Shooting with a limited amount of natural light at a high ISO can result in a lot of noise in your photos—like the image below that Deke shot in Carlsbad Caverns, 800 feet below ground. But if you have a high enough number of pixels, you can rescue the photo and smooth it into a print-worthy image with the assistance of Adobe Camera Raw.
Continue reading ‘Deke’s Techniques: Reduce noise with Camera Raw…’
It’s wonderful that I can go to a public library to use a computer—but there’s an element of vulnerability about it, too. Each day, hundreds of people will use the same computer that I just used. This week on Monday Productivity Pointers, I’ll give some options for public browsing, as well as some settings to consider for the various computers you may have.
For example, I maintain entirely different browser settings for my laptop, which I travel with and could easily lose, than I do on my desktop computer, which could only be used by someone else if they broke into my house.
Continue reading ‘Monday Productivity Pointers: Using Public Computers Safely…’
Take a 10-minute recess every week to join Bert Monroy in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, the playground of digital artists. Every Friday Bert will walk you through a fun, self-contained project that tests your skills and challenges the imagination. Photoshop isn’t just an image editor; it’s a sandbox for creativity and experimentation. Take a spin through its carousel of tools and get reinspired each and every week.
Animating falling snow with Photoshop
This week’s technique adds a new dimension to an otherwise flat image. Bert starts with a winter scene and—with some help from the noise filter, levels, and a simple animation—he ends up with an incredible falling-snow effect. Follow along with Bert and see just how easy it is to create this effect with your own images.
Adobe, Illustrator, and Photoshop are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or countries.
Interested in more?
• Start a 7-day free trial to lynda.com today
• The entire Pixel Playground with Bert Monroy series
When you think of using an iPad as a photo accessory on the road, chances are you think of using it in place of a laptop computer—for example, to store photos transferred from your camera’s memory card, and to edit photos using apps like Snapseed from Google.
Those are indeed popular tasks for iPad toting photographers. But the iPad isn’t actually an ideal tool for them, particularly if you shoot using your camera’s raw mode. Raw-format images deliver better quality and provide more editing flexibility than their JPEG counterparts, but they utterly inhale storage space—it’s easy to fill up an iPad with the results of an afternoon’s shooting. Then there’s performance. No iPad can crunch through raw-format images as well as a laptop can, and most iOS photo apps can’t work with raw-format images at all.
But there’s another way to put an iPad to work on the road: to assign metadata to photos, such as ratings, keywords, and even geotags that record where you took each shot. This is a great way to put an iPad to work in field: cull your best shots and do some essential housekeeping, but save the photo-enhancement tasks for a real computer.
This workflow is the subject of this week’s installment of The Practicing Photographer. Ben Long demonstrates a $4.99 app called PhotosInfoPro, which lets you perform those essential chores, and then export the results as a series of XMP metadata files that programs like Adobe Lightroom can read.
The process is straightforward. Use the Apple Camera Connection Kit to transfer photos to your iPad, but don’t delete the originals from the memory card. Next, use PhotosInfoPro to add ratings, keywords, locations, and other details while they’re still fresh in your head. Finally, email XMP files to yourself using PhotosInfoPro (or stash them on Dropbox or an FTP server). Then delete the photos from your iPad to free up space. You can work through a large photo shoot in less time than it takes to watch a rerun of L.A. Law on your motel room’s TV set—and it’s one less thing you’ll have to do when you get home.
There’s a secondary message to this week’s installment: Take the time to assign metadata to your photos, whether you do this in the field on your iPad or back at your desk with your favorite imaging software. It’s an unglamorous but important task that will make your photos easier to organize and find. You’ll find details on assigning keywords and other metadata in many lynda.com courses on Lightroom, Aperture, Bridge, and iPhoto. For an overview of the process, check out Derrick Story’s Organizing and Archiving Digital Photos.
Interested in more?
• Start a 7-day free trial at lynda.com
• The Practicing Photographer series at lynda.com
• Ben Long’s courses at lynda.com
• All Photography courses at lynda.com
Adobe and Lightroom are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or countries. Aperture, Apple, iPad, and iPhoto are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Dropbox is a trademark of Dropbox, Inc. Google and Snapseed are registered trademarks of Google Inc.
As a video editor, I find color correction one of the most exciting areas of video post-production. I consider it an invisible art—vitally important, but most viewers have no idea that it happens at all.
So what is color correction, and why is it so important? The easy answer is that it’s a manipulation of the color in an image during post-production. Usually color correction is performed to maintain a consistency in color tones throughout a film or video. But very often, manipulation of color can also be used as a storytelling device. Films like The Matrix, Traffic, and O Brother Where Art Thou? are great examples of films that used a unique color treatment as a major storytelling element. Color correction is a standard process in filmmaking and video production, and easily as important to a production’s quality as sound and lighting. The lack of color correction is a common reason that amateur video can look low quality or unfinished.
Like most tasks in video production, color correction requires practice and planning. How do you learn it? First, learn to color correct for consistency across your project. Chances are, you didn’t shoot all of your scenes at the same location, time, or with the same lighting setup—and as a result, the color tones in your shots may be different. I recommend starting with one of the many courses on lynda.com that cover color correction and editing applications (listed below).
Next you should learn to create specific creative styles with color correction. Although the courses listed below get into stylistic topics, they focus mostly on software tools and correcting for shot-to-shot consistency. So I’m pleased to announce that next week we’ll be launching the first course in a new series titled The Art of Color Correction with author Simon Walker. Simon brings along some high-profile teaching partners: Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Renoir, and Hopper. I hope I’ve piqued your interest. I’ll post again when that course releases; until then, check out one of the courses below to prime yourself for The Art of Color Correction.
Color correction tools
Premiere Pro and Adobe CS users:
• Up and Running with SpeedGrade
• Color Correction with Premiere Pro CS5.5
• Premiere Pro: Color Correction and Enhancement
Final Cut X and Final Cut Studio users:
• Color Correction in Final Cut Pro X
• Color 1.5 Essential Training
Avid Media Composer users:
• Color Correction: Creating a Polished Look in Avid Media Composer
Not a lynda.com member? Start a 7-day free trial today.
When it comes to graphic effects, sometimes your most impressive creative work isn’t visible on the page—it’s in the technique that made what’s on the page possible. That’s the case with this week’s FX video on using the Adobe InDesign animation tools.
In the video, I show how to make it look like one object is revolving around another. It’s a simple example with a red circle that crosses in front of a black rectangle, then reverses direction and goes behind the rectangle.
Continue reading ‘InDesign FX: Revolving an item around an object…’
You may have noticed that over the last few weeks we’ve been releasing a variety of courses about book design, including:
• Designing a Book by Nigel French
• Designing a Photo Book by Nigel French
• Distributing and Marketing Ebooks by David Wogahn
Now that these courses are finished, we’re proud to share a complete Book Design playlist that will take you from starting the design of a book to publishing it online, while inspiring you along the way. Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll learn.
Continue reading ‘Announcing a new Book Design playlist…’
A side effect of shooting underwater is that colors are filtered away by the water between your lens and the subject. A flash can help, but there will still be some color loss. You can bring back the full-color glory of sea life, though, by using the tools in Photoshop. In this movie, Deke McClelland shows you how.
To get the best results from this technique, you need to make sure you have enough color information in your image. But you can’t gauge this with the naked eye. Instead, go to the Channels panel in Photoshop and isolate the Red channel. If the channel appears too dark, this technique probably won’t work, but if your image detail is still clear, you can proceed.
Continue reading ‘Deke’s Techniques: Correcting an underwater photograph…’
