Anyone reading my blog for any amount of time knows how much I love sharing my passion for photography and I love teaching other photographers things that totally make their day. For the longest time I've been sharing lighting tutorials, composition tips, equipment comparisons on small blog posts but I've been wanting to share even more and for the last year or so we've been working on a new website where I can do just that.
This past fall I launched an Online Photography Education site called Shoot for Love, it is a monthly membership site priced to be as affordable and as accessible as possible....
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This blog post is my homage to a photographic era of yester-year, the days before anyone had even heard of a little program called Adobe Photoshop, back when making a digital scan of your photo meant purchasing THOUSANDS of dollars in special equipment. This didn't mean people didn't do crazily creative things to their images, Man Ray was creating images like his one titled "Kitty" over 60 years ago.
Photo by Man Ray circa mid-1900s. Think about doing this one without photoshop.
Obviously special effects for the sake of the effect don't make the images better, but in the world of creative...
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Ever notice how most digital black & whites look sort of washed out? That's because they're using what an off-set printer would call an "unsupported" black. When a graphic designer wants a pure, rich black they use a black "supported" with additional inks making a dark silky black instead of a sort of dark grey that would appear if you used just black ink.
Well, the same principle applies to black and white photos. By blending additional inks into your black and whites you get a richer tonal range which gives you more details in your highlights... a complaint many film shooters have...
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Remember back to when you were first learning Photoshop? You probably went through and applied different filters, maybe you tried doing a colorized-black-and-white image, maybe you created some color effects stuff like that. Well, the idea was to experiment! You didn't know how things would turn out you just started TRYING things.
There is nothing wrong with this experimental stage, but at some point you need to LEAVE that stage and you need to come into your digital darkroom with a very clear idea of what you want and some basic ideas on how to get there... otherwise you're probably just...
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Neck wrinkles in photos is my number one Pet Peeve
Neck Wrinkle (n) The overlaps in skin caused when a person's head is turned with a seemingly unnatural angle relative to the neck.
Even though most photographers and models will create images that avoid overlapping wrinkles of skin somehow neck wrinkles pop up in professional fashion and beauty photography not commonly, but definitely not rarely. There are neck wrinkles in a book titled "Fashion Photography" for crying out loud!
I don't know why I allow myself to be so bothered by them. Maybe it's because it's so easy to make posing adjustments...
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Thank you to everyone that shared their opinions on how I achieved the Spiraling Out effect in my first Exercise in Photoshop Forensics post. I definitely think it was successful enough that I'll do another one in the future but for now let's get to the solution!
Ofir Abe's description was correct in his guess about my technique, which was to process multiple iterations of one image (using Adobe Lightroom) and exporting each version to Photoshop where I exposed different parts of each image using layer masks. Why do it in Lightroom rather than adjustment layers? Well, it's a matter of bit depth...
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How was it done? You be the judge.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The solution to this exercise was posted in a separate blog post, you can view it here if you'd like http://new.jakegarn.com/solution-exercise-in-photoshop-forensics/
I used a couple very simple techniques to create these images and rather than offer a post-processing tutorial I'm going to turn the challenge back onto you, my blog readers. Sometimes the best way to learn your tools is to imagine how other photographers are using them, so in that spirit look at these images carefully and leave a comment describing the post processing techniques...
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Editing a High Key Portrait
In Lightroom
A brief introduction to some editing tools I used in Adobe Lightroom 2.0.
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Five
Faces
Do multiple faces mean automatic super-villain status?
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I am nothing if not a mad scientist, had I any talents in biology or any sort of life sciences I would be the guy in a lab that accidentally created a super hero/villain out of myself and at this moment a blockbuster movie would be in production about my life. It would be a massive success and I would be stumbling out of the car with Paris Hilton as we speak... and my wife would be pissed but she'd understand because I wasn't myself, it was the mad science that made me freak out.
Alas, I have no biology skills whatsoever......
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Retouching a
Beauty Portrait
Showing a few simple techniques for retouching a beauty portrait in Adobe Photoshop.
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