September 2016 – Photoshop, Depth of Field, Zoo, Panoramic, Texture,
One of the things a lot of us seem to do is to collect/accumulate a lot of photography books. For a while it seemed I was grabbing every new book on Lightroom or Photoshop that came out. After a while, I found the authors that presented things in a way that made it easier for me to understand so I’ve restricted my accumulations/hording to those authors. This article came out last week that I’m sure will have something to appeal to everybody. It’s the “17 Top Books For Learning Adobe Photoshop”. You can find it here:
https://www.ephotozine.com/article/17-top-books-for-learning-adobe-photoshop–29743
Part of the challenge in photography is directing your viewer to look at the part of the photograph that you want them to look at. One of the easiest ways to do this is by controlling the Depth of Field. Put the unimportant or distracting stuff out of focus and it gets a lot less interesting. Here’s a new article by Tedric Garrison on the Picture Correct website titled Depth Of Field: A Major Player In Creative Control.
http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/depth-of-field-photography-creative-control/
Sometime, soon I hope, it will get cooler and be time for my annual trip to the zoo. One of the things I’ve been trying to do more of my last few times out is take animal portraits. I find it easier to get rid of unwanted backgrounds and when I do it right it seems to make a better connection with the animal. I’m hoping eventually I’ll get good at this but right now I’ve got a great portfolio of animal butts. Here’s an article by Sue Lindell titled “Tips For Zoo Photography”
http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/tips-for-zoo-photography/
Scott Kelby, the guy who’s probably the most prolific photography writer on the planet seemed to be on a roll this month with a lot of good tips and tricks. Like everything with Adobe, there’s a bunch of different ways to do things. When it comes to panos, I know of three. Well Scott came up with a forth and here’s his tutorial titled of all things “There’s A Better Way To Make Panos In Photoshop”
http://scottkelby.com/better-way-make-panos-photoshop-cc/
One of the things I see in our quarterly contests lately is some of you experimenting with the oil painting effect in Photoshop. Scott did a very simple tutorial on this technique called of all things: “How To (A) Turn Your Phot Into An Oil Painting (B) Add More Depth c) and Add A Canvas Texture”
http://scottkelby.com/turn-photo-oil-painting-b-add-depth-c-add-canvas-texture/
Here’s a fun link for this month. There’s a guy on the web named Aaron Nace who publishes some really in depth Photoshop tutorials on his website called PHLEARN (PHotoshopLEARN). A lot of his stuff would fall into the advanced/intermediate category but you can sure learn a lot watching. Here he’s working on some touch ups for portraits. So if you have a picture of your wife, husband, significant other or even a selfie that you’re going to post on Ashley Madison that you’d like to trick up a little, this is a cool trick. It’s called “How To Get Six Pack Abs In Photoshop”.