Posts
Worst… music… ever…
http://blindimagephotography.com/main.php
It’s like angry porn music.
Heaven
Heaven is having so much RAM that OS X flows as smooth as silk no matter how many applications you run.
Yes I’m still here
An acquaintance recently wrote to tell me that I suck at updating my blog. I agree with him—but I have an excuse: I have a very short attention span.
Okay, so I didn’t say it would be a good excuse, but there you have it.
Ideas always pop into my head at the most inopportune times. It usually happens when I’m stuck, or have writer’s block. I use to make myself focus. I would write the idea down, file it somewhere, and then try to forget about it. A little voice in the back of my mind would always tell me that I’d never finish anything. Regardless, I could never re-focus, and would end up wasting a lot of time anyway.
Recently, I figured that trying to focus on my current task was a stupid strategy. It’s hard enough trying to build motivation to do something, and here I was trying to suppress it.
These days, if I get excited about something, I work on it. As for the project I was working on, I just have faith that I’ll get back to it. If I don’t, then maybe it wasn’t that important.
This blog is one of those projects. I don’t want to stop writing it, but then again I don’t want to feel I have to write it. That takes all the fun out of it. This time, the release of the iPhone SDK has me busy. But don’t worry, I’m still around.
I do have another image in the works. My dad recently bought a Seattle Mariners collectable train set. The image is about half-done, but when I finish it, I’m sure I’ll have something interesting to post. In the mean time, here’s the partially finished image to whet your appetite.
Jordan part 2: putting it together
Okay, here’s how the Jordan image came together:
(If you want to focus on one of the steps in the above animation, clicking on it will open the current frame in a new window.)
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The base image.
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Here, I darkened the orange background so that his face draws most of the focus. I did this simply by creating a Curves adjustment layer, and painting in the background.
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His hands ended up being darker than his face because of how it was lit. I didn’t catch it at the time, but it was quick work in Photoshop to brighten it up using an adjustment layer and a layer mask.
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Overall color balancing: I desaturated everything a bit, and used a Color Balance adjustment layer to pump a little yellow into the highlights. By the way, in my opinion you can improve most portraits by pumping a little yellow into the highlights.
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The image was somewhat dull, so I increased the local contrast by using the “Making Photos Pop” technique with a large radius.
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I didn’t have much control over the placement of the window in the background, so I added a vignette to put even more focus on Jordan. Here’s how to create a quick vignette: create a new layer filled with white, create a layer mask, use the circular marquee tool to draw an oval in the general shape of the vignette, fill with black, gaussian blur the layer mask (containing the oval), and finally adjust the layer opacity down to taste.
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This is the step that gives your image the “illustration” look, evident in the final image. Basically, you exaggerate the highlights in your subject by “dodging” them. In this image, I focused on his face, hair, and clothes. I especially like doing this to wrinkles, like on his jacket and jeans.
Exaggerating the existing highlights is easy, but sometimes you need to imagine how light would fall in a perfect lighting situation and paint those highlights in too. Figuring that out just takes practice and messing up a lot. Since I dodged on a separate layer, mistakes didn’t cost me anything. You can use the dodge tool and rely on undo, but a better way is to create a Curves adjustment layer that lightens the image, and then paint in the layer mask. Then, you can leave your non-drawing hand on the “x” key to quickly switch between white and black to dodge and un-dodge, respectively.
By the way, this step is best done with a Wacom tablet. If you don’t have one of these and are serious about photo manipulation, you aren’t doing yourself any favors. I know they can be expensive, but the control they afford is completely worth it. Buy one, like, now. You don’t need to buy the biggest one, but don’t go too skimpy. The smallest one you should even consider is this one, which is a newer version of the one I use. Trust me, in this case size is important.
One other thing, just so I can come away from this article with a clear conscience, that Wacom tablet link is hooked up to my Amazon affiliates account. So if you buy a tablet using that link, then you’ll be supporting this site. Just make sure you use that link, or if you want to, this one. These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along.
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In this step I again increased local contrast to further augment the painting I did in step 8, so I applied the pop technique again, with a large radius.
