February 2018 – Cloning, Heat Map, Focus, Hyperfocal Distance, Lightroom, Beginner Tips
Well it’s still cold outside. It’s the time to stay in and work on your post processing skills so we’ll feature a few Photoshop techniques this month. Blake Rudis from f.64 Academy is a guy that loves post processing more than photography and he puts out an incredible amount of useful information for free. We’ve got a few from him in this article.
The Clone Stamp Tool isn’t one of the sexier tools in Photoshop but it’s really useful once you learn to use it properly. Here’s Blake’s tutorial titled “5 Very Practical Tips for the Clone Stamp Tool”.
https://f64academy.com/5-practical-tip-clone-stamp-tool/
Another one of Blake’s creations that I’ve been playing with recently that seems to have some promise of working its way into my post processing workflow is the use of a heat map to help bring out and balance the colors in your images. The example Blake uses for this tutorial is an image of the Milky Way, but the technique will work equally well for landscape images. Blake also makes available an action package for you to download to make this easier. Here’s his tutorial titled “The 5 Tone Heat in Photoshop”
https://f64academy.com/5-tone-heat-map-photoshop/
Taking sharp images has been a popular discussion around club events recently so I’ve added a few articles tutorials about taking pictures that are in focus and sharpening them in post.
The first is an article from the Picture Correct website by Rajib Mukherjee titled: My Camera Won’t Focus: The 8 Most Common Problems”. There is a possibility that the problem is not you. Here’s a link to that article and video.
https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/my-camera-wont-focus-the-8-most-common-problems/
Up next is a YouTube tutorial by Dave Morrow titled My Sharp Focus Technique – Back Button Focus & Hyperfocal Distance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQDhOWcy6f0
And to finish it off, a tutorial from Blake Rudis again, (I told you he puts out a lot of info) titled “Sharpening in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom”.
https://f64academy.com/sharpening-adobe-camera-raw-lightroom/
To wrap it up for this month we’ll go back to basics for the beginner and as a refresher for all you advanced shooters. Here’s an article from Picture Correct titled “10 DSLR Camera Features You Should Know” (Really Well, my italics) It’s written by Graham Wadden.
https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/10-features-of-a-dslr-camera-that-you-should-know/