not go away. Full disclosure, I have already pre-ordered my copy. What are your thoughts? Do you take or make an image?
In this time of worldwide lockdowns and #stayathome – amusing oneself is not easy. Read a book, clean the house, edit some images. Ok, what do we do in Week 2? Enter Multiplicity.
My original plan this week was to take a leaf out of Thomas Heaton’s book and try some macro at home. But after watching Chris Sale’s vlog on multiplicity (or as he called it, multiple exposure selfie), I decided to try that first. Apart from I would l have less mess to clean up – I could do it with minimal effort and no extra supplies.
Taking the Shots
You will need a camera, though a phone will work if you can put it on a tripod, but this post is cameracentric.
To take the images, I placed the camera on my tripod set to a waist-high height. Looking through the lens at 24mm, I couldn’t get everything in, so I swapped it out for the wide-angle and shot at 16mm. The entire image was taken in manual mode with autofocus. Because I didn’t want to use a flash, I also bumped the ISO to 800 with an F-stop of 9 to make sure everything was (reasonably) sharp. This gave me a shutter speed of 1/6 sec. Light isn’t great in the back room on an overcast day. It’s also important that you don’t move it between shots when you set the tripod up. Pick a location that will get all your planned shots in without repositioning the tripod.
I could have used the ten-sec timer – but chose to use my phone connected to the camera via wifi. The advantage of this is I could ‘see’ myself on the phone and set the shot up, then using the phone as a remote, take the image.
Overall, I took 5 images but ended up only using four as one of the shots almost completely obscured another one. I also changed my tops between shots to give a bit more interest. Be sure when you shoot yours, you allow space between yourself; as I mentioned, I lost a shot because one of me was standing in front of the other.
Editing Your Multiplicity
Once I had my shots, I downloaded them to the computer. From there are soooo many ways, you do it. I could be called lazy, but I prefer the term efficient. 😉 This is what works for me. I also worked solely in Photoshop, as I don’t use Lightroom. However, if you are a lightroom user, you can import them into Photoshop from Lightroom as layers.
- Once you have all the images open in photoshop, choose one that will be your base image. It doesn’t really matter which one is.
- go to the second image and hit Cntrl/cmd A then Cntrl/cmd C (this will select and copy the entire image)
- now go to your base layer and hit Cntrl/cmd V, and it should be pasted over the top of the base layer.
- On the adjustments panel, hit the little icon that looks like a Japanese flag
- this creates a mask over your image (it should be white) so choose a black soft brush to brush away the part of the image where you were in the bottom layer to reveal yourself. You should now have two of you
- repeat steps 2-5 with each of the remaining images
- when ‘all’ of you are there, flatten the image and edit as you would normally.
I enjoyed doing it – to the extent, I created another one the next day outside. Being in stage three restrictions with Corona Virus my front yard was as far as I dared go. It also required me to interrupt the dogs morning nap as I roped her in. Give it a go – and would love to see your results – just add a link in the comments section.
Floating fruit, creating images with fruit that floats or levitates isn’t hard, but loads of fun. You do need Photoshop (or similar software that removes elements from photos) – but don’t need to be an expert. The first time I ever tried it, I used a carrot. I had fallen in love with images I had seen of the bananas but had none in the house. So a carrot pressed into service.
Harder fruits or vegetables are much more manageable than soft ones. When I did get around to the banana, it was a lot more temperamental than the carrot. Being softer, the toothpicks slid and moved quite easily. So, where to start.
Lighting
All of mine have been taken inside, with good filtered window light. If you have lights or a flash, that may work for you. I prefer natural lighting or continuous lights over flash, but that’s just me. Setup your ‘scene’ with a nice background and base… something non-intrusive as the fruit is the star of the shot. All shots below were taken against a white melamine board background and on a wood panel look wallpaper.
I used a standard 24-105 lens, F5.6, ISO, and Shutter speed to suit my light. Choose good quality, firm fruit without blemishes and slice it to your preferred shape. Then ‘construct’ it back together with toothpicks.
Fire up Photoshop
The toothpicks hold the fruit into the shape you want, plus support it to stand upright by itself. Once you are happy with the arrangements, fire off your shots and then import them into Photoshop. Make sure you are working on the flattened image, and from here, the magic starts. On the left side, toolbar choose the polygon tool. It’s the third one from the top. The polygon tool is like a piece of elastic. Choose your start point and click, go to the next point and click, next and click, etc., finishing back at the start point. Once you join the two together, you’ll get the marching ants.
Once you have the marching ants, you hit delete on your keyboard, and the content-aware menu will pop up. N now click enter, and the toothpick (should) disappear like magic. If it doesn’t work, try doing it in smaller sections. The ‘maths’ behind it is replacing what you have chosen with the tool with what is nearby. So you need to let it know exactly what you want gone and have some space for it to pick to replace it with. In some instances, I had to remove the toothpicks one at a time even though the two were close side by side.
Keep going until you have removed all the toothpicks, then edit your image as your normally would. Try Apples, Pears, Banana’s, Tomatoes, Carrots, Kiwi Fruit, any Citrus works well. Have fun!
