In this video I will show you my full workflow of how I deal with complex backlit cityscape photos. I am editing photo that contains 3 levels of depth: city at the back, bridge half way between the city and the camera, and a view deck with people just in front of me. In addition the photo is backlit during sunset hours. I will be dealing with ghosting, manual digital blending from a few exposures, removing unwanted objects with clone stamp tool and healing brush, using some content aware fill, too. I will be changing colours and saturating the photo selectively, using pen tool, and other selection tools. I will also work in Lightroom and Photoshop together, and finish it all off with some filters from Topaz and Nik (current Google software). Video tutorial on how to digitally blend images in photoshop - full workflow with many great tips Buy fine art photo prints at my store on SmugMug. Photography workshops in Tokyo - click for more details. In this photoshop tutorial I will show you how to use channels in order to make very complex selections that would be impossible to accomplish with other photoshop tools, like magic wand, quick select, quick mask, pen tool, or even special plugins, like Topaz ReMask. Each of photoshop selection making tools has its use, and it is good to know which one to use in what circumstances. Channels are perfect for making complicated selections of areas where colour contrast is quite substantial, though there is a way of combining channel selections via calculations menu in photoshop, but this is a subject for next video tutorial. I will use channels to select sky in photoshop, and separate it from the trees, and rooftops. Enjoy! Contrast of tones and colours is often an overlooked step in post processing, but in certain photos, like night photography, contrast makes a HUGE difference in the final appearance of the shot. I usually apply contrast twice or three times during post processing, and in this video I am showing you my final touches in regards to contrast.in this video, I am using curves selectively, which means that I am limiting the tonal range of curves level adjustment layer effect. Curves are an extremely powerful tool, and a photo can be actually accomplished by exclusive use of curve layers, so it is really important to master this and include them in your post processing workflow. I use curves for contrast, tones, colour correction, cross processing, and so on. Here is part 2 of my in-depth tutorial on how to create realistic HDR photos. In part 1 I mainly used Photomatix and then I made a few simple adjustments in photoshop. Part 2 focuses mainly on my workflow in photoshop, though I also add a few adjustments in lightroom. Part 2 is mainly about contrast and colour adjustments, then manual blending of certain areas of the photo from other exposures, adding a few filters from Topaz Labs and Nik software, and then blending those effects with the photo layers in photoshop. Last part of this video is about perspective correction. Part 1 and 2 together are a full on in-depth HDR photo tutorial, so if you are into HDR photography, I hope you find them helpful. Enjoy! This is part 1 of two video series on creating realistic HDR images in HDR software and photoshop. Although I am using HDR Efex Pro 2 as much as I use Photomatix, this video is about the latter, and then part two focuses on adjusting details in photoshop. I have a separate video on digital blending, which is a fully manual process used for creating HDR photos, and ou can watch it on my Youtube channel. HDR is great for creating amazing phoptos when your camera cannot capture the entire dynamic range of the light that is present in the scene that you captured. Blending a few exposures is then essential to be able to bring all the details back. Whenever you lift your camera to your eyes and think of taking a photo you should already know which direction you want to go with it artistically speaking. When I press the shutter, I have a complete vision of the final shot. I usually know exactly what I want to do with it in postproduction, whether it will be an HDR image, or a straight forward editing in photoshop, I can see those final touches in the RAW file before I apply them. Having a vision is crucial in any type of art. Night photography is fantastic for this, as you need to take your time. Use the tripod to slow things even more. Compose, align, feel the scene, read the light, dive in the shadows, and live the scene. This video tutorial discusses my thought flow reasoning behind taking photos, and then the editing process. Incidentally, if you want to watch a detailed tutorial on digital blending, then watch this movie here. This short photoshop video tutorial is about adjusting and tuning your Adobe Camera Raw for best performance and results. I will show you which colour profile to pick, what resolution you should set and which bit range to work in. Also, the second part of this tutorial is about synchronising and saving settings and image adjustments, so that you can use them with other images, or apply the same settings to any image at any time in the future, without the necessity of guessing and redoing the entire process from scratch. For more free photoshop tutorials and photography tips, subscribe to my YouTube channel. Removal of colour cast or luminosity shift is often necessary, especially when a photo underwent a few steps of editing, and had a few filters, levels, curves, or other changed applied to it. Whether you stack photoshop effects or adding textures to your photo, at some point you will run into an issue that the photo becomes too saturated or too bright, has too much contrast, etc. That is when the technique shown in this photoshop video tutorial comes in handy. It is an easy trick that can be applied to any photo, at any stage between two layers in photoshop, via layer blend modes. In this tutorial I will show you my full workflow and how I created this image of a night scene in central Tokyo, that I took yesterday. The video shows not only what I do but also why I do it. Digital blending is a very powerful though time consuming technique, then again, if you want to bring your photo editing to another level, the best shortcut is no shortcut at all. Digital blending is a fully manual process, where an HDR photo is created from scratch, by masking and blending a few exposures in photoshop, or any other program that allows it. All of my HDR photos are manually blended to some extent, even if I am using HDR Efex pro 2 or Photomatix to creat the HDR image base. I find that digital blending give the best and most realistic results, though as I said, it can take time and requires patience, even though the technique itself is not that complicated. Final photo in full HD can be viewed here. This video is a bit long (approximately 45min. long) but the aim was to show not only my full workflow, but also how i think and perceive the image changed throughout the whole process of photo editing in photoshop. The bonus information are all the tips that I give you on portraiture photography, and additional hints of postprocessing, that go outside the subject of this tutorial. The pace of the video is not fast, and I did not want to rush it on purpose, so it is easy to follow for anyone who starts in photography. Photo editing techniques are quite basic as well, and I also introduce you to some photoshop plugins, which I am using all the time, in nearly every photo. The trick to using the photoshop plugins like Topaz or Google software (former Nik software), is to know how to tweak the presets, and how to stack the filter effects. For more free photoshop tutorials please visit my Youtube channel. Recently I finished gathering all the audio equipment for creating video tutorials. Absolutely love that new toys. Anyways, today, while I was waiting for one of my photoshop tutorials to be uploaded to Youtube, I grabbed the telephoto lens, one flash with a rogue grid, radio flash controller, my Manfrotto magic arm, and shot a few photos of the mic. Then I brought the images into photoshop and created this photo. It is a monochrome blend of 4 images, shot at different exposures, one light source. Hope you enjoy the game of light and shadows!