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Again, this time with a small radius, which makes the image look crispy. Look at his clothes. You can almost see the fibers. Check the hair. Be warned: it is very easy to overdo this step and over-sharpen. This is all a matter of taste. Some days I look at this image and think it’s over-sharpened. Some days I think it gives it that hyper-real look. I like to think that makes it just right.
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This step is the opposite of step 8, where I “burn” instead of “dodge”. The technique is the same, but you create a Curves adjustment layer that darkens instead of lightens. In this step, I burned in areas where I thought shadows might naturally fall that happened to coincide with the vignette, which put further focus on the subject.
Well, there you have it. Many of my images, especially portraits, have these techniques applied to them, and not always in the order I presented. I hope this discussion wasn’t too advanced, but in case you need further clarification on one of the steps, just leave a comment. Maybe I’ll make it the topic of a future post.
One final note: I encourage you to try the steps above on your own, and then post your images up on the freemixology flickr group for everyone to see. The site is new, so there probably won’t be much there yet, but hopefully it will become a great way to learn from one another.
Jordan part 1: Layers and Masks, Removing Blemishes
As promised, here’s “Removing Blemishes and Freckles”. I apologize that it’s a day late. Murphy was biting me in the butt trying to get these video uploaded to my ISP.
I’ve also posted another tutorial, “Layers and Masks”. Using layer masks is a very important basic technique that I use in almost every step in the process. If you don’t have a firm grasp of masks, be sure to watch and understand this video. You’ll use this technique over and over again.
The first few steps in creating the Jordan image involved removing facial blemishes, and to generally clean up other scene elements that I thought were distracting. After all of the other related tutorials are posted, I’ll wrap it all up with a post that discusses how they all come together to make the image.
Techniques 101
Wow, how time flies. I look up from my “real” job, and almost a week’s gone by.
The tutorial I mentioned in the last post is still in the works, but I realized that for novice Photoshoppers to really understand what I did, I’d have to spend some time explaining the techniques that I used. So, instead of doing it in one swell foop, we’re going to bone up on each technique individually. Each technique I show will correspond to a step in developing that photograph.
Tomorrow, we’ll start off with a quickie on how to use layers and masks. After that, you’ll want to pull out your MySpace photo because I’m going to show you how to quickly remove all of your unsightly blemishes. And it won’t even require you to freebase Proactiv Solution.
I apologize in advance to those of you who’ve been waiting with baited breath, but we’re going to be good kiddies and wait until Christmas to open this present. But unlike a Christmas present (and perhaps inappropriately, a little like a strip tease), the good news is that I’m gonna let you peek inside the package as we go along.
Push it real good
In my last post, I put forth this challenge:
Here’s the game you should play: how far can you push and prod a photograph without your viewer knowing anything was done to it?
Well, I decided to take my own challenge and reworked this image. I took this photograph of my friend Jordan a few years ago in my basement, and decided it needed an update anyway. Perhaps I went too far. You be the judge:
(Roll your mouse over the image to see the original).
I didn’t use anything but Photoshop in this image; no external plugins here.
In a future post I’ll step through how I did it. I can’t post the steps now because… well… it’s a bit involved, and it’ll take some time to write it up. It will definitely be a meaty post. If you don’t want to miss out, you can add this blog to your RSS reader: freemixology RSS feed.
UPDATE, Feb 15, ’08, noonish: Okay, so I went too far. This is what happens when you’re blogging at the same time as looking at David Hill’s inspiring photography. After asking several people at PhotoSIG (a wonderful photography critique site, by the way), I agree that the photograph above is obviously stylized. However, I think it’s stylized to good effect. The tutorial I will post up will have a further revised version of this one.
UPDATE, Feb 15, ’08, 3:21p: Well, maybe I succeeded after all. I put the photo in front of my boss. She’s an art collector, but not a photographer, and that may have been the critical difference. The people who’ve been telling me it’s obviously processed have all been photographers. In fact, when I asked her if she thought it’d been processed, she responded with “no, I just thought you used good lighting”.
Can you see the difference?
