Tuesday Tips to Fun Stuff

Okay, so I have been a total slacker on the Tuesday Tip thing. I guess the 9 classes and the second job have been getting to me a bit. So, how about this. I am going to change “Tuesday Tips” to “Fun Stuff.” Who said I HAVE to do it on Tuesday anyway, what if I feel like sharing something on Monday? Anyway, so I am will be sharing some fun stuff in the future, concerning the best boom stand ever and some fun helpful stuff with the move tool in Photoshop. Anywho, I do have something fun to share today and that is the homemade snoot. A snoot is something use on a light source (hot-shoe flash, strobe unit, etc) that really directs the light to a narrower beam than a flash unit without a modifier. There are a lot of modifiers you can make using simple things you find at home or a local supermarket…and they are el cheapo. So, the following items are what you need to make a homemade snoot: black felt (I like the sturdy kind…you can get it from Wal-Mart, Michael’s, any craft store), velcro, scissors, and about 5-10 minutes. I have a snoot for my Canon 580 and my Vivitar 285. All you have to do is wrap the felt around the head of the flash unit making sure about 1″-2″ overlaps, then cut off the excess. Take a strip of velcro and adhere it to one end of the felt. Then flip it over and adhere the opposite velcro piece (that will attach to the other velcro) to the other end of the felt. If you find the snoot is slipping off, you can use a hair rubber band to hold it tight. The pictures probably make a lot more sense:

I just use the test fire button to figure out where to place the flash or to see which part of my subject to illuminate. I use this snoot in the last wedding I did to get this shot:

Tuesday Tip: Re-use Curves

For the image below I used a Curves Adjustment Layer (found under the half-black, half-white circle from the layers palette) to give the shadows a cool blue feel and the highlights a warm feel. Well, what if I wanted to use that Curve again. I don’t think I would remember the exact setting I used. I could set up an action, and I do have an action for this. But, there is one other option that I use as well, and that is saving your curve to use it later.

Step One: Create a curve adjustment layer that you think will be helpful in the future. Maybe you already have one you use quite often, like an S-Curve, a Cross-Process Curve, etc. Once you have done that, keep the curves dialog box open and click on Save Curves Present from the drop down menu  (top right corner). If you have CS2 or earlier just click Save. 

Next, name your file something you can identify it by later. Preferably something that has to do with the color used. I created a folder to keep all my curves in.

The next time you want to use the curve, get a Curves adjustment layer, then go to the Curves dialog box and choose “Load Curves Preset” from the drop down menu at the top right.

Then navigate to where you saved your curve, select it, and click load.

That’s about all there is to it!

Tuesday Tip: Saturate and Sharpen

Hello.  I have a quick tip for today. It involves a sharpening technique and a saturating technique. Open an image you wish to sharpen a bit and add some saturation. Here is the image I will use (thanks Jessica):

I have done a few basic adjustments to the above image. So, here we go:

Step One: Select the background layer and duplicate it (cmd-J for Mac folk, ctrl-J for PC folk). 

Step Two: We are going to sharpen by using Unsharp Mask. If you have a method you use for unsharp mask go for it. Choose Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. Here is what I used for this image: Enter  30 for the Amount, 15 for the Radius and 0 for the Threshold.

Remember, images are not created equal so  you may have to adjust those numbers to suit your image. Click Ok.

Step Three: Go to Edit>Fade Unsharp Mask. Choose Soft Light from the blend mode menu. This is what will add some saturation. Drag the opacity slider down to get the desired saturation level. Click OK when you are satisfied.

Step Four: You may need to do a Levels adjustment layer to open some of the midtones up again. Here is the before and after:

Tuesday Tip: Check this Gal Out

Hey there. I have someone for you guys to check out: Ginny Corbett Photography. Her husband Shane and my husband Shannon have been friends pretty much forever. How lucky did I get that my husband’s best friend is a photographer too. Go check Ginny’s site and blog out and leave her a comment while you’re there.

Tuesday Tip: Sizing Horizontal and Vertical Images Using a Batch Action

It has been a while for Tuesday Tips, I know. So, I have a very helpful tip today. I have been trying to think of a way to batch resize both my horizontal images and my vertical images from the same action. Before I had been separating them into two folders, one for horizontal and one for verticals. But, that gets old and quite annoying. I dug around a bit and finally found a solution. There is one catch (isn’t there usually one): all the images need to be the same size to start with. Which is fine if you are batch resizing images from the same camera from the same session. Often I need to resize when I am sending hundreds of prints of to the lab to be printed, say as all 4×6. I also resize before I upload images to my proof site. So, here we go:

Step 1:

In short, I will be using Image>Image Size in Photoshop to find the right percentage to resize to get a 4×6 image. You will have to play around a bit to get the right percentage. Just for example sake, let’s say I have a folder full of both horizontal and vertical images that have a pixel dimension of 5120×3413 (horiz)/3413×5120(vert) and I want to resize all of them to 4×6. Open an image from that folder. Then on the Menu choose Image>Image Size. Be sure that “Resample Image” and “Constrain Proportions” are both checked. Under Pixel Dimensions change the unit to “percentage.”

