To use it is to learn it

This image is a typical retouching job request. Well, maybe a little crazier than typical. Here is a billboard I shot as it sits on a building near the Meadowlands. I was amazed how great the billboard looked up there but as I looked at the image, the wiring was certainly distracting. As we work to retouch this image we will come to know more intimately the healing and cloning tools, content aware fills and cutting and pasting. A request as seemly simple as this will help to make us all Photoshop experts.

Photoshop Illustrations

Adobe's Lightroom was designed from the ground up for photographers. I was one of the MANY beta testers before the initial launch so I know that Adobe did a great job looking for photographer's input for this program.

Photoshop on the other hand was designed by photographers (see the dodge & burn tools) but is constantly seeking to add functionality for illustrators as well. The two Adobe products that work seamlessly together are, in fact, Illustrator and Photoshop.

To that end, I am trying to come up with projects that will show off Photoshop's illustration abilities and, like I am always saying, teach the use of Photoshop's tools. Using is learning. This apple began as a red circle. By using different Photoshop tools and filters, we end up with an apple!

Photoshop Illustration 2

Okay,

The apple in an entry below is one thing. This Nikon image was quite another. When I was young I would spend my downtime sketching things that I saw as I sat. This is an example of the same thing but with Photoshop. I had a down day, I was bored so I drew, in the layers shown, the Nikon D700 that I saw sitting on my desk.

Gee, a photographer doing a photoshop illustration of a camera. Strange...

Teaching Beauty Retouching

I know. There is software that will retouch faces (sort of) automatically. However the images you see in magazines are all done by hand so that is what I plan to teach. The fact is that beauty retouching methods are ever evolving and everyone who does this for real has a different opinion as to which ways are best. Therefore I will teach all methods and students can pick their favorites from the bunch. As they learn these techniques they will be learning more about the tools that Photoshop offers. The way to learn Photoshop is to use Photoshop. Every time you do a project in Photoshop you learn more, get better and get faster.

Displacement Maps

Displacement Maps are used to give a 2D image a 3D appearance. A displacement maps is a grayscale image with lights and darks. The lights come forward in the map and the darks recede. Displacement maps will actually warp you image according to your displacement file. Now in CS5, we can make 3D displacement maps which we can rotate just like any 3D Image. It's just another talent that may come in handy one day.

HDR

I know I said that HDR's are kind-of gimmicky but here we go anyway. Here is a 3 exposure HDR of my book shelf. Notice how the ceramic piece holds full detail without burning out while the shadow area behind the bookend little old man holds detail as well. That's the purpose of HDR. To combine images of various exposures and take the best detail from each. CS5 took a huge leap this time. You pick your images, go: File > Automate > Merge to HDR Pro and Photoshop will assemble them into one massive image. They open in a window that gives you a whole bunch of options including 32, 16 or 8 bit and different ways to modify the image. Hit okay and you should end up with a flat file that you can continue to perfect. As a studio photographer, I prefer to light my sets so that all the detail I want is fully visible in one capture but for a quick grab shot this does a great job. Oh - I handheld this image with my D700 set at ISO 1600 and Photoshop removed the ghosts and made it perfect(almost)

Type

Ever since version 5.5 (I think) Photoshop has had a vector type engine (think path). This made Photoshop's type resolution independent and set us free in many ways. We will be exploring type, layer styles, type on a path even type in a path. All of these work to help create editable type that can rival anything a client might ask for, or which you might wish to create.

3D

3D.

I kind-of feel about 3D in Photoshop the way I feel about HDR. I think that both can be useful from time to time but they can be gimmicky as well. To that end I feel I must teach y'all about Photoshop's 3D (and eventually, HDR). We will run over the ever crazy repousse' (Corey Barker's favorite word) and all the stuff about extruding, meshes and materials. It works with type and it works with objects. It really is fun to extrude a line of type and then be able to rotate it in space until perfect. I guess we'll just play with it and I'll see what you all think.

