Free Wallpaper Images

Just posted a bunch of wallpaper images that I'm providing free of charge to anyone who wants them. There are several different sizes available so you can pick the ones closest to you monitor resolution. Enjoy...

Ultrawide-Field Retinal Imaging

OK, first, I didn't take this picture. But it is a picture of me, so I think it counts as a valid post on my blog. I went to the optometrist a few days ago and they offer to take digital photos of my retinas (for a fee of course). I said sure as long as I can get a copy of the images. They said sure. So that was that. I paid my $35 and my eye doctor emailed me the images within a few hours. The image above is of my left retina. The doctor said all looks good. My eyelashes can be seen at the bottom and the flap at the top is part of the camera apparatus (not a detached retina!). If you want you eyes photographed like this, just call around and find an optometrist that has the Optomap System.

Summer in Black & White

I just posted a new gallery with a series of black and white images that I created over one weekend. The images are from my backyard and from the Tualatin National Wildlife Refuge. All the black and white conversions were done using the new B&W Styler plugin from www.thepluginsite.com. These are the same folks that brought us FocalBlade. I've been very happy with the B&W Styler plugin. And for those of you who'd like to try creating your own filters for Photoshop. I beleive that both of the plugins were create using FilterMeister. FilterMeister is a very complete system for building PS plugins that doesn't require extensive programming knowledge and expensive development tools. The documentation is excellent as well.

Photographing Models

OK, not really, but here's a neat technique to make your photos looks like photos of models (not the people kind of model...think model railroads...) Above is a very quick sample I threw together (in about 5 minutes). Here is a link to a tutorial on the technique from Christopher Phin across the pond in the U.K.

Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 for Windows

I finally got around to trying the beta release of Adobe's Lightroom application for Windows. I've only played with it for about 20 minutes (before it crashed on me). But what I did see I liked...so far. I'm excited to see how the Pixmantec technology gets incoprated in the final 1.0 release now that Adobe has acquired them (and RAW Shooter Premium has been discontinued). The beta release is definitely not quite ready for prime time and I definitely won't be relying on it for the time being, but it shows good promise from a workflow standpoint.

I'm finally back to blogging!

It's been a long time since the last post. Back about the time of my last post I decided to quit my day job and move to a new small startup company. That company has been keeping me very busy. I was still doing a couple weddings and portrait sessions when I could but I didn't have a lot of time left over for working on the website and writing posts. Well...that's all changed again. The new company has to suspend operations for a while to work out some funding issues. I'm looking for a new job in the meantime and getting back into this blog and the website. Wouldn't it be great if I could find a job that combined both digital photography and software engineering. I'm looking...

Another visit to Horseshoe Bend, Arizona

You may remember my post a while back about Autopano Pro and the Horseshoe Bend panorama that I stitched with the demo version. I was planning on buying it when release because at the time PTGui crashed when trying to do the same stitch. The latest version of PTGui, version 5.7, was release in December. This latest version finally fixed the bug that was preventing me from stitching my 88 image panorama of Horseshoe Bend, Arizona. The small image above hardly does the image justice. My buddy Bill Anderson pointed me to Zoomify (requires flash) as a cool way to explore very large images on the web. I have Zoomified this panorama. It can be view here. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags:panorama, zoomify, ptgui, horseshoe bend

Flat Panel Monitors

I really try not to get involved in flat panel monitor debates. I have a unique perspective on that business. In my other job, when i'm not taking pictures, I write embedded software for flat panel monitors, plasmas, and projectors for a display processing fabless semiconductor company. It's really amazing what you can gleem from watching customers design, build, test (or not) display products. One thing is for sure, cost almost always comes before quality (especially in the sub $3K market). Another is that manufactureres will change the internal design about twice a year, sometimes without any external indicators (like a new model number). Many companies are just now discovering the science of colorimetry. That being said...