 

Step 2: 

Enter the width or height that you want (so I entered 6 inches for my width because I opened a horizontal image). The percentage will automatically adjust. For this image, my percentage is: 35.16%. Kind of a weird percentage. You may want to write that down for the next step. Don’t click OK quite just yet. Click Cancel if you want to go to the next step. (You can decide which type of Resampling you feel is best). 

Step 3: 

Now you can set up an action to resize both vertical and horizontal images based on that percentage. 

Step 4:

Once you have set up an action, you can resize the entire folder by going to File>Automate>Batch. If you do not wish to write over your full size images, don’t forget to set up a new folder for your resized images. In Batch, you will indicate which action you wish to use, which folder you want to apply that action to (Source) , and then where you want to save them (Destination). Just another tip, you may really want to consider backing up your images to another location just in case you accidentally indicate the wrong folder to save to.

Hope that helps!

Tuesday Tip: Flash or No Flash

Today’s tip is really just something to consider. Recently I photographed a Victory Campus Ministry Meeting. VCM is a college outreach of my church, Greenville Christian Fellowship. For their meeting they created something similar to a concert environment for worship. There were cool lights of different colors and even some fog. After photographing this event I realized that it is really easy to get caught up in what you have recently learned. I started out in wedding photography about a year and a half ago and it has been a big learning experience in terms of lighting different spaces using a flash or multiple flash units. Before wedding photography I normally used a studio setup to do my art work. So, now that I have been using flash to light interior spaces, sometimes you forget that there are instances where you just don’t need it and it would be much more interesting without it. I think I get caught up in “filling the room” and in making it an even distribution of light that I tend to forget how interesting available light can be in certain situations. I began the night making exposures, that I wasn’t really happy with. I really wanted to capture the atmosphere and it just wasn’t happening with the flash, so I just turned it off, bumped up the ISO and opened my aperture and started shooting. I liked the available light much better. I did bring a bit of flash back in by bouncing off a wall behind me and dialing down the power on the flash so it wasn’t as intense.

Tuesday Tip: Vignette in ACR

A compositional technique to keep the viewer’s eye contained within your frame is to make sure your corners are “burned” in or dark enough to contain the image. That is one thing my students hear constantly when they come out of the darkroom: “your corners are a bit light, you need to burn them in a bit more.” There is a slight and subtle way to do this in Adobe Camera RAW. It is a global adjustment (all over), so you may have to do some local adjustments (isolated areas) in Photoshop later. After you have made your basic exposure and temperature adjustments, click on the “Lens” tab. Under vignette, simply drag the slider to the left to get the desired amount. Every image is not the same, so this will require different values for each image. You can also change the midpoint as well. This will adjust where the amount will center around or start from. Here is a look at the dialog box as well as a before and after image (only adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW have been made to these images):

Before Vignette Adjustment (changes are very subtle):

A little TLC in Photoshop:

Tuesday Tip: Get the Time Right!

This is a follow up from last week’s tip. Last week, I suggested using Adobe Bridge to help organize your images from a shoot. In order to use the Sort by Date Created feature in Bridge it is a great idea to make sure that the clock in your camera (or more importantly cameras) is set to the right time. This will not put the time and date on your images like some point and shoot cameras, it just embeds the time in the metadata of your file. If you have one camera set to 7am and the other set to 6pm and you are shooting at the same time, that will be annoying if you try to use the Sort by Date Created feature. Also, if you have a second shooter, make sure their camera(s) are synchronized to yours.

Tuesday Tip on Wednesday: File Ordering

Okay, I am a bit late on the Tuesday Tip thing this week. I am constantly trying to find better ways to organize my gazillions (is that a word? I don’t think so) of digital files and also trying to make my workflow more efficient. It is definitely a work in progress. Often times when I return from a photo session, whether it is an event or even just making images on my own time I will dump them all in an appropriate folder. Well, if you are like me you may be exposing using several different cameras and different memory cards. The only problem is, I like to view my images in chronological order and it frustrates me when they are all jumbled up. That is where Adobe Bridge comes in.

Step 1: Open Adobe Bridge and navigate to your folder of images in Bridge and select the folder of images you want to organize:

Step 2: Depending on how many images you have in the folder, you may have to wait a bit to let Bridge recognize all of them. Go to View>Sort>and choose by Date Created. This will organize all your images chronologically. I love that feature. Notice there are a lot of other sorting options there too. I use the rating system quite a bit to help me separate the keepers from the non-keepers.

Tuesday Tip: The Wedding Photography Project

So, today I thought I might just give you a cool site to check out. I have been a fan of Neil van Niekerk’s blog for some time. If you are looking to learn more about photography you should check out his site. As an educator his site has been very helpful in terms of finding new ways to present and organize material to my students. He is part of another site called the Wedding Photography Project which is there to help wedding photographers improve their work. Even if you are not a professional photographer I bet you would enjoy looking at the images!