PhotoWalkPro

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Yesterday’s post discussed some scenarios that require shooting a little unconventionally with the intention of using Photoshop to complete the photographic process and complete the pre-visualized image.  I ended the post with a picture of the I Amsterdam sign that is located in a park in Amsterdam.  I also told you that I shot the image with the express purpose of using Photoshop to make it look the way it does below.

Several of you posted your guesses as to what I did in Photoshop to make it look like it does above.  Unfortunately no one had the correct answer.  So here’s the deal.  My buddy, Jeff Kelby, had been to Amsterdam before and he told me about these letters he had seen that were located in a park in the Southwestern part of the city.  We set off to the park and sure enough, we rounded a corner and there were the big red and white letters, spelling out the I Amsterdam slogan that is found all over the city (mugs, bumper stickers, hats, t-shirts, you name it). I really wanted to get a photograph of the landmark but it was covered in tourists.  They were climbing and posing and basically blocking me from getting a good shot.   So here’s where I had my “shoot for Photoshop” idea.

As I walked around the rear side of the letters I noticed that there was no one there. Everyone was posing on the front side so that the letters would be readable in their own pictures.  That’s when I pulled out my camera and composed my shot of the rear of the letters, completely unobstructed by other tourists.  Of course the letters were backwards in my image but that was my plan.

Once I had my shot, I simply opened it in Photoshop and then flipped the image to reverse the backwards text so that it read correctly in my image.  No multiple image stacking or masking as some of you guessed, just a simple horizontal flip.  Crazy, huh?  But totally conceived at the time I took the image with the intent to change it in Photoshop.  Sometimes a little planning can really go a long way towards getting the shot that you want.  Here’s the original image as it came out of my camera.

That’s it for me this week.  I am going to try and catch up on some well needed rest and put some finishing touches on the D3000 book.  Have a great weekend and I’ll see you Monday.

Getting the shot right in the camera should always be the goal of any photographer but sometimes the shot you want is beyond the camera’s capabilities.  So what do you do when you know what it is you want but you know you can’t get it in one exposure?  In those circumstances, you can shoot for Photoshop.  Here’s a good example of what I mean.

While walking in a cathedral in Bruges last week I saw a beautiful stained glass window at the end of a large hall.  I wanted to capture the entire scene but when I shot with a proper exposure for the hall, the window was completely over-exposed.  When I shot to get a good exposure of the window, the hall became so dark that you couldn’t see any detail.  To remedy this, I decided to shoot two exposures with the intent of combining the two images in Photoshop.

To get the two images as one, I adjust the images in Lightroom and then opened both of them as layers in one Photoshop document.  I then had Photoshop align the two layers and used a layer mask to combine the best parts of both.  I am sure that some of you are wondering why I didn’t shoot an HDR and the truth is that I considered it but I think that the processing would not have given me the result that I was after.

So here’s another shot that I took with the intention of fixing it in Photoshop.  I’m not going to tell you what I did but take a look at it and see if you can figure it out (Jeff and Scott Kelby are not allowed to comment).  I’ll post the answer on Friday.

Yesterday my buddy Scott Kelby brought his Photoshop CS4 for Digital Photographers seminar to the Washington DC Convention Center.  It was a packed house as 800 Photoshop users of all levels packed in to the classroom do watch Scott do what he does best, teach Photoshop.  I had the pleasure of sitting in on the first half of the day and, even though I have seen much of what Scott was teaching, he still managed to squeeze in some new trick and tips that I had never seen before.

The morning kicked off with Scott’s revised 7-Point System for Camera Raw.  If you are familiar with his book of the same name, you know that it was written for CS3 and taught the 7 techniques to make photos look better using Photoshop.  Now in CS4, most, if not all of the 7 steps can be performed using the latest version of Camera Raw.

The second session was all about portrait retouching and it was excellent as usual.  Not only did Scott cover all the finer points of retouching (eyes, skin, face sculpting, etc.) but more importantly the reasons for the retouch.  Scott’s belief is that you don’t retouch a person to make them into someone they aren’t, rather to represent the way you see them in person, not under the microscope of the portrait shoot.  If you haven’t been to one of his retouch classes and you are a people photographer, you definitely need to check it out.

Unfortunately I had to leave mid-day so I didn’t get a chance to catch the afternoon session but I know that everyone that stayed got their money’s worth.  I can definitely say that it was a great primer for Photoshop World and I am more excited than ever to get to Orlando at the end of the month.  Hopefully I will see you there as well.

I’m going to pull a lame-o move today with a short little post to say thanks to the folks at Adobe for making one of the best programs ever.  I was up very late last night watching the Photoshop 20th Anniversary Event hosted by Scott and the gang at NAPP.  They did a fantastic job with a great retrospective of all the previous versions of Photoshop, all the way back to 1.0.  It was a great trip down memory lane for those of us that have been using it since the beginning.  One of the highlights was Russell Brown’s own wacky look back.  He had me laughing out loud.  The show ran pretty late for those of us on the East Coast, wrapping up around 12:30 am this morning, which explains the brevity of this post.  If you weren’t able to catch the live event you can watch the video recap at the NAPP 20th Anniversary site (it might take a little time to get the video up so if it’s not there, check back later).

Once again, congratulations to Adobe and all of those involved in making Photoshop the awesome application that has transformed the world of graphics and photography over the past 20 years.  I can’t wait for the next 20.

Thanks for your patience while I worked out my small video issue.  So today I am going to give you a quick guided tour of the Viveza Plug-in.  I tried to hit most of the major features to show you how you just how quickly you can can use the powerful features of this software.  If you would like to learn more about Viveza 2 and all the other great Nik Plug-Ins, check out the Nik website and give their 15-day free trial a spin.

UPDATE -

I forgot to include this in the video but there is one other feature in the Viveza 2 plug-in that really kicks butt.  If you turn convert your image into a Smart Object in Photoshop before using the plug-in, Viveza 2 will act like a Smart Filter.  This means that after you apply your changes, you can go back into the Viveza dialog box and rework them if you desire.  How cool is that?

I have a friend that recently updated his Mac to Photoshop CS4.  He has been using CS3 for a long time and was really enjoying all the great features but he was confused when it came time for him to scan some photos with his flatbed scanner.  It seemed that he could not find the TWAIN menu command anywhere and so he had to scan and save his images before opening them in Photoshop.  He had talked to a couple of other friends using CS4 but, since they were Windows users, they still had their TWAIN command available.

I asked him if he had his install DVD.  He did so I told him to open it up and check out the folder labeled Goodies.  Inside of that was a folder called Optional Plug-Ins.  Inside of that is another folder called “Import-Export”.  And there it was, the TWAIN plug-in that was missing from his menu.  I’m not sure why Adobe decided not to include the TWAIN as part of the regular install but I’m sure they probably had their reasons.  In fact, if you go to Adobe, they actually advise you to use Rosetta to access TWAIN support. Not exactly the best way to run Photoshop.

Anyway, I had him put the TWAIN.plugin file into the Adobe Photoshop CS4/Plug-ins/Import-Export folder on his Mac and TaDa, his scanner was back in business.  There are a lot of other items that are also in the Goodies folder that previous Photoshop users might be longing for like Extract, Contact Sheet II, and Picture Package.  Of course there’s no telling whether or not these features will even be available as Goodies when CS5 comes rolling along but for now, my friend is just happy to scan photos from inside CS4.

If you can’t find your goodies folder, you can download the optional plug-ins directly from Adobe.