Name that flower!

July 3, 2008 | Filed Under florals | 1 Comment

You know your love of photography has surpassed your inhibitions when you are willing to crouch down at the edge of the flower beds at the mall, just to get a nice shot, and it isn’t until later that you realize you never once looked to see if anyone noticed (or thought maybe you were a tad strange).

The question now is: What is this flower?

Wordless Wednesday: Twinkle Toes & White Balance

July 1, 2008 | Filed Under Wordless Wednesday, people | 30 Comments

I’ve been making the move from auto to manual settings this week. One of the biggest hurdles is convincing myself that every shot won’t be blown out (overexposed) or dark (underexposed). The auto mode has been helpful as a reference point: if I’m unsure which settings to use, I switch to auto and see what the camera choses.

I love Scott Kelby’s books on both photography and Photoshop. This weekend I read an acronym, WHIMS, that he made up to remember to check his settings at the beginning of a shoot. In auto modes, the camera will chose the settings, but in manual mode you begin with the same ones as the last time you used the camera.

Here’s what it stands for:

W: White balance check
H: Highlight warning turned on (to tell if portions of your shots are blown out, or overexposed)
I: ISO check (correct ISO for your surroundings)
M: Mode check (whether aperture priority, program, or manual mode)
S: Size (image size and quality settings)

While this acronym is easy to remember and amazingly helpful, using it isn’t yet a fully integrated habit. The following photos were taking of my sleeping daughter’s feet (awwww), and in the first one the white balance was set for full sunlight. Oops.

In the second, the white balance is set to auto (I wasn’t completely sure which setting to use for indoor natural light).

The difference is obvious, although I confess to liking the yellow one best. What do you think?

Please visit my regular blog for another Wordless Wednesday!

Visit 5 Minutes for Mom or Wordless Wednesday for more Wordless Wednesday participants.

Wordless Wednesday: Hosta Flowers with Photoshop Tutorial

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Photoshop tutorial, Wordless Wednesday, florals | 17 Comments

I had comments about the coloring of the vintage bouquet I used for last week’s WW, so I went back and wrote a Photoshop tutorial for it. This week I thought I would post a Photoshop tutorial with my WW, but a much easier one this time.

If you like the idea of a WW with tutorial, let me know in comments and maybe this is something I will try to do often.

Here is the original image:

I just did something very simple and fun with it. Select Filter>Artistic>Rough Pastels. Once there, I used Stroke Length: 6; Stroke Detail: 4; Texture: Canvas; Scaling: 100%; Relief: 20; Light: Bottom. That’s it!

Here’s the finished product, which has the effect of a drawing with pastels on canvas:

If this can be done in Elements, too, please let me know!

Visit my regular blog for shots of a bee and a wasp who visited my hostas.

Sign up for the Twisted Silver jewelry giveaway this week on my regular blog!

Photoshop Tutorial: B & W Conversion (Vintage Bouquet)

June 19, 2008 | Filed Under Photoshop tutorial, Wordless Wednesday, florals | 4 Comments

So many people mentioned the coloring on the Vintage Bouquet Wordless Wednesday post, that I thought I’d post a quick Photoshop tutorial so you can do it, too! I don’t have Photoshop Elements, but I hope this will work there, too. Please let me know if it does.

First is the original photo:

Even though I kind of like the red chair showing through on the deck, I cropped it from the picture. Next, I pressed the letter D to set the foreground color to black, and then used the Create New Adjustment Layer at the bottom of the layers panel and chose Gradient Map.

When the gradient map dialog box appears, click on the gradient itself to bring up the Gradient Editor dialog box.

Click below the center of the gradient to add a color stop (which will really darken your photo).

Double-click the color stop to see a color picker. Choose a gray color right up against the left side; move around until you find a spot that looks good and then click OK.

You’ll still have the gradient editor dialog open, so move that slider around until you get just the tone you want. It’s really weird because the photo actually gets darker when you move toward the light end and lighter when you move toward the dark end, but you have to release the mouse to get a preview.

Click okay on every dialog box when you’re finished.

Next we’ll let some of that lovely blue hydrangea color peek through again. Select the Gradient Map adjustment layer, and move the opacity slider down to 80%.

See the blue?

Next we’ll darken the outer edges of the photo (known as vignetting). We’ll start by creating a curves adjustment layer. Click Create New Adjustment Layer button at the bottom of the layers panel and chose Curves.

Make a dot somewhere in the middle of the diagonal line by Command-clicking it on a Mac or Ctrl-clicking it on a PC, and then grab that dot and slide it down some to darken the image.

While the Curves layer is still selected, click the little camera-looking icon at the bottom of the layers panel to add a vector mask.

Now select a fat, soft-edged round brush (mine was 1100px wide!) and begin to “paint” the layer mask on the middle portion of your picture, leaving the outer edges alone. Painting with black hides the layer, which in this case removes the darkening effect of our curves layer from the middle of the picture. If you look at th next image, you can see both the fat brush and how the vector mask shows up as a dark blob in the middle of the vector mask box on the curves layer in our layers panel.

Just flatten your image (Layer>Flatten Image) and then save it as a finished JPG (I always work with a copy of my original image and then save in a separate folder of “edited” photos).

Unfortunately I didn’t save the PSD file (ouch!) when I originally edited the image for the Wordless Wednesday post, so this end result isn’t exactly the same as that one. Here you can see the difference from the original.

Please let me know if this tutorial was a benefit to you and if you would be interested in more in the future. It’s the first one I’ve posted.

To give credit where credit is due, I learned the above techniques from The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby, and the Kelby Training Photoshop seminar I attended in Nashville last month.