2 posts tagged “photoshop”
The book contains several examples of cool things that you can do with photoshop, and ways to solve specific problems. The first chapter takes a photo of a parrot-- good, but a bit overexposed and some of the details are blown out-- and then looks for detail in the individual RGB channels and uses one of them to improve the image.
Another chapter shows a good trick for color-matching between individual photos in panoramas. I've already used this technique dozens of times. Other chapters add motion blur to a photo of a carriage, convert a color photo to black and white, and several other things.
The second half of the book takes an ordinary headshot and converts it to Frankenstein's monster one step at a time. The end result is awesome, and the various steps are clear and easy to follow.
An enclosed CD has the source images that were used, so you can follow along on your own. It also contains movies that illustrate the process.
This is an outstanding book for someone who prefers to learn by example rather than by descriptions of functionality.
A friend's daughter is the lead singer for the band EyeKnife. She's just barely 16, but she has an amazing voice and a lot of drive, and I think she has a lot of potential. I've been following the band around with a camera, trying to get great photos in dimly-lit clubs. Working with low light is an interesting challenge, both in shooting and in post-processing.
The band wanted a promo photo to send out with a press packet, so I started digging through my archives to see what I had.
I was really fond of CarolineCloseup (though not quite this glowing edit of it), but her dad vetoed that.
Several people were fond of this image, but it didn't really work well on its own-- it was flat and busy and just not all that impressive by itself. It was too low-contrast to really have enough punch, and I didn't think I could find enough drama to make it work by itself.
And finally, a lot of people liked this one, but I didn't think it did a very good job of showcasaing her-- the bass player in the backgkround was distracting, the equipment was distracting, and it just wasn't a very pleasing photo to look at. However, since it was taken with flash, it worked pretty well in color.
I went off to Photoshop, and spent a couple of hours pretending to be a wizard-- isolating and desaturating and burning and cropping and adding borders and, well, just mucking about to see what I could get. I'm pretty proud of the end result; as an 8x10 glossy, it's absolutely killer.