I'd buy a 30" Dell if I could justify the expense just because it's big and bright (but I don't know about it's colorimetery). Same for the nice, but smaller, Eizo's (which has excellent colorimetry,but is very $$$$). But I can't. I use an HP2335 23" WS panel and a Dell 21" monitor. They work fine for me. I think some people put way too much energy into panel choices. Mine certainly are not "professional" monitors, and since I'm not working with production houses that demand absolute color accuracy, it's not a real concern to me. I've never had a client complain about color accuracy in any photographic product that I've produced. Photography, for me, is not about absolute accuracy. As long as my panels closely match my prints, I'm happy. Photography is about realizing a vision. And that vision is rarely dependent on absolute color accuracy. There is certainly a need for that kind of accuracy, and if I ever need it, I'll consider spending several thousand dollars to get it. Right now, I don't. I'm also very excited to see LED backlight based panels come down in price. These promise to deliver very bright extremely wide color gamuts that can very simply be tuned to precise color temperture targets without requiring the use of a LUT. My guess, though, is that the price point won't come down for another two years.

Most 17" and larger panels made today are quite good (but that won't stop people from voicing very strong opinions to the contrary). Just Don't buy the cheapest one you can find.

Photoshop JavaScript & Watermarking

Come explore one of the best methods for automating workflow in Photoshop. This new article shows how I used JavaScript to write a very simple automatic watermarking tool that works on any image.

I've just posted this new article to the articles section of my website that gives a basic introduction to Photoshop JavaScript. The script that I use in the article is one I use to create watermarks on my proof images. Photoshop JavaScript opens up a whole world of options that are not possible when simply recording actions.

Technorati Tags: photoshop, photoshop workflow, photoshop javascript, photoshop automation, watermark

I sense another computer upgrade coming!

It was just brought to my attention that the RAID-5 controller on my motherboard uses a software based solution. This means that the controller uses the main CPU to compute the parity information that RAID-5 uses to ensure the data integrity. This affects the read and write performance of the RAID-5 array. Since I wanted my workstation to be a high performance system, I'm going to have to look into a dedicated hardware RAID-5 controller. I found this web review of RAID-5 controllers at Tom's Hardware.

I thinking about one of the solutions from 3Ware. This 4 channel version can be had at NewEgg for about $320 and seems to earn good customer reviews. An 8 channel version adds another $120 to the price but would allow me to fill out the chassis hard drive bays completely by adding one more drive to the RAID-5 array (but that's really is approaching overkill, even for me).

The DAM book and the LAB book

I just received to new books from Amazon.

First is The DAM Book by Peter Krogh: This book is all about Digital Asset Management (DAM). DAM is absolutely essential for the professional photographer and quite handy for the prolific non-pro. But setting up an efficient DAM system isn't trivial. My DAM solution is a little ad-hoc right now. This book has been highly recommended around the net and I'm hoping it will help me get a bit more organized when it comes to cataloging, tagging, and finding both RAW files and working files.

The second is the LAB book: It's called Photoshop LAB Color - The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace by Dan Margulis. Quite a title. This is a very interesting and challenging book. My professional history, for the last 7 years, has been in video systems where YUV (as opposed to RGB) is the transport of choice. Photoshop LAB space is very similar to YUV in that the image channels consist of a single luminance chanel and two color difference channels. This book shows and explains in great detail why working in this space can enable photoediting processes that are very difficult or impossible in RGB or CMYK space. A very worthwhile read, you'll definitely learn a new trick or two. I'm working my way through it slowly because there is a lot of information to digest. It looks very promising.

I'll post more on these as I learn an apply the knowledge...

Getting the most from Photoshop CS2

The folks at ExtremeTech have just published an article called Optimizing Photoshop CS2 Performace. This article contains a wealth of information on tuning PS/CS2 for peak performance on your computer. Thanks to Bill Anderson for pointing me to this article.

Technorati Tags: photoshop, optimizing, performance

Photoshop Workstation RAID-5 Upgrade Complete

I just completed an upgrade to my data drive from 2x320GB RAID-0 to 4x320GB RAID-5. RAID-5 offers increased performance (over a single drive) and data security. If one drive fails all the data can be recovered. This adds a lot of piece-of-mind. The RAID-5 array performance isn't as high as pure RAID-0, but the data security is worth the trade off. Details of the upgrade, installation, and configuration have been incorporated into my Workstation Article.

