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.