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December 2017 – Black and White, Sharpening, Sunset Silhouette

We’ll spend a little time on Black & White photography this month in honor of my friend Rosemary Williams who’s just been notified that one of here entries into the Black & White Single Image Contest 2018 has won an award and will be published in Black & White magazine.  The first tutorial is from Blake Rudis of f.64 Academy and is titled Three Techniques for better Black and White Images.  The video is a little less than 20 minutes long and can be found here:

http://f64academy.com/3-techniques-compelling-black-white-photos/?mc_cid=6ad0eab143&mc_eid=b757bed750

 

Another recent look at Black and What was recently published on the Picture Correct by Andrew Goodall and titled Black & White Photography Techniques.  Here’s the link:

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/black-and-white-photography-light/

 

Now that you’ve created all those stunning B&W images you’ll need to sharpen them.  If you shoot in Raw, every single image you take must have some sharpening. There’s at least a half of dozen plugins on the market that claim to be the best sharpening tool on the market but who wants to spend money on something that you can do in Photoshop.  This tutorial is a couple of years old, but it just popped up on my radar.  It’s from Blake Rudis and titled 6 Ways to Sharpen in Photoshop Without Plugins.  At the end he gives you a button to download an action set that will let you do a one click sharpen just like a plugin.

http://f64academy.com/6-ways-to-sharpen-without-using-plugins/

 

Shooting sunsets can be rewarding and fun but sometimes people won’t get out of your pictures.  One way to handle that is to turn them into silhouettes.  Actually, Silhouette photography is fun.  Here’s an article by Danny Eitreim that explains how to do it, titled of all things Sunset Silhouette Photography.  It’s on the Picture Correct web site.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/sunset-silhouette-photography/

 

Now for all of you that feel that Black & White photography is unrealistic because all the color has been sucked out of it here’s a tutorial by our friend Blake Rudis titled How to make the most Natural Color Correction in Photoshop. 

http://f64academy.com/inverted-color-correction/?mc_cid=cb47a0b2d0&mc_eid=b757bed750

November 2017 – Rain, Black and White, Motion, Fall Color, Sunset, Sunrise, Luminosity Masking

The web site, Picture Correct, had several articles that I found interesting during the last month so I’m going to just list them here without comment.

 

Rain Photography Tips by Kalyan Kumar.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/rain-photography-tips/

 

4 Questions to Help You Discover Your Photographic Style by Stephanie Gagnon.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/4-questions-to-help-you-discover-your-photographic-style/

 

10 Reasons to shoot Black and White by Michael Freeman.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/10-reasons-to-shoot-for-black-and-white/

 

How to Photograph Motion by Ali Ghorbani.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/how-to-photograph-motion/

 

Fall Foliage: Tips for Taking Great Fall Photos by John Huegel.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/tips-for-taking-great-fall-photos/

 

What does Practice Mean When It Comes to Photography by Martin Jones.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/what-does-practice-mean-when-it-comes-to-photography/

 

Since winter is approaching and we’re going off Daylight Savings Time, it will be a lot easier to take Sunset images.  You still have to get up early for Sunrise but you can take Sunsets and still get to bed on time.  Steve Arnold had a tutorial this month on his Photo Mastery Club website titled “How To Intensify Colours In Your Sunrise and Sunset Images”. (Note the Australian spelling of Colors).

https://photomasteryclub.com/photoshop-tutorial-intensify-colours-sunrise-sunset-images/

 

As Long as we’re working on color I found a great video by Greg Benz titled “How to Enhance Your Photos with Selective Color in Photoshop”.  If you’ve never heard of Greg, check out his website.  He’s known for doing some great stuff with Luminosity Masking.

https://gregbenzphotography.com/photography-tips/how-to-enhance-your-photos-with-selective-color-in-photoshop

 

Speaking of Luminosity Masking, Adobe just added it to Lightroom and Camera raw.  Blake Rudis of f64 Academy released this timely tutorial on “Luminosity Masking in Adobe Camera Raw & Lightroom”.

http://f64academy.com/luminosity-masking-acr-lightroom/?mc_cid=655fcb40b5&mc_eid=b757bed750

October 2017 – Camera Hacks, Cropping, Replace Skies, Reflectors, Sunset

Here’s some fun little things to try when you feel like experimenting.  It’s titled “10+ Genius Camera Hacks That Will Greatly Improve Your Photography Skills In Less Than 3 Minutes”.  That’s quite a claim there but I’ll admit, they are useful in the right circumstances.  I used No. 10 quite a lot while I was in Europe a few years ago. I’d consider it more of a photoshop technique than a camera hack though.  It’s written by Greta J. and you can find it on Bored Panda at: 

https://www.boredpanda.com/easy-camera-hacks-how-to-improve-photography-skills/

 