Technorati Tags: RAID, Photoshop, Workstation, Build PC

Creating A Toned Color Photograph

I just published a new tutorial in my articles section. This tutorial shows a method I use to create a toned color photograph in Photoshop. The image above has a sepia toned base but some of the color from the original photograph has been retained. This tutorial walks you through the process step-by-step and also includes several examples of different photographs to which I've applied the effect. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: photoshop tutorial

Top 5 Essential Photoshop Plugins

I've been using Photoshop regularly for about 6 years now. I've tried a great many plugins in that time, most I don't care for, some I like, and a few have become essential to my photographic work. Here is my list of essential plugins today:

1. Photokit Sharpener (for it's excellent sharpening workflow)
2. Neat Image Pro + (top notch noise reduction)
3. Fred Miranda's BW Workflow Pro (easy and flexible BW and Toned Images)
4. Adobe Camera RAW
5. Dr. Brown's Image Processor (excellent for batch resizing images)

The last two "plugins", of course, are now part of the Photoshop CS2 distribution. These plugins really do improve my workflow efficiency.

Technorati Tags: photoshop plugins photography

First Upgrade for the Workstation

Although my Photoshop Workstation is only about 5 months old I'm already doing my first upgrade. Right now I have two 320Gb HDDs in a RAID-0 configuration. This array serves as my working drive where I keep a copy of all my current RAW files and all the working files generate from the RAWs. I've had no problems with it, but, since RAID-0 isn't fail safe, I decided to reconfigure the array as a RAID-5 array with two additional 320GB HDDs. This will provide 960GB of fail-safe high speed storage.

My MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum motherboard has 8 SATA channels divided between the NVIDIA controller and a Silicon Image controller. Only the Silicon Image controller will support RAID-5. Fortunately, when I originally built the system I put the 320GB drives on the Silicon Image controller, adding two more won't be difficult.

I'll be updating the workstation article once I get the new drives installed.

Technorati Tags: photoshop, motherboard, raid5, photography, workstation

Free Photoshop Plugin - Deep Paint 2.0

RightHemisphere, it appears has released their now discountinued program Deep Paint as a free download. It seem the company is going to concentrate on 3D modelling now. Anyway Deep Paint 2.0 is a standalone program and a Photoshop plugin that lets us accomplish painting effects much like Corel Painter IX.

Apparently it has been available for a while, but I never knew about it until just yesterday. It can be downloaded from www.download.com. Just search for Deep Paint. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but I'll post some samples soon. I already use Painter IX so I'm not sure if Deep Paint will earn a permanent spot in my toolbox. Only time, and experience, will tell. But...it's free so it's worth mentioning here.

Technorati Tags: photoshop, painting, plugin, free software

Hummingbirds in flight

Last week while visiting family in southern California I spent some time photographing hummingbird that were congregating around the feeders at the house. I've created a gallery of hummingbird photos to share. I'm not an ornithologist so I'm not sure what species are represented in the collection, but they sure are fun to try to catch with the camera lens.

The basic setup was my Canon 1DMk2 with the 70-200/2.8L IS lens attached as well as the 550EX flash. This was mounted on my tripod (because I was standing in position for a long time). Since I wanted to use very fast shutter speeds I put the flash into high speed sync mode. I shot in manual mode so that I could control the background exposure seperately from the birds. The camera lens was about 4 to 6 feet from the hovering hummers, very close to the minimum focusing distance.

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: photography, birds, nature

New articles posted!

I just posted two new articles on the site. The first one, titled Software Tools for Photographers, is an inventory of the software tools I use on my Photoshop workstation. The second one, titled Photographic Toolbox, is an inventory of the photographic equipment I use. Both articles are living documents that I will continue to update as my toolboxes evolve. The aim in both cases is to provide some insight into why I chose the tools that I did in hopes that it will help other photographers make better decisions about their tools.

Technorati Tags: software, photography, photo equipment

Workspace Lighting

There is a lot of discussion on the web about calibrating one's monitor and printer, but the subject of workspace lighting is generally neglected. But workspace lighting can have a significant effect on the perception of color both on screen and especially in print. I've written a new article describing the research I've done and the results of getting proper lighting in my workspace. Its called Lighting Your Workspace.

