January 2018 – Create Snow, Composition, Sunset, HSL, Flash, Lightroom
December was a tough month for new photography tutorials, most of the sources spent more time trying to sell stuff rather than teach stuff. That’s OK because they have to make some money to keep teaching us stuff for free. I still managed to put together some interesting stuff searching new releases on YouTube so here we go.
The first article was drawn to my attention by our award-winning newsletter editor herself, Rosemary Jardine. Some of you may know that Rosemary has moved to someplace where they have beautiful fall colors and snow the rest of the year. Berrrrrrrrrr! Rosemary used this tutorial from our old friend at Phlearn titled How to Create Snow in Photoshop to create this Stunning Christmas card.
You can find the article here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP7qiZIuTA0
We’ll change climate a little bit and move over to another of my favorite guys, Serge Ramelli. In this tutorial Serge is tackling composition. He does his post processing in Lightroom, but his composition instruction works for everybody and his post processing will work in Adobe Camera Raw as well as in Lightroom. Here’s his tutorial titled Understanding Composition: Imperial Dunes Lightroom Tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF-CBOlIyu4
Here’s a new instructor I don’t think I’ve referenced in the past. Greg Benz is best known for his use of Luminosity Masks and the Photoshop Panel he created to make luminosity masking easy called Lumenzia. Here Greg is just focusing on Sunsets in his article How to Use HSL for Beautiful Sunsets without Color Banding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0S2DTWzdPc
Here’s one from our Phlearn buddy, Aaron Nace on using Flash. I wish I had found this before Christmas when I had to take a bunch of family pictures and doing it by trial and error. Here Aaron tells how to Create Beautiful, Natural Lighting with Flash & the Ideal ISO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78eKWIfEltc
For Those of you who use Photoshop and Lightroom, you probably realize that Adobe put out a recent update to Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. One of the big changes was to enhance the results of the lowly Auto Button. Now you ask, “Who uses the Auto button anyway”? I’m not sure, but apparently Adobe thinks we ought to be using it a lot more then we do. Here’s how Adobe describes it”
Using an advanced neural network powered by Adobe Sensei, our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform, the new Auto Settings creates a better photo by analyzing your photo and comparing to tens of thousands of professionally edited photos to create a beautiful, pleasing image.
Sounds impressive doesn’t it. Blake Rudis of f.64 Academy has devoted 14 minutes to explain to us just how awesome (his word) it is.