Haven’t checked out these Photoshop Actions yet, but wanted to leave myself a note here to take a look.
Yanik has a lot of very, very good text and video tutorials on a variety of photographic topics. Some great stuff about off-camera flash, macro photography, stock photography, photoshop, and so forth.
PopPhoto.com tutorial by Debbie Grossman.
Probably won’t need this if you have a gradient filter or multiple exposure HDR. This is a Photoshop-only technique (won’t work with Photoshop Elements). Makes a sky richer and more dramatic instead of washed out. In a step-by-step tutorial, Grossman explains the selection techniques, blend modes used, and a way to make the finished result realistic by removing the white halo that can happen between the selection of sky and earth.
Tutorial in Layers Magazine (by way of Photojojo’s newsletter). Cross processing produces a color shift that creates a very retro look. Boost the contrast of an already contrasty photo, create custom curves for the Red, Green, and Blue channels in the curves dialog, then switch back to RGB curves to save. More contrast can be added after that.
Posted in photoshop, tutorials
Tagged cross processing, curves, Layers Magazine, Photojojo, photoshop, retro, tutorial
Here’s a good one I found on Focal Press’s YouTube space. It’s a video showing a technique from Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 Maximum Performance by Mark Galer. He shows how to use a Hue/Saturation layer to target just the sunburned color on a man’s face: he uses the eyedropper to select the color he wants to change, then cranks the saturation all the way up to see all the colors the eyedropper has picked up. Then he shows some tweaks on how to get rid of some of those tones to hone in on the specific color he wants to change.
I believe this one will work in Photoshop as well.
Check out FocalOnline on YouTube for more videos from its excellent line of photography books (Light: Science and Magic, etc.).
Posted in books, how to, photoshop, Photoshop Elements, tutorials, YouTube
Tagged books, Focal Press, photoshop, Photoshop Elements, PSE6, retouching, tutorial, YouTube
Richard Lynch has some inexpensive tool sets to add some of Photoshop’s capabilities to Photoshop Elements. The main site is here; the blog is here.
Posted in Elements, how to, photoshop, Photoshop Elements, software
Each month, Wetzel and Company offers a free download of one of their hand-crafted backgrounds, patterns & photographic textures. These freebies are high-resolution JPGs, copyright free, culled from the company’s various themed CD collections. There are also quite a number of tutorials on the site to give you some ideas on how to work with these backgrounds and textures. This month’s tutorial is about how to use Photoshop’s Layer Adjustments to create an artistic background effect with the free digital pastels background from its Digital Pastels CD. Go to Wetzel’s site and sign up for its newsletter to receive notice when new free sample downloads are available. The newsletter also features one of Wetzel’s CDs, and an occasional tutorial.
Originally uploaded by bc.foto.
The soft glow in the Monarch Butterfly image above is an example of Orton Imagery. Back in the day of film, this effect was created by combining color slides into a “slide-sandwich” of two overexposed images: one in-focus and the other out-of-focus.
Today, the Orton effect can be created in Photoshop and other image editors. There’s an excellent tutorial on the Nature Photographers online magazine: here’s the HTML web link and here’s the PDF file.
The tutorial includes how to create the effect in Photoshop, as well as using slide film. It was written by Darwin Wigget, who learned about this technique in a Popular Photography article by Michael Orton. Wigget began calling it “Orton Imagery.”
On flickr, I’m a member of two Orton groups: Orton Group and Orton Addicts. Looking at how other people are using Orton helps me learn more about the technique.
All portraits need retouching. This is one of the ideas presented by Monte Zucker at a seminar I attended last fall (2006). Zucker is a legendary photographer and educator, and was touring with Photoshop Hall of Famer, Eddie Tapp.
One retouching technique Zucker uses is “The Monte Zucker Soft Focus Filter.” The effect was created in Photoshop by Tapp. You can learn how to do it by downloading the step-by-step PDF tutorial from Tapp’s site. It’s quick, easy, and gives very nice results.
