Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips
Here’s another great Photoshop tutorial video from Plearn with Aaron Nace. In the tutorial, he shows us how to use the liquify tool to shape hair, the clone stamp tool to clean up messy areas of the hair and then fill in areas using layer masks to style the hair.
Collections are a powerful organizing tool inside of Adobe Lightroom, which lets you group photos together that may or may not be found in the same folder of your overall file organization. You can create Collections for portraits, landscapes, specific individuals and infinite other selection criteria.
One of the newer features in Lightroom is that you now have the ability to add images to a Collection during import. It is a simple and straightforward process that might save you quite a bit of time in organization that you would otherwise do later. [Read more…]
There are plenty of creative ways to shoot fireworks but if you’ve never got good shots before, I’ve got some good pointers to help you get it right this year. I wrote a post a couple years ago with some basic settings for shooting fireworks.
Check it out here: Camera Settings for Shooting Fireworks
Hope this helps you get some great shots this weekend during your Fourth of July celebration…
After Effects is a powerful video compositing, effects and motion graphics program that’s part of Adobe Creative Cloud. The problem for those coming from a video editing application like Final Cut or Premiere Pro is that the learning curve is steep.
Once you’ve spent some time in the program, you learn some of its nuances and start wrapping your mind around the different workflow that it presents. Then, you change a setting or apply an effect and nothing works the way you expect it to. [Read more…]
Lens flare commonly occurs when shooting in the general direction bright light sources, whether they are a part of the image or not. The bright light creates internal reflections and scattering of light inside the lens, which results in artifacts or haze in the final image. A common scenario for producing lens flare is shooting into the sun.
In the above video, Karl Taylor shows us examples of lens flare and how to use a lens hood to avoid it. The lens hood serves the dual purpose of protecting the end of the lens in the field.
Focus stacking allows you to create a greater depth of field that your lens allows you to capture and is commonly used with macro photography. In this video from Aaron Nace at Phlearn, he walks you through how to shoot and composite focus-stacked images in Photoshop.
Here’s a new sharpening technique that I had not seen before but works very well, particularly with low light images. It uses a combination of Photoshop with Unsharp Mask, Topaz DeNoise and then back to Photoshop for another pass with Smart Sharpen before using blend modes to apply the sharpened layer with the original color layer.
There are several examples of the technique in the video walk-through above.
[via Topaz Labs]
The liquify filter in Photoshop is often demonized as the tool for making unrealistic body alterations in advertising images. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. In the above video, Jeff Rojas walks us through the basics of using the liquify filter and what the various tools inside the filter do to an image. He also makes a case for editing subtle changes with an eye toward natural body proportions.
[via ISO 1200]
In his latest video, Karl Taylor and Adobe’s Richard Curtis look at the power of integration between Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop using smart objects and linked camera raw settings.
Curtis covers some pretty cool landscape editing approaches. The tutorial clocks in at 27 minutes but is worth the watch if you have not explored the relationship of Smart Objects in Photoshop and Lightroom.