I have been playing in CS5 Extended (a trial edition while I decide whether or not I want to upgrade right now) and have done some work with the stacked layers ability. Essentially it allows you to stack your photos and then one way of displaying them is to multiply them on top of each other. It works brilliantly for fireworks and I am pretty happy with how the photos from Canada Day came out.
Above is the screenshot from Bridge showing the Before and After of today’s SOOC feature.
This was a shot I took of a “ferris wheel” (it is actually called the Skyview of something like that) in Niagara Falls. It is a long exposure shot done at night (f18.0, 6.0 seconds, ISO 200) that I was actually quite happy with straight of the camera. I cropped it down to 16”x20” as that is the size of print I wanted, but it wasn’t actually necessary as the original composition worked quite well. I converted the image to black and white. This was something I struggled with for a little while as I actually found the slight blue colours around the edges of the image very interesting, but the crisp whites when converted to black and white won over in the end.
I spent the past few days in Southern Ontario for business meetings and at night took the opportunity to visit some of the tourist attractions down there and of course made a stop at Niagara Falls. It was a little cold and windy, but well worth it, in my opinion. I just love how they light the falls at night. I waited around until the lights changed to variations I really liked and I think this version is my favourite.
These are the American Falls. The Horseshoe (Canadian) Falls are normally my favourite, but this night the straight, American ones really caught my eye.
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This past Thanksgiving we did a little semi-impromptu family portrait session. It took some coaxing but we eventually got some great smiles out of little Jackson.
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Above is a screenshot from Bridge showing the before (the only thing done here is some slight cropping), the initial after and then a tri-tone image (it is this last image I am going to be focusing on below).
In the initial after image I have obviously done added a vignette and performed some sharpening but I have also removed some clutter in the background, softened her skin ever so slightly and cleaned up some rough edges of her hair. If memory serves, I added a little bit of contrast to her eyes (focusing on not changing the colour) as well.
In the tri-tone image I basically took the initial after image and performed a technique called Duotone in Photoshop. To start this process here is what to do:
1. With the image open in Photoshop select Image then Mode. The current selection will most likely be RGB mode. This is the typical mode that camera’s take images in – it is how my photos start out.
2. Select Grayscale. A couple of warnings will popup. The first is asking whether or not you want to merge your layers (if you had no layers then you will not have this warning). I typically do not merge them, however, it is best if you do. The second is asking whether or not you want to discard the colour information, click discard.
3. Once this is done, you can now go back into Image then Mode and select Duotone (it was grayed out before).
4. Up pops a dialog box – this is where the fun begins. The dialog box will bring up whatever Toning you last created/worked with. If you haven’t used this feature before, it will start in a Monotone setting (one colour to be used throughout the image). To change the number of colours used change Monotone to Duotone (2 colours), Tritone (3 colours) or Quadtone (4 colours). To change the colour click on the colour box and then select the one you want. You can either browse through the ‘swatches’ that are there or you can use the normal colour picker by hitting the Picker button on the right hand side of the newest dialog box.
5. The trickiest thing about this application are those little graphs beside the colour boxes. Essentially these are just like Curves boxes and show you the distribution of the colour throughout your image. On the Left are your highlight and the Right are you shadows. As you move the curve around you change how that specific colour acts in each of the areas. You can make the colour only show up in the highlights or switch it completely around and have it only in the shadows, or anything in between. It takes some time to get used to this and I would suggest not jumping right to Quad-tone when you are starting out.
Here’s a screen shot for the Tri-tone box I used for the above image.
As you can see, I used a fairly normal curve for my black and darker pink colour and then brought in a lighter pink in the highlights. The bottom colour bar shows the distribution of colours throughout the image. In a normal image, this bar would go from white to black.
Try it out sometime and let me know how it goes for you.
I did a pet photography session with my Chris’ new little kitten a couple of weeks ago. Her name is Two and she is adorable! She didn’t sit still for very long, but we managed to get some great shots of her anyway.
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Canada Day Fireworks shot from the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec overlooking the Ottawa River and downtown Ottawa in Ontario.
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Jackson Robert Beach