April 2017 – Photoshop Tips, Landscapes, Desaturated, HDR, Photomatix, Zoom Burst,
Let’s face it, sometimes we just can’t get the picture just the way we want it through no fault of our own. The background doesn’t cooperate because you’re in Chattanooga in January and you’re trying to get your shot on a sandy beach. Or, more realistically, you want a picture of an insane clown helicopter shooting down a world war II bomber over the ocean with the pilot bailing out.
Well here’s how cut all the pieces out in an article on PetaPixel titled 10 Tips and Tricks for Making Difficult Selections in Photoshop.
https://petapixel.com/2017/03/11/10-tips-tricks-making-difficult-selections-photoshop/
We’ve just had the first day of Spring so it’s time to get back to taking outside pictures, especially Landscapes. The trick is getting your image to look like you saw it in your mind as you were taking the picture. Remember that we’re trying to create art here so the image in your mind doesn’t have to look anything like it actually appeared. After all, it’s your mind. Here on 500PX are 4 Landscape Photography Tutorials All About Post-Processing.
https://iso.500px.com/four-landscape-photography-tutorials-post-processing/
Our next quarterly contest is “Chattanooga” so we all should be running around our city trying to capture the feel of the place. (Please, no more bridge pictures). One of the hot new trends in city photography, though it has its detractors, is called the “desaturated urban look”. Here’s a tutorial posted on PetaPixel by Serge Ramelli titled A Simple Guide to the ‘Desaturated Urban Look’ in Lightroom.
https://petapixel.com/2017/03/06/simple-guide-desaturated-urban-look-lightroom/
For the past few months our newsletter has featured a multi part article on HDR by Mickey Rountree. Now I love HDR, I’ve used it since I first picked up a digital camera in 2008. I got Mickey hooked on it. But it arouses inflamed passions in lots of people. I just googled ‘I hate HDR’ and got 647,000 hits in less than a second. The reality though, no matter how you feel about it, is that you’re going to run across a situation where your camera is incapable of capturing the dynamic range of the scene. If you want the image, you’re going to have to use bracketed exposures to get the shadows and highlights. This article, posted on Photofocus, may soothe the inflamed passions. Its titled ‘Toning Down the HDR Look with Photomatix Pro’.
https://photofocus.com/2017/03/02/toning-down-the-hdr-look-with-photomatix-pro/
To finish this month’s list of tutorials we’ll get away from the computer with an article about a cool in camera technique. This might even be good for our next contest since part of the article is directed toward structures. It’s on the Digital Photography School website and titled ‘How to Create a Dynamic Zoom Burst photograph. Once the initial concept is covered he gets into how to incorporate structures into the zoom.
https://digital-photography-school.com/create-dynamic-zoom-burst-photograph/