August 2017 – Exposure, HSL Layer, Exposure Blending, Selective Color
If you want to get really good at photography, you’re going to have to master exposure. It’s essential. As good as are cameras are they do make mistakes. Their programed to average the light out in a picture. Take a picture of a polar bear in the snow, what do you get. A gray bear. Take a picture of a black bear in the woods, what do you get? A gray bear. The camera averages the light to grey. Some subjects need tweaking to be represented properly. Here’s an article on Picture Correct by Tom Greenwood titled Understanding Exposure” An Introduction to Photography.
https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/understanding-exposure-an-introduction-to-photography/
Our friend Blake Rudis of the f64 Academy studied art in school and had been a painter so he understands color. A lot of his teaching is about color and how to adjust it in your photographs. In this tutorial, he’s taking on the HSL Adjustment Layer in “There is much more to the HSL Adjustment Layer than you think!”
http://f64academy.com/advanced-look-hsl-adjustment
This may sound strange, but the more experienced you get, the less pictures you take. Not necessarily in total quantity but perhaps from a particular location. You become more discerning. You have a better idea of what makes a good image. One of the quotes I read when I was just getting started in Digital photography was “Everything in Nature is beautiful but not everything in nature makes a beautiful photograph. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek article on Picture Correct titled “Funny Flowchart to Help You Decide When & If You Should Take a Photo”. Read through it, it does make you think
One of the more popular techniques being discussed a lot lately is Exposure Blending. A lot of the early HDR proponents have switched to Exposure Blending to get the high dynamic range they are looking for but without the toxic waste glow of the early HDR images. Chris O’Donnell, the creative force behind the website Creative Raw, has made available a 5-video course on Exposure Blending. The entire course is over 2 hours long. When you click on the link you’ll first come to the video file with a downlink but that’s only for the 5th lesson. Scroll down to the icons for each of the 5 lessons. You’ll have to click on each one and download them individually.
https://creativeraw.com/eb-05-blending-single-raw-file/
Here’s another video from Blake Rudis of f64 Academy, this time discussing the Selective Color adjustment layer. It might seem a little advanced but run through it a couple of times. It will give you much more control over your images color than just using a HSL layer.
http://f64academy.com/3-ways-make-images-pop-selective-color-photoshop/