March 2018 – Crop Tool, Add Clouds, Double Exposure, Split Toning, File Formats
We’ve all heard numerous times about using the rule of thirds when composing your images, but have you heard about the Golden Ratio or the Golden Triangle? Here’s our old friend Aaron Nace from Phlearn to explain how these things work and how to use them to enhance the composition of your photographs. Aaron uses overlays in the Photoshop crop tool to display the three guides, but the same things are available in Lightroom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqGM0TKeRDc&feature=youtu.be
Bill Fortney was once asked how he got so many iconic photographs of our national parks. His answer was simple: Go back 20 times. I don’t know about you, but I consider myself lucky if I can get to an exotic place once. 20 times just isn’t going to happen. So, what do you do if Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate? You get shots of beautiful scenery, but she gives you a plain white sky. We have the skill and technology. We fix It in Photoshop. Here’s an article and video on Shutterbug. The article is by Ron Leach and the video is by Unmesh Dinda. It’s titled: Here’s How to Add Clouds & Enhance Colors for More Dramatic Landscape Photos.
One of the tricks that we’ve been seeing a lot of over the past few years is double exposure photography. The most popular seems to be a silhouette of a person with a landscape shot inside the silhouette. Here’s an article in Light Stalking by Taissia Iv titled: How to Make Double Exposures in Photoshop.
https://www.lightstalking.com/how-to-make-double-exposures-photoshop/
One interesting little trick that we can use to give our images a consistent style across a group of images is something called split toning. Evan Ranft uses Lightroom for this tutorial. It’s a little more complicated to do in Photoshop. At least I haven’t found an easy way to do it. The article is titled: How to Use Split Toning in Lightroom to Accentuate Your Colors.
One thing we have a lot of in photography is file formats. From each camera manufacturer’s proprietary raw format to DNG to PSD to tiff to jpeg. Here’s tutorial from George Benz that sorts everything out to what to use for what purpose. It’s titled: The Photographers Guide to File Formats in Lightroom and Photoshop.