Welcome back to Deke’s Techniques. This week learn how to transform the Dunguaire Castle image from last week’s technique into a weathered black-and-white print with Adobe Photoshop and Camera Raw. We’ll balance the luminance levels to create the sepia tone, and we’ll add some film grain and vignetting. Let’s see how it works.
The first time you try them out, Photoshop filters can be sort of fun, turning your images into a pastel drawing or giving them a chrome effect. But as Deke points out in this week’s free technique, you’ll soon realize that many of these built-in filters are nothing you’d actually want to use. So instead, Deke has used a familiar tool to a surprising purpose this week, by using Adobe Camera Raw to create some filter-like recipes that result in usable effects. And you don’t need to use raw-format photos to make it work, either.
He begins with this image (shot by lynda.com‘s own Jacob Cunningham), which does happen to be a raw image to which Deke applies conventional Camera Raw processing in order to set his starting point:
For his first effect, Deke uses a negative Clarity value to reduce the edge contrast and a negative Vibrance setting to leach out the most vivid colors in the image. He then adds back some saturation to return the glow of the model’s skin tone.
Next, Deke takes the same image, and applies a bleached effect that’s centered around the application of a drastic temperature reduction. Who needs Instagram when you have ACR?
The third effect emulates old school cross-processing (as if you were developing one kind of film with a process designed for another) by adjusting the temperature and tone, then setting vibrance and saturation at odds. The result is this interesting effect:
The next recipe applies an etched effect, which gives our good-natured model an almost other-worldly look. This part of the technique involves tweaking the Recovery, Fill, Blacks, Contrast, and Clarity values.
Finally, because you’ve undoubtedly come to expect extremes from Deke, he’ll show you how he used the Tone Curve to set the different levels inside the image at extremes with one another, resulting in this stark treatment:
Five photo-processing filters in under nine minutes. And all along, you’re applying your effect to duplicates of an original smart object, so everything is non-destructive and you can riff off of Deke’s ideas without harming your original image.
And if that’s not enough, members of the lynda.com Online Training Library® can view another new movie in which Deke shares his sixth and most outrageous filter effect inside Adobe Camera Raw. It’s Deke—you can occasionally question his taste but never his talent. And you never know what the inspirational effects of going over the edge might be.
Every week, there’s a free techniques from Deke!
Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques collection
• courses on Photoshop in the Online Training Library®
• courses by Deke McClelland in the Online Training Library®
Camera Raw is an independent application that lets you develop your raw photographs and exploit every byte of the vast information captured by your digital SLR camera. Not just powerful, it is a force unto itself. In this week’s Photoshop Top 40 Countdown, Deke shows us how to tap into its many features.
Macworld.com thinks that lynda.com would be a pretty cool holiday gift idea for the creative types in your life, and while we might have a bit of a bias, we agree.
Here are a few reasons to give the gift of lynda.com this year at the holidays:
You know someone who is getting a new digital camera this year. Check out the hours and hours of digital photography and camera RAW courses in the Online Training Library®.
You would like to build a basic photo-sharing website so that your friends and family can all see photos you took of your Christmas tree, Menorah, hand-knitted reindeer sweater, or all of the snow our friends on the East Coast have been getting. iWeb ’09 Essential Training will help get your photo site built in an afternoon.
Instead of sending a written card to everyone this year, you’d like to try your hand at an animated Flash card like Chris Georgenes does every year. (How cute is this?!?) Flash CS4 Professional Tools for Character Animation and Flash CS3 Animation Secrets are a great way to get started on your own.
You got married and want to explore your family trees together. Growing and Sharing Your Family Tree is an ideal course to help get started researching and organizing who you are related to.
You’d like to share the love (and sell some of the junk stuff you got for the holidays last year), while making a little pocket money for yourself. One of our latest titles, Product Photography for E-Commerce, will give you at least a fighting chance to sell off those footie-pajamas and over-sized plaid pants you got from your grandma last year.
You’d like to help your mom start a cooking blog of all her yummy holiday recipes. WordPress.com 2.7 Essential Training is five hours of everything you need to know to get her sugar cookies and brown bread recipe online and shared with the world.
So, yes, we’re a little biased, but we know from experience that there are hundreds of reasons not to want to go to the mall this time of year: The long wait in lines, not knowing your giftees’ clothing sizes, fighting traffic, catching colds from strangers. There are also a lot of reasons that a gift subscription to lynda.com is a great option for many on your gift list. Visit the lynda.com Gift Center today and give the gift of knowledge.
Happy Holidays from all of us lynda.com!
