Photo Extremist: Creative Photography Tutorials, Photoshop Tutorials, Instructional Videos

9Nov/097

How To Enhance Your Landscape Photographs To Be More Colorful In Adobe Camera RAW

Taking very vibrant, saturated, lush landscapes has never been easier when taking images in the RAW format. You can easily get perfect looking images in post processing when using Adobe Camera RAW, which is included with Photoshop.

When I say lush, I mean full and rich with colors. I'll show you a before and after example and then tell you the recipe:

The first picture is the original RAW, the 2nd is after post processing in A.C.R.

As you can see in the first photo, the sky was hazy, and what should be green is a desaturated stupid yellow color. It's really easy to fix this up

HSL/Grayscale tab. Hue subtab.

When you open your RAW in Adobe Camera Raw, click on the fourth tab labeled HSL/Grayscale and the default subtab of that should be set to Hue. Simply slide the Yellow slider to the right. This will turn the yellows into greens. Problem solved. In this particular example, however, there were yellow flowers as well. In order to not make those greens, I slid the green slider to the right. This simply made the greens greener and the yellows just green enough. If all you have in your photo is just a bunch of ugly dead yellow grass, then by all means, bump the yellow slider all the way up to +100.
If you want to make the skies darker, click the Luminance tab and slide the Blues and Aquas sliders to the left. Sometimes I like to bring one out to the left and the other one to the right, but in this particular example, I moved the blue to -64
To make things more colorful, click the middle tab that says Saturation. I bumped up the Greens to +67 and the yellows to +15, but all the values I've been mentioning must be applied to the specific photo you are editing.
To finish things off, I went back to the first called Basic and bumped the Saturation and Vibrance up to +10!

This method is better than using Photomatix to create High Dynamic Range (HDR) images, in my opinion (although the effect is different in nature to begin with, they are a but similar). I tried to make an HDR composite of this same image and it looked like crap compared to the one I made in A.C.R.

Here is a video tutorial I made on the subject as well:

Tagged as: adobe camera RAW, blue skies, colorful, colourful, enhance, garden, gardens, green, hdr, High Dynamic Range, hue, luminance, lush, photo, photography, photoshop, plants, saturation, vibrant, yellow 7 Comments

5Nov/0912

Multiplicity Photography Tutorial

In this article I'll explain how you can easily clone yourself with a camera and Photoshop. People call these "multiplicity photographs". When this technique is used in sports, it is known as "sequence photography". If you find this subject interesting, I would reccomend getting my Trick Photography and Special Effects eBook.

"Imagination" - I had my mom take these, every time I got into a new position I told her to take a new shot. It went by quick and easy. I replaced the sky with a more dramatic one and added birds. I also did some dodging and burning on the play structure.

OKAY. So, here is how you do it. Put your camera on a tripod and tighten it so it won't move. Focus your scene and then switch to Manual focus so that your camera won't constantly be trying to re-focus the scene. You can shoot in any mode you want to, but I would advise against Shutter Priority mode and just take the photos in full Manual mode or Aperture Priority mode. This insures that each frame will have a consistent exposure and your aperture locked in. After everything is in focus and you have your shutter speed and aperture set, take a picture of the scene with the model to the left of the frame. Then, take another picture of the model closer to the right of the frame. Keep taking pictures with the model's body in different areas of the frame.

You can get a friend to help you take each picture, use a remote, or use the self timer feature on your camera. If your friend is pushing down the shutter button on the camera, make sure they are careful on keeping the camera perfectly in place and not to accidentally bump into it.

Now once you have all your photos taken, you need to import them into Photoshop. Click File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack.... Then just select your images and wait a minute for them to compile.

Once it's done you should see all your pictures in the Layers window. Select the top layer and click New Layer Mask (it's located at the bottom of the layers window) Next, take a black brush and brush over the person in that frame. The person will seem to be erased, but to un-erase it, hit CTRL+I, (cmd+I if you are on a Mac). You can now see the person in the first frame, as well as the one in the second frame! Make a layer mask like that for all the frames and then your done! You can also do this with objects and animals, and skateboarders, etc.

There is also a piece of software that can automate this entire process for you called Aqiplicity. I tried using it once, but the results were not perfect. It's worth giving it a try though. You can view your image in the free version but the saving option is disabled. It's $10 for the full version.

This image was very easy to create because none of the people were overlapping each other. This made it very easy to mask the model without tediously going into fine detail

If you would like to see some spectacular examples using this photography technique, take a look at the 20 Stunning Examples of Multiplicity Photography!

Tagged as: clone, copy, how to, layer mask, multiplicity, multiplicity photos, people, photography, photoshop, tutorial 12 Comments

3Oct/090

Distort Faces in CS4 by using Content Aware Scale

You can easily use photo manipulation to make very trippy, surreal, drugged out, distorted faces. All you have to do is open your image up and select the face using the standard Rectangle Marquee tool. Then, go to Edit > Content-Aware Scale. Grab one of the points on the edge the selection and move it around. I like to shrink the face together rather than expand it, but feel free to experiment. The higher the resolution your original image is, the better quality it will be.

If you want to protect certain areas of your image (areas that will not be scaled) simply go to the Channels tab and create a new channel (Alpha 1). Then use a white brush to fill in the areas you want to protect. After you've done that, select your image using the Rectangle Marquee tool and then click Edit > Content Aware Scale in the menu.

Now, Below the main menu at the top there will be a toolbar, at the right of the toolbar there is a drop down box that is labeled "Protect:". Select Alpha 1, and then scale your image like normal. Keep in mind that none of the images on here were scaled using the Protect function.