Learn more about creating artistic black and white photos, by watching my photoshop tutorial. Here is my next composite photo manipulation created from a boudoir shot of a Japanese model Asuka that I shot last week. If you want to learn more about composite photography, see this article and video tutorial here. Composite photography can be lots of fun so if you have photoshop, go ahead and have some photo manipulation fun. It is a great way to learn composition, light, colour management, and photoshop tools.
Composite photography is one of the most creative types of this amazing visual art. It allows for manipulating not just one photo but putting many photos together. It is a great way not only to learn composition of a photo, developing one's artistic skills, but also mastery of the photoshop tools. In this tutorial I am using a background photo and another complex composite shot of a Japanese model, which I converted into a cyborg or an android sci fi vision. Just so you know, both photos were shot by me in Tokyo, so this makes it even more cybertron-like. Anyways, I hope that this tutorial will help you guys with creating better composite images. This is the eights photo of the recent Chinese calligraphy body art photo shoot series, with a Japanese model Asuka. Here, I decided to go heavier down the vintage path, by maintaining the some contrast between shadows and highlights, but at the same time I smoothed the tones and selectively blurred the edges of the photo. I really like the final result, hope you guys enjoy it as well! It looked quite nice crossed processed in a motion picture style (blue shadows / orange-ish highlights), but black and white is much more classe and allows for the eyes to focus on the writing, rather than the whole scene. Clone stamp tool is one of the most powerful tools in photoshop, and I am sure you all use it quite often during photo retouching. Personally, I use the clone stamp tool a lot when I edit my urban shots or architecture shots, where the patterns are geometrical and precise. In such cases the use of content aware based tools is usually not the best idea. But most of the architecture shots will involve a perspective, meaning, that objects that are further away will appear smaller than those closer to us. So, if you use a clone stamp tool as it is in photoshop tool menu, then when you sample a given area, no matter where you stamp it on the canvas, the size of that sampled area will not change. In other words, the sampled area close to the camera, will match the same pattern positioned further from the camera. In this video I will show you how to use the clone stamp tool in conjunction with the vanishing point filter in photoshop, and teach you how you can clone stamp in perspective. For more photoshop tutorials and photo editing tips and tricks, please visit my YouTube channel. Pixelation and pixel bending can be quite annoying and ruin visually the most amazing photos. Issues with pixels appear either when the editing was pushed far enough to damage pixels, or tonal transitions in the photo range from very dark to very bright tones, and vice versa. There are a few ways of dealing with pixelations, and I discuss all the methods that I use in this video tutorial. I show there a few tricks that you can easily apply in photoshop during post processing, or even saving the final file. I also talk about DeNoise plugin from Topaz Labs, which is a phenomenal piece of software, and I use it for noise reduction and dealing with pixelation and pixel bending. For more photoshop tutorials and photo editing tips and tricks, please visit my YouTube channel. Here is another photo from this week Chinese calligraphy body art session with a Japanese model Asuka. I had a general idea to create something delicate and sensual with this photo and I decided to merge the light tone vignette with the new blur tools in photoshop CC. There are many changes in the new photoshop version, and I highly recommend you to play around with them. The blur filters menu was expanded and new features appeared. I was trying out the new field blur, which has quite a few different options, and then masking it out with layer masks. By combining it with a bright, sort of misty vignette, it gave a very dreamy look to this photo.
Black and white photography is timeless. Its simplicity and beauty, which is based only on 256 tones, is unsurpassed. However, it is not an easy task to create a good black and white photo. In order to do so, one has to think and see in black and white before the shot is taken. Certain colours, such as green, red, brown, or blue, will distinguish themselves in a colour photo, but once converted to black and white the visual difference between them may be dramatically reduced, causing the whole scene to look bland and boring. The key to a good black and white photography is knowing how to manipulate with light and dark tones and the contrast between them. Post processing of a black and white photo may take much longer, and may require much more precision than one would normally need for a colour photo. Why? Watch this video and find out. I have finished my next android photoshop manipulation. I just love making those. I think I need to start hunting for models just for my new cyborg ideas? Girls in Tokyo area - please contact me if interested.
Talking about cyborgs, I would like to recommend you guys a website created by Mpaolo Almeida, a photoshop artist from Brazil. This guys is really talented and has amazing ideas for his photo manipulations. On top of this he is a really down to earth guy. Have a look at his site, www.tutoriaisphotoshop.info, and his youtube channel. He is also selling tutorials on various types of photo manipulation, including cyborgs, steampunk, fantasy and dark art. Although the tuts are in Portