March 2017 – Levels and Curves, Reduce Noise, Portrait Retouching, Color Theory Guide, Dramatic Sky
Well it’s March, or it will be when you read this and January and February are usually boring months for me. Normally it’s too cold to go out and shoot but this year we’ve had a lot of rain, it’s too wet to shoot. Anyway, this is the time I usually spend a lot of time trying to improve my post processing skills. So. this month’s tutorials will pretty much entail computer work.
Our first article this month goes into depth on one of the great mysteries in Photoshop. What’s the difference between Levels and Curves? They kind of do the same thing, don’t they? Adjust the contrast? I know I use them all the time but was never really sure why I used one or the other. I found this detailed tutorial showing the different controls and how to use each one. It was found on Picture Correct and titled “The Ultimate Quick Guide to Levels and Curves in Photoshop. The video is by Joshua Cripps.
http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/the-ultimate-quick-guide-to-levels-and-curves-in-photoshop/
Noise. With film, we called it grain. Grain sounds much nicer. Noise is something you feel compelled to get rid of. We worry about it too much. Rick Sammon has a great quote. “If a picture is so boring a viewer notices the noise, it’s a boring picture”. But there’s things we can do to reduce it. Here’s a tutorial by Bake Rudis at f.64 Academy titled “How to Reduce Noise in Adobe Camera Raw”. The procedure works exactly the same in Lightroom. Blake goes into a lot of detail on what each of the noise reduction sliders do.
http://f64academy.com/reduce-noise-adobe-camera-raw/?mc_cid=db3ab66cd9&mc_eid=b757bed750
This one probably would have been more timely in the February newsletter but I saw it too late. It’s titled “Complete Lightroom and Photoshop Portrait Retouching Tutorial”. It appeared on Peta Pixel and was created by Glyn Dewis. Even though I don’t shoot portraits I learned some good photoshop stuff in this tutorial.
https://petapixel.com/2017/01/30/complete-lightroom-photoshop-portrait-retouching-tutorial/
Now we can get into some really heavy stuff. As photographers, we spend a lot of time studying our cameras, studying composition and studying light. How many of you have studied or even thought about Color Theory? If we really want to create art, it’s something we should probably have a working knowledge of. Here’s a tutorial posted on Peta Pixel by Dave Morrow titled “A Comprehensive Color Theory Guide for Photographers”. There’s also a free download of a Color Theory Photography Guide.
https://petapixel.com/2017/01/27/comprehensive-color-theory-guide-photographers/
Now to close off with something a little less brain taxing by one of my favorite educators, Aaron Nace (the guy with the man bun) on Phlearn. We’ve all taken those great landscape pictures but get stuck with a boring sky. We can usually replace it, live with it or toss the picture. In this tutorial Aaron shows how to fix it. This guy is full of great tricks and I always learn something. The tutorial is titled “How to Create a Dramatic Sky in Photoshop.