Fourth of July in Paris

This is another case of a great image sitting on my hard drive waiting for several months to be discovered. Last July my wife and I were in France for work and vacation. I captured this image shortly after sunset on the fourth. Not many fireworks that night, but it sure was a beautiful evening to be out walking on the Seine. The image is a stiched panorama of three exposures. I used PTGui to assemble it. Other than some nominal sharpening, it is essentially unretouched from what the camera captured. Click on the image to see a larger version. Some other pictures from France can be viewed here. Enjoy...

Technorati Tags: paris, france, photography, notre dame, cityscape

The Business Website

The business side website has been coming along slowly. This weekend finally saw a flurry of activity. Most of the latin filler text has been replaced with english text that is actually pertinent to my photography business.

I've also discovered the Simple Viewer flash slide show application and have integrated it into several parts of the web site. The Wedding Gallery, General Gallery, and Fine Arts Gallery all use this player. Eventually I will use it for all sample galleries.

I'm still not sure about the final solution for client proffing/sharing galleries. Right now I use pbase for that purpose, but I'd like to have it all integrated on my site and server.

Until next time check out the business website...

Autopano Pro

Autopano Pro is a soon to be released panorama stitching program. It is available in demo form right now from the Autopano website. I just downloaded the demo version and tried it out on a set of 88 6.3MP images that I've been trying to stitch together for about 9 months without sucess. Autopano did it (almost completely) automatically. It was able to sort and position all 88 frames in about 3 minutes. I spent another two minutes fine tuning the horizon and center point. Then the program spent exactly one hour stitching the final image on my newly built high performance Photoshop workstation. The final image was 24800 x 9800 pixels, 506MB. I am very impressed and will be buying a license for it as soon as it goes on sale. Price is listed as 99 euro, so maybe a little over $100. Well worth it.

The demo version watermarks the image although in the sample above you can hardly tell since it has been downsized to about 0.03% of the original image size. That's right, the original image is 2812 times as big.

Seeing Beyond The Capture

The image you get out of your camera isn't always very reflective of what you remember seeing when you took the exposure. Maybe you're frustrated because you see all these great images posted on various websites while your's seem the remain boring and flat. It's not your fault. This new article talks about seeing beyond the initial exposure and finding the hidden treasures that lie within. In the article I walk through all the steps in making the image above showing the techniques I used with roll over images each step of the way. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: photoshop, tutorial, photography, vision

Building a High performance Photoshop Workstation

I built myself a new high performance Photoshop workstation a few months ago. The system has been very stable and has been a pleasure to use. This article details the adventure of the build. I wrote it to help out anyone who's thinking about building their own workstation for image processing and editing. Finding information about building PC's is simple if you want to build a high end gaming machine. Information about building PC's for other purposes is less common. I hope you find it useful.

Dogs in the Studio

Tonight we got the dogs in the studio. They behaved beautifully, much better than I expected. Studio setup consisted of two strobes, one 45 deg camera left, one 45 deg camera right. Strobes were elevated 45 deg above the models. Lighting ratio was approximately 1:2. Background is black mulsin. Taken with Canon 24-70/2.8L at 32mm f/11. Enjoy...



Technorati Tags: photography, dogs, studio, portrait

Photoshop Tip: Changing Brush Size

Use the square bracket keys on the keyboard to rapidly adjust the brush size up and down. When the brush is larger than 10 pixels each keypress will change the brush size by 10 pixels. Less than 10 pixels...each keypress adjusts the size by 1 pixel. This is much faster than using the mouse and doesn't force you to remove your focus from the work at hand.

Eyes that Entrance

The eyes define a person. They are windows into that person's soul. The eyes are one of, if not the single most, important parts of a portrait photograph. It is the first feature noticed. It is also one place where a little post-processing can really make a portrait shine. I've just posted an article in my Articles section on how I create entrancing eyes in portrait photographs. The techniques I use maintain the soul and identity of the subject while turning the eyes into magical windows. You can find the article here.

Changing the background canvas color in Photoshop

When I'm working in Photoshop I really like to work in the full screen modes. What I don't like is the default gray color used in the background canvas. It's too light for me. I prefer a much darker canvas color. Fortunately, selecting a new color for the canvas is pretty simple, albeit not obvious. There are two full screen modes and the canvas color can be set independantly for each mode. Go into the first full screen mode (by hitting the 'f' key). Select the color you'd like to use for the background canvas (I use #202020). Select the paint bucket tool, then shift-click in the canvas area. Shazam! new canvas color. Hit the 'f' key again to enter the next full screen mode and repeat.