Go online and you’ll find a wide variety of opinions on cropping from you should never do it to all images can be improved with intelligent cropping.  Both sides have highly successful photographers as champions.  For me, it depends on what I’m shooting.  For Landscapes, I almost never crop.  There’s time to thoughtfully compose the image in camera so unless you missed something in a corner you should be happy with the capture.  For action shooting, Polo, Air Shows, Boat Races or any sport, I tend to shoot wide so I don’t chop off part of the subject out of the frame.  I can always crop down to the important parts later.  Here’s an article on Digital Photography School by Simon Ringsmuth titled Tips for Cropping your Images for Better Composition.

https://digital-photography-school.com/tips-cropping-better-composition/?utm

 

One of the things we’re plagued with as amateur photographers is time.  We usually go out to shoot on a weekend and if the atmospheric conditions aren’t right our pictures aren’t all they could be.  The most common problem is bald or uninteresting sky’s.  Fortunately, we have the ability to fix it.  One of my favorite photographers on the web is Serge Ramelli who has done a tutorial on PetaPixel titled “How to Do a Realistic Sky Swap in a photo Using Photoshop”.

https://petapixel.com/2017/08/31/realistic-sky-swap-photo-using-photoshop/

 

Our old friend Aaron Nace is back with a tutorial on Phlearn titled “6 Ways to Better Portraits With Reflectors.”  You can find it here:

https://phlearn.com/tutorial/better-portraits-reflectors/

 

And wrapping it up this month is an article from Picture Correct on photographing Sunsets.  We’re entering a great time of year for sunsets.  They’re coming early enough that you can capture your images and still get home to get to bed on time.  The Article is titled “How To Capture A Sunset Photo” by Kalyan Kumar.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/how-to-capture-a-sunset-photo/

September 2017 – Color Correction, Golden Hour Landscape, See Thru Frame, Animated GIF’s, Street Photography

Color correction is something we all must deal with at some time or another.  Sometimes the eye dropper tool in Lightroom or ACR will handle it but sometimes it’s can be a  little more tricky.  Blake Rudis, from f.64 Academy, put together this quick video called “3 Step Color Correction”.

http://f64academy.com/3-step-color-correction-acr/

We talk about the Golden Hour, that magical time in the morning where the light is just perfect.  If you can manage to get up for it.  Chris O’Donnell of Creative Raw put together this tutorial titled “How I Photograph a Golden Hour Landscape” and it has some pretty good information in it.

https://creativeraw.com/photograph-golden-hour-landscape/

Here’s a fun little project for your amusement and entertainment.  My granddaughters loved it. It’s called “How to Create a See-Through Frame Effect In Photoshop”.  It was published by Aaron Nace on Phlearn.  Here’s Aaron’s sample of the technique.

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://phlearn.com/tutorial/see-through-frame-effect-photoshop/

Here’s a cool technique that Mickey Rountree turned me on too.  It’s a little complicated but the effect is cool.  Did you ever see those pictures where part of it is a photograph but part of its moving?  Think of a woman standing on a cliff and the only thing moving is her hair blowing in the wind.  It’s called a GIF.  Here’s an article by Adobe on “How To Create Animated GIF’s. 

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/make-animated-gif.html

With the weather getting a little cooler you might be inclined to spend a little more time outside walking around with your camera.  There’s lots of things to shoot just walking around downtown in the city.  Here’s an article by James Maher posted on Picture Correct titled “5 Ideas To Photograph When You’re Out On The Street”.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/6-ideas-to-photograph-when-youre-out-on-the-street/

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

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/funny-flowchart-to-help-you-decide-when-if-you-should-take-a-photo/

 

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/

July 2017 – Dramatic Photos, Water Splash, Landscape Tips, Frozen Objects, Radial Gradient Filter

This month we’ve got a variety of things to look at from Photoshop tutorials to inside projects to tips for landscape photography. Let’s start with a tutorial from PetaPixel by my favorite French photographer, (who lives in California), Serge Ramelli titled “Transforming a Boring Photo into a Dramatic One With Photoshop”.  Serge Gives you a download link so you can download his files to work along with him.

https://petapixel.com/2017/06/23/transforming-boring-photo-dramatic-one-photoshop/

 

This next article gives us something to do inside.  With all the rain we’ve been having, it’s easy to get a case of cabin fever; especially since it seems to rain every weekend.  This is an article posted by the digital Photography School by Stefan Mogyorosi titled “Water Splash Photography Made Easy”.  Things splashing in water make some great pictures plus it’s probably something you were told not to do as a kid.  Here’s one I did of a Chery dropped in Club Soda.  Several years ago, the Chef at the Walden Club had this hanging in his home.  I wish I had had this article when I shot mine, I think they would have come out much better.

https://digital-photography-school.com/water-splash-photography-made-easy/

 

Landscape photography can be very challenging; you can take the same picture over several years and it will always come out different.  Here’s an article posted on Picture Correct by Gde Putra titled “13 tips to perfect your landscape Photography.

https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/13-tips-to-perfect-your-landscape-photography/

 

Here’s another inside project but this one takes several days to prepare for.  You can think ahead and prepare for when that rainy day presents itself.  This article was on the Digital Photography School titled “How to do Frozen Object Photography at Home”.  The author is Simon Bond.

