PhotoWalkPro

When making gallery prints for my images in Photoshop I used to always use the Canvas Size dialog to add the extra space around the edges of my image.  The problem was that I would have to do it twice to get the right amount of space I wanted for that Gallery Print look (more space on the bottom than the top and sides).  Now I use a different method that is also quicker and easier.  Check out today’s quick video tip to see how I do it.  So simple and yet so satisfying.

If you aren’t familiar with duotones or tritones and quadtones for that matter, you should watch today’s video on how to apply one to your black and white images.  The duotone process allows you to overlay colors into the highlights and shadows of your black and white images to give them a completely different look.  They can add warmth or completely cool things off, depending on the mood you want to set for your image.  Check out the video and then try applying some duotones to your black and white workflow.

If you have a highspeed Internet connection, try clicking the full screen button located just to the right of the volume control on the bottom of the video screen.

Here is the final image after applying the Duotone seen in the video.

One other quick thing about using Duotones.  Once you have completed the Duotone conversion you will need to go back to the Image mode menu and convert the image back into an RGB file if you want to save the image as a JPEG.  If you don’t convert it, you will be limited to saving the file as a Photoshop document.  Keep this in mind if you are going to be posting your images to the Internet or sending them out for printing.

I’m still under the weather, which is why I didn’t get a chance to update the blog yesterday but I wanted to go ahead and put up this video that I made this past weekend on dodging and burning.  The video shows a couple of different methods I use to non-destructively darken and lighten portions of my image.  I prefer to use these methods over the dodge and burn tool so that I can go back and tweak my adjustments later if need be and not have to worry about undoing anything else I have done.  I have written about one of these methods in a previous post and I received several requests to actually show how it is done in a video so here you have it.

Now it’s time for me to down some Nyquil and try and get some rest.  I hope you have a sniffle-free Thursday!

I got a call yesterday from a buddy who was asking if I knew of a way to protect jpeg images on a disc so that they couldn’t be printed.  I knew where he was going with this.  He wanted to deliver proofs to a client but didn’t want to give the client the ability to just use the images to make their own prints or even copy them without compensation.

The truth is, I really didn’t know of any method except to make an auto-playing slideshow.  My other suggestion was to put a transparent watermark on the images before handing them off to the client.  The transparent watermark is not so obtrusive that it gets in the way of viewing the image, but it does supply enough of a deterrent that you wouldn’t want to make prints from the image.  To make things even better, a simple action can be made to create the watermark and then turned into a droplet.  The droplet can be placed on the desktop and all you have to do is drag and drop a folder onto it and it will automatically run the action on all of the images in the folder.  You could also use the droplet in Lightroom as part of your export process (check out this video from my friend Julianne Kost to see how to use droplets in Lightroom).

Here’s a quick video that will run you through the process.  This isn’t the only way to do this, it’s just the way that I found works best for me.  If you have a different method, please share it in the comment section.

By the way, this video looks even better when played full screen.

Here’s what the final image looks like after the watermark is applied.  Make sure you click on it to see a larger version.

I really like this photo of the Petronas Towers except for the fact that my wide angle lens and camera angle made for some really bad perspective shifting.  It’s not easy to photograph one of the World’s tallest buildings from a fairly close distance so I had to tilt my camera up to get all of the towers in.  This tilting of the camera makes the tops of the buildings look as if they get smaller and are tilting in towards the middle.  Normally I would try and use the perspective adjustment in the Free Transform tool but today I tried using the Lens Correction Filter.  It offers some different ways of fixing perspective shift and I like the grid overlay for getting everything lined up just right.  Check out the video to see how I transformed the shot above into the one you see below.

Yesterday I posted some images from my shoot in the Las Vegas Boneyard.  Included was one pano that I made by combining 3 images shot with a 10.5mm fish-eye lens.  I had never really thought of making a pano from fish-eye images because the lens has so much distortion around the edges that I never really thought it would merge well.  That’s until I saw Russell Brown from Adobe give his little demo in the opening keynote during Photoshop World (you can watch the entire keynote over at Terry White’s blog).  Dr. Brown showed the power of the Merge to Panorama tool in CS4 and clued me in to the little check-box that I had been missing that let me create my cool pano.  Check out this video to see how it was done.

Now here’s the other really cool thing that I learned at photoshop World and it’s the tool I used to bring you the video tutorial.  See, usually I use a program called iShowU to create my video screen capture videos but this video wasn’t made with iShowU, it was made with an Internet application called Screenr that my buddy Rich Harrington turned me on to.  Screenr is a completely web-based option for creating video screen-casts and posting them to Twitter.  It also allows you to post them to YouTube as well as embedding them into a blog or web page.  It was extremely easy to use and the only downside is that you only get 5 minutes of record time.  Beyond that, it’s a totally cool application that I will be using for all my short tutorials.  You can begin using it for your own videos by checking out the Screenr website.