(Hint: cover one half with your hand, then cover the the other side)
Some people have sent me comments telling me that they can’t see the difference between the photo processed using this technique and the original. This is both bad and good. Bad because it doesn’t look like I did anything, and good because that’s exactly what I intended. Let me explain.
Photographic enhancement techniques can ruin a good photograph in the same way that the over-application of fonts leads to gaudy, divergent designs. Although you could argue that an over-enhanced photograph is stylized, in most photo-retouching situations, you aren’t trying to stylize the photograph (of course, there are exceptions). You don’t want your viewers to say “wow, you’re good with Photoshop”—you want them to say “wow, I wish I could take a photo like that”. If your viewer can definitively say “after” is better than “before” but has difficulty articulating why, then you’ve succeeded.
Of course, your taste may be different than mine, but that’s part of the fun. Here’s the game you should play: how far can you push and prod a photograph without your viewer knowing anything was done to it?
First tutorial posted: Making Your Photos Pop
One of the ideas I’ve had for this site is to provide a soup-to-nuts view of how a real production photograph goes from the camera, through the digital darkroom, and then finally to its intended real-world use. For example, the seals photo in the last post wasn’t just an example photo, it was an image that I created to sell as stock.
Unlike other sites, I didn’t want this site to be a collection of disjointed tutorials. If there are going to be tutorials, they should be in context to the development of a real production photograph. Originally, I intended to contextually link to tutorials that are already available on the internet, and post them under the techniques section of this site. However, I figured it might be fun to create my own.
I don’t intend for my tutorial collection to be the most comprehensive on the web, and I still intend to link to all the wonderful tutorials that are already out there. But as there’s any number of ways to do something, the more tutorials the better. That said, I’ve posted my first tutorial, which shows you how to give more presence to your photos. Incidentally, I used this technique in the seals post. I’ve updated it to link to this tutorial.
Here it is: Making Your Photos Pop. Enjoy! And please, like any good photographer, I’m open to constructive critique. Leave me a comment.
Don’t beat the seals
Last month I took a month off from work to go to Hawaii.
Awesome.
Let me say that again.
Awesome.
But I digress. If you’re a good little tourist, one of the places you’re likely to end up at in Hawaii is Sea Life Park. There’s something about these kinds of parks that hypnotize me into bringing my camera, even though I know in the back of my mind that I’ll come away with nothing but snapshots of people in a row, and blurry fish through thick glass.
Sometimes though I get lucky. Check this photo out:
Alright. I’m not that lucky. This image is actually a composite with elements from four different images. I’m not sure if seals stand up like this in nature, but they certainly do when a trainer feeds them fish:
I don’t suppose it’s too bad of a photo as-is, but I usually can’t leave well enough alone. No, leaving it alone would be boring.
On the last day in Hawaii, I hiked the Diamond Head crater. At the top I took a photo of the Pacific ocean below a sea of clouds. I placed this under the seals. There’s any number of ways to do this. I chose to use the pen tool, as outlined in a tutorial here.
As you can see above, the transition between the water below the seals to the ocean is a bit rough. Alright, it’s really rough. I needed a transition between the two different water textures. What made sense here was a cliff. Luckily, I had this shot from the southeastern coast of O’ahu:
A little work with the magic wand tool gave me the cliff I was looking for:
Blending just below the rocks (especially on the right side) got me:
You might also notice that I added a bit of sand texture. It came from one of the many beach photos I took. A color balance layer with mask helps the close-up water blend with the ocean, integrating the image together further:
I then removed the yellow reflection of the wall from the seals’ necks, and performed some global color balancing:
I dodged and burned to push the contrast, and then made it pop. For example, look under the top layer of clouds. You should notice that the sky is darker there:
The final step was to bind the whole image together to yield the image at the beginning of this post. An effective way to do this is to give the entire image a tint. In this case, I used Photoshop’s Photo Filter function under Adjustments in the Image menu to apply a blue tint. Take note that this technique works best if the individual elements are already well blended. Otherwise, no amount of tinting will bring it together.
When I snapped the original seal photo, it didn’t particularly speak to me. But I knew even before the shutter opened that I was taking the photo as raw material. Just because you can’t take a photo doesn’t mean you can’t make it.