Beyond Phototips

A couple of days ago, Brian Auer posted a project on his blog where he invited people to use a photograph that he would supply and process it in Photoshop (or any other image editing software). The idea was to see how different people take an image and work on it.

 

 

 

Brian was kind enough to give us the option of starting from the original RAW file from his camera as long as we reminded ourselves time and time again that we did not own the photograph, but were only borrowing in for purposes of this project.

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Chris Marquardt from Tips from the Top Floor has just recently interviewed John Nack, the product manager who was in charge of Adobe Photoshop CS3. Chris, in his usual charismatic manner, has gotten a lot of information out of John in this marathon 46 minute podcast. However, if you’re an avid Photoshop user and fan you should seriously consider listening to this episode of the podcast for the tasty morsels of information, including which version of Photoshop you may want to buy, and why.

And in if you want to check out what else John Nack has to say, you can check out his blog, for even more tasty morsels to keep yourselves satisfied until we can get our hands on the real deal.

I’m amazed at Susheel’s ability to take pictures using his amazing camera, lenses and filters and his ability to edit his pictures in RAW format. He is a thorough professional but me – I’m an amateur with some decent knowledge about compositions. I use a small point and shoot Sony digital camera and I have loads of limitations in what I can do with it. What I usually do is to shoot pictures using unconventional angles, white balances and aperture settings, edit them in Photoshop and make them better looking. Let me tell you that I’m also not a pro in Photoshop. But I know some simple tricks using which I can give different effects to the photo I have taken. I use all of them and decide on an effect which gives the picture the maximum impact.

This is a picture of my cousin Niki I shot some time back using my point and shoot camera when he was on the beach (The first pic in the series). The photo got over exposed but I liked the camera angle and also the overexposed sky which is giving a white bg to my subject. I decided to work on this picture in photoshop to give it some effect and make it look better.

I opened the file in photoshop and as the first step I adjusted the levels using Image > Adjustments > Auto Levels on the menu bar. Then I corrected the picture a little more by adjusting the levels manually using Image > Adjustments > Levels. Moved around the sliders till I got satisfied with the subject’s look (Second Pic).

To give the subject a stylish look I duplicated the layer on which the picture was there and changed the layer type to hard light for the duplicated layer which is on top and played around with the opacity a bit. It looked better now (Third Pic).

If anyone remembers the posters of the movie Kal Ho Na Ho there was a strange black and white yet color effect which had been given to the photographs. I decided to try that effect on this pic by selecting the layer below and simply doing Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. Ah I got another effect now (Fourth Pic).

I wanted to try out another effect too to compare all three versions so I reverted back to the version just before me desaturating the layer. I was not sure what effect to try then I remembered Susheel’s soft focus trick using filters. I wanted to get that effect on this picture so I selected the layer below and did Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Keep the radius of the Gaussian blur a moderate 2.5 pixels. I had to also change the opacity of the top layer to 100% and I got this effect (Fifth Pic).

I have no idea if the effects I explained here were good enough for your pics or made any sense to most of you but believe me every time you try a variation of the settings I explained you get a new effect for your pic. How you make use of them is the key. Just try it out and let me know if you got a brand new effect. Please note that these tiny tricks are for amateurs like me, the professionals will have a better idea on how to do photo correcting in their own better ways.

Umesh is a User Experience Designer who is interested in photography. Check out his blog White Space.

I’ve often heard people look at a photograph exclaim, “Oh, that’s photoshop!” when what they really meant was “Oh, that’s retouched!” making the name “Photoshop” synonymous with “digital retouching”. Now, Photoshop is by no means easy to learn and the newbie can be quite intimidated by it, so having someone teach you how to use it is a great help.

Photowalkthrough.com is a great way to learn how all this retouching is done. Hosted by John Arnold, Photowalkthrough is a video Podcast that shows you how you can process your digital images in Photoshop and other programs. John explains how to use photoshop’s tools and explains various techniques in an un-hurried, in-depth fashion. Each photograph is typically worked on over the course of 3-4 shows and you can watch as each decision that John takes leads to the final processed image. I vote a big thumbs up for this podcast!

If you ‘re interested in subscribing, head on over to www.photowalkthrough.com or go to the iTunes store and search for the podcast through iTunes.