Sharpening Tools

I've purchased and tried a lot of sharpening tools over the last few years. Most of them have left me wanting for one thing or the other. One of the most important drawbacks for me is that almost all sharpening tools execute in a destructiove fashion. That is, they are not applied in a seperate layer. Some of them even insist on flattening a image first before they can be applied.

This all changed when Photokit Sharpener was released. I won't go into a full blown review of the sharpener because there are already some excellent ones posted on the net at The Luminous Landscape, The Computer Darkroom, and at Outback Photo. The user manual that comes with the plug-in is very thorough, walking you through the complete sharpening workflow from capture sharpening, through creative sharpening, to output sharpening.

I will note, however, that I still use plain old unsharp mask from time to time, mostly when batch processing proof images. Unsharp mask is by far the fastest, but when I want the best results I turn to Photokit.

I highly recommend this sharpening plug-in. It's not cheap at $99, but you are getting a seriously professional level tool for your money. You will not be dissapointed with the results.

If there is one thing to watch out for, it is that, since Photokit Sharpener does all of it's work on layers, you can end up with a lot of layers and this can consume large amounts of RAM. The more RAM you have available the better. If you are working on a particularly large image it is a good idea to close all other non-necessary open files in Photoshop.

Book: Portrait Photography - The Art Of Seeing Light

This is the second book to go on my recommended books list. Portrait Photography - The Art Of Seeing Light, like the Master Guide I recomended in my previous post, takes on the subject of lighting for portraits. But, unlike The Master Guide, this book deals a lot more with portrait photography outside of the studio where both natural light and flash can be combined to acheive the vision. Each chapter discusses a different lighting technique and has plenty of examples of how to apply it in practice. This book definitely teaches a particular style which may or may not be a style that interests you, however, the general lighting theory and the numerous examples will give you plenty of food for thought.

Remeber that no book will make you a better photographer. They can help enlighten you to new techniques, clarify technical details, and provide good reference material. So absorb the information in the books. Don't treat it as gospel. Use this knowledge; practice; take a lot of pictures; trying new things; critiquing your work; think about your lighting; these will make you a better photographer.

Recommended Books

I've added a new section on the right hand side bar called Recommended Books. I'll be adding books to this list that I've found useful and worth the price I paid. The first book is the Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers by Christopher Grey. I've mentioned this book in a few posts before. It is an excellent book for anyone interested in pursuing studio photography. The author takes the reader through many lighting situations and portrait types and very clearly explains his thought processes as he examines early exposures, critiques his work, and adjusts the lighting to finally acheive the results he had envisioned. It receives a 5-star review at Amazon.

The book isn't really focused on running a studio with a minimum investment though. The author assumes you are serious and assumes you'll be able to purchase the proper equipment. On the other hand, he also points out where you can save money by making your own equipment easily.

Wacom Intuos3 Graphics Tablets

I have, for some time, been using a Wacom Intuos3 6x8 Tablet for all my work inside Photoshop. This tool is indespensible for me now. Once I used the pressure sensitive pen with the tools in Photoshop I knew that I could never go back to using a plain old mouse. I'm still discovering new ways to take advantage of the tablet in Photoshop. And now I've discovered Corel Painter IX. Another great graphics application that benifits immensely from the Wacom tablets. I use Painter IX to do painterly adaptations of my photographs. The multiple axis control of the Wacom pens make simulating paint brushes much more realistic.

I use a dual monitor setup on my workstation. One of the monitors is a 23" widescreen. With my current 6x8 tablet mapped to the entire desktop, I'm only using the top half of the tablet. The screen shot below is from the Wacom Table Configuration Applet clearly showing how a single tablet is not ideal for a dual monitor setup.

Wacom is very flexiable in how you can configure the system. I could set it up so that the entire desktop is mapped to the entire table, but I would loose the horizontal and vertical proportionality. I can also set it up so that the table is only mapped to a portion of the desktop. However, this doesn't really work for me. I like to have complete access to the desktop and to have proportional control. Well, it looks like there is a solution...