Search for Corey Barker Search for a map Translate

Source: Attribution goes here

About Bing Highlights

Bing Highlights

Version 1.0.0 (12)

Copyright © 2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Support

Source: Attribution goes here

About Bing Highlights

More 3D

Here is a 3D picture that shows some of the benefits of Photoshop's 3D engine. 

This image shows 3 type images turned into 3D. How did 3D help? 

#1) each line of type is not only movable but rotatable in 3D space as well.

#2) the 3D lighting is carried from image to image so that they all relate. 

#3) surfaces can be edited so that we can even have reflections bouncing around.

As I play more, I realize that it may not help me in my business, but it sure is fun!

Puppet Warp in depth

This one is amazing even to me.

Puppet Warp has been around for a few versions of Photoshop now, but as is true for many Photoshop tools and filters, there is so much more than first meets the eye. Most lessons for puppet warp will use a wooden model like the one above. We too, will begin there. I have a slightly fuzzy model image so we will practice cutting it out with a path (learning the path tool) and make it appear sharp. Then, on it's own layer, we will add anchor points and make the model move.

But that is just the start! A little know ability of puppet warp is that it allows you to move items on a flat later as individual pieces. You can even move pieces on a flat image above and behind each other! When you okay it, you will have an edited image but only one layer! Amazing.

Lastly there is one more (at least) use for which the puppet warp is perfect. In class we will use Photoshop to make a panorama from 2 images and then tweek the image using puppet warp so that each part is brought up to level. Did I mention that this thing is amazing?

Project number two

Here is another project for the fall students taking Digital Imaging/Studio Lighting 2 at William Paterson University. Below (the last entry) you see the before and after of the Grand Central Station image. Above is the Guggenheim Museum. My wife and I were taking a break on a Central Park bench one hot day when I shot an image of the museum showing the lines of people waiting to enter the place. I remembered the image later and chose to once again, remove the humanity using Photoshop. Get ready kids. We'll do this one too!

Teaching Advanced Photoshop

I have been using Photoshop daily since 1994. As a photo professor for William Paterson University I have been asking myself the question: "How do I teach advanced Photoshop to motivated students?"

I have to realize that the majority of photo students will have ADD and relate more to visual input rather than those written or spoken.

Therefore, I have decided to give my students a few difficult projects that we will do in class. I hope that the massive end goals will be the carrot that will keep them focused and learning.

To that end I offer one of my own projects that I will share with the kids. This one is Grand Central Station. The original image is filled with activity. The second has had all life removed using Photoshop. Hey - If I can do it so can they!

Shooting color negatives

Hi all,
      This one came about because I am going through all of my 36 years of images this summer. Most of the commercial work was either black & white negatives or chromes (35mm-8X10") but I came across my pile of wedding negatives. They were shot by an assistant (big mistake) and a good number of them were way underexposed. The prints (4X6") were so bad that we never made an album or anything so I decided to scan the original negatives. I first tried with a 35mm scanner, but was unsatisfied with the results so I set up a copy camera using my D700, a 55mm macro lens w/ extension tube and an old MacBeth light box. This set up produced a 24.5 MB file that can be processed into a 72MB file with Camera Raw. The only problem was that the image was a color negative with the orange tint. This is difficult because the orange is not an even layer but different in different areas of the image. Here is how I finally did all 165 images from my wedding so many years ago:


#1. I shoot the negative and convert the NEF file to DNG.
#2. Next I open the image in camera raw and click the balance dropper on an orange negative edge.

#3. I then open the file and convert (Command-I) the colors. What then appears is a very over exposed but semi-normal image.

#4. In Levels (Command-L) I go through each of the 3 colors (red, green & blue)  and bring the shadows and highlights in to the visible histogram. I do this in red, green and then blue.

#5. The image is already looking much better. The orange cast is gone and the levels are good. I finally tweak the highlight slider while in the blue level and move it right and left until the file looks right.

You can go back in Levels if needed and tweak the final image as you normally might. After doing 165 rather quickly, I am delighted with this process.