https://digital-photography-school.com/frozen-object-photography-home/

 

My last pick for this month is from Blake Rudis, the talent behind the f64 Academy.  This tutorial is about drawing the viewers eye to where you want them to look at your image.  It’s all done by creating light.  Blake’s article is titled “Radial Gradients in Photoshop” or more to the point Creative Spotlights with the Radial Gradient.

http://f64academy.com/radial-gradient-photoshop/

June 2017 – Airshow, Landscapes, White Balance, Silhouettes

Its summer time and that’s the beginning of Air Show season.  Air shows have been popular with our members with at least 10 of us attending the big air show down in Rome Ga each year.  Here’s a shot I got using the spray and pray method.

This year the event is October 21st and 22nd.  Here’s a link to info on the Rome show.  http://wingsovernorthgeorgia.com/   This month there was an article on Picture Correct by Chris Corradino titled How to Photograph an Airshow.  It’s pretty basic but if you haven’t done many, he offers some good suggestions except for metering.  How he expects to have time to meter manually when the planes going past at a couple of hundred miles an hour is beyond me.

Here’s the link to his article.

http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/airshow-photography-tips-techniques/

 

Here’s a short video for you photoshop users from our friend Aaron Nace from Phlearn on how to put some excitement into your summer landscape Photos.  His tutorial is titled How to Color Landscape Photos in Photoshop.  The techniques he shows don’t just apply to landscapes, you can use them for anything.  Here’s the link.

https://phlearn.com/tutorial/color-landscape-photos-photoshop/

 

Thinking about some of our in-camera basics, one of the things we must always consider is White Balance.  Get it wrong and you’ve got some weird color things going on in your pictures.  Now white balance is something you can fix an almost every post processing software ever made but with a little forethought you can fix it before you take your second shot and save yourself the aggravation later.  Here’s another article posted on Picture Correct by Frank Perez titled Photography White Balance: A Beginner’s Guide.

http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/photography-white-balance-a-beginners-guide/

 

Shooting silhouettes gives us a great chance to be creative with our photography.  A chance to focus on a beautiful background yet have our subject completely blacked out in the foreground.  Here’s how you set it up in a tutorial by Pranav Bhasin titled Silhouette Photography Tips And Tutorial.

http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/silhouette-photography-tips-and-tutorial/

 

The last article for this month is on something we overlook all too frequently.  Here’s a video on Hot to Clean a Tripod by Rajib Mukherjee

http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/silhouette-photography-tips-and-tutorial/

May 2017 – Oil Paint Filter, Graduated Filter, Photography Slump, Lightroom Tips

Let’s start out this month with something for those shooters who like the oil paint effects on a photograph.  I never really liked the oil paint out of Photoshop, I thought the Topaz Impression filter did a much better job.  Blake Rudis did a neat tutorial on using the Photoshop filter but he broke down the image into Shadows, Midtones and Highlights and applied different paint strokes to each section.  His video runs about 15 minutes and it’s pretty detailed.  I found myself following along on one of my images and had to stoop several times to go back and repeat sections.  It’s titled How to Use Oil Paint in Photoshop The Right Way.  Here’s the link and my attempt at following his technique.

http://f64academy.com/use-oil-paint-filter-photoshop/

 

In Lightroom we have a couple of powerful tools to enhance our images that don’t seem to get enough attention.  They are the Graduated and Radial filters.  Our old friend Aaron Nace (he of the man bun) did a great tutorial on his website Phlearn, titled How to use Graduated + Radial Filters in Lightroom.    You can find it here:

https://phlearn.com/graduated-radial-filters-lightroom

 

We’ve all been there at some point.  We don’t feel like packing up the gear and going out to shoot something.  Nothing seems to excite us.  A new article on Picture Correct addresses “The Photography Slump”

http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/the-photography-slump/

 

Here’s a quick tip from SLR Lounge to help you Lightroom users make Lightroom respond faster.  It’s titled “Lightroom Quicker – 5 Ways To Optimize Lightroom”.  The tip is in video format but the author lists the tips and gives you a time stamp where each tip starts in case you’re already setup the way he suggests and want to skip to the next one.

 https://www.slrlounge.com/lightroom-quicker-5-ways-to-optimize-lightroom/

 

To finish off for this month we’ll visit with Arron Nace again for a tutorial on How to Remove Haze in Photoshop and Lightroom.  The Dehaze filter got added to Lightroom and Camera a year or so ago but I still get questions about it. In Lightroom it’s pretty easy to find but it’s fairly well hidden in Photoshop.  It’s also good for more than removing haze from an image, Moose Peterson says he uses dehaze on lots of his images to give them a little extra kick.  Arron demonstrates the use of the filter in both Lightroom and Photoshop.

https://phlearn.com/remove-haze-lightroom-photoshop?

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/

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.

https://phlearn.com/create-dramatic-sky-photoshop-2

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