Wacom has just announce the worlds first widescreen tablet. It is the Intuos3 6x11 Widescreen Tablet. As soon as I saw this, I emailed the folks at Wacom to find out if I could attach two tablets to my workstation, and map each one to it's own monitor. They got back to me very quickly with an "affirmative". I can't wait. It's very hard for me not to just order it up, but I'm under spousal order to not buy any more toys until Christmas...

Adorable Kids, Beautilful Adults

Last night I offered to take some pictures of a friend of mine's children. They have twin 4 year olds, brother and sister, and a 1 year old son. It was an experience like no other. I do not have children yet and, in hindsight, it became very clear that I had no idea what to do or how to handle the situation. I have no experience shooting children except candids of nieces and nephews. What did I learn last night? Children have an attention span of less than 1/4 second when positioned in front of a camera. I also understand all the advice that I've read that recommends removing the parents from the studio during the shooting. With all five people in the small studio it was udder chaos. I took 326 exposures and I think I got 2 or 3 worth printing. Fortunately, parents being parents, they liked a lot more than the 2 or 3 that I did. I've got a lot to learn about shooting children.

But, truth be told, I really do prefer the shoot adults. Not because they are more patient and take direction better. Kids are absolutely adorable and make great pictures. But I'm coming the see that every adult person's face has a story to tell (and not just the pretty models). Every adult face is worth photographing because they are all beautiful in their own way.

Creating a Photoshop Action

The easiest way to automate repetitive tasks in Photoshop is to create an action. In this post I'm going to guide you through the creation of a simple action. This tutorial is very basic and aimed at Photoshop beginners. The action, however, is very useful to any level of Photoshop user.

We are going to create an action that will mimic the color saturation effect of Fuji Velvia film. Our action will apply the effect on an adjustment layer, leaving the original image data unchanged. Since the effect is on it's own layer, we will be able to adjust the intensity of the effect at anytime.

Ok, lets get started:

Open up a nice image in Photoshop. I'm going to use this one:

Step 1: Create The Action

Open the Actions Palette. If you don't already have it open, go to the Window menu and select Actions. Now let's create a new action. At the bottom of the Action Palette is a row of buttons. It will look like this:

The New Action button is hilighted. Press this button now. A dialog box will pop up and prompt you for some information about the actions. For this action we just need to give it a name. I suggest: Velvia Adj Layer Type in the name and press the record button. The round record button will turn red to indicate that an action is being recorded.

Step 2: Record The Action

Now Photoshop is recording you every move. Anything you do that will be remembered. Now we will go through the steps to create the velvia effect.

On the Layer menu, select New Adjustment Layer, then select Channel Mixer...

A dialog box will pop up prompting you to enter a name for the layer. Call it Velvia Mixer and press the OK button. Now the Channel Mixer dialog box pops up. This is where the real work is done.

To create the velvia effect we need to change the source channel mixing values for each of the red, green, and blue channels. When the mixer dialog first opens it should be on the red channel with all the sliders set to 0%. Change the slider to be Red=120%, Green=-10%, Blue=-10%. The Channel Mixer should look like this:

Next, select the output channel drop down box and select the green channel. All the sliders reset themselves to 0%. Change them to Red=-10%, Green=120%, Blue=-10%.

Next, select the output channel drop down box and select the blue channel. All the sliders reset themselves to 0%. Change them to Red=-10%, Green=-10%, Blue=120%.

Notice that for each channel the sum of the slider values always equals 100%

We're done with this dialog box. Hit the OK button to commit our changes. Now the image probably looks a little too saturated. Most images will not need this much effect. To address this, we're going to change the layer opacity to 50%, thus cutting the strength of the effect in half.

Find the Layer Palette. If it's not visible, go to the Window menu and select Layers. Your layer palette should look similar to this:

Click on the little right-arrow next to the Opacity box, then drag the slider until it reads 50%. Alternately, just type 50% into the box. Now the image should look a little less saturated, but still more so than the original.

The action purposely applies a lot of effect (120%) so that we can easily adjust it up or down after the action has been run. If you feel like the image needs more than the default 50% just adjust the layer opacity toward 100%. If, on the other hand, we configured the channel mixer to only do half of the effect, we'd have to go back into the channel mixer again and make changes to all 9 of the slider controls to boost the effect higher. Using the layer opacity saves a lot of work.

Step 3: Stop Recording

This is a very important step. Don't forget to do this or you will be recording everything else you do until you quit Photoshop. On the bottom of the action palette is a little square stop button:

Press this button to stop recording the action. We're done. The action has been created. Now we can apply this effect to another image by simply opening the image, selecting the Velvia Adj Layer action in the action palette, and hitting the play button (next to the record button).

The adjust the strength of the effect, simply select the Velvia Mixer layer in the layer palette and change the layer opacity. Setting the opacity to 0% is the same as disabling the effect, turning off the layer visibility, or deleting the layer. Setting to 100% will give you the full strength of the effect. If you want even more strength, just run the action again to create another layer.

For my image I decided that I like the full strength effect so I change the layer opacity back to 100%. Here is the before (one the left) and the after (on the right).

Your new Velvia Adj Layer action is saved automatically by Photoshop so it will still be there the next time your run the application.

Be careful when applying this effect to photographs of people. The saturation boost does not always look good on people's skin. It can make them look sunburned. You can use the action, but learn how to use the layer mask to limit the action to only the non-skin parts of the image. That's another tutorial...

Actions can save you an enormous amount of time processing photos.
I hope you have found this helpful.

Technorati Tags: photoshop, tutorial, action, velvia

Controlling The Exposure

When working with external strobes the exposure must be fully manually controlled. Most shooters who are making the jump from on camera flash systems to off camera flash systems have never really thought about doing flash photography in manual mode. With the advanced state of TTL flash systems these days, it's not any mystery why. It's so easy to let the camera do all the work.

Using studio strobes (or off camera flash) is a whole different ball game. The camera can no longer control the power emitted by the flash head. The TTL system is no longer connected to the flash units. You as the photographer need control everything. Most high quality studio strobes have at least some manual control over the flash power. Many units have continuously variable controls.

The fact that the exposure is now under manual control also necessitates the need for a hand help light meter (unless of course you have extremely well calibrate eyes). The light meter will be able to tell you exactly how much power your flash units are emitting and what aperture you'll need to expose that flash power correctly.

There is no way I'm going to cover this in enough detail in a blog post. Many books have been written on it and people have spent years mastering studio lighting. The best book I've read is the Master Lighting Guide (mentioned in my previous post). But there are two key points that will significantly shorten the initial learning curve.

First: Shutter speed controls the amount of ambient light that will contribute to the final exposure. Since the camera is in manual mode, you can set the shutter speed to what ever you want as long as it is at slower then the maximum flash sync speed of the camera. On the Canon 1D Mk2 this is 1/250 second. Using a wireless trigger system may require using a slightly slower speed. Regardless of the shutter speed you select the flash light will be completely exposed.

Second: Aperture controls the amount of flash light that will be exposed. As long as the shutter speed is at or below the max sync speed, the shutter will be open for the entire duration of the flash (which is usually less and 1/2500 of a second). So, changing the aperture is the only way to control the strobe light reaching the sensor/film plane.

Since aperture also controls the depth of field in an exposure. Selecting flash power and aperture also controls DOF. If you use lots of power, you'll need a smaller aperture and thus get more DOF. On the other hand, using less power will require a larger aperture and thus less DOF. First you decide how much DOF you want in the exposure (this will determine the final aperture), then go about setting the flash power to get the requisite aperture. For instance, say you want a DOF for the shot that require f/8. Using your light meter, adjust the key light and fill light flash power until you get enough power to expose at the selected aperture.

On my light meter (a Sekonic 558R), when measuring the light for the flash exposure, the meter will tell me the ratio of ambient light to flash light in the scene. If I adjust the shutter speed on the meter, the ratio is updated in real time. A very handy feature. The Sekonic L-358 also does this. By changing the shutter speed while leaving the aperture set you can control the ratio of ambient to flash. In much studio lighting the ambient light does not contribute significantly to the exposure.

I hope this help clear up some of the initial mystery to exposing an image when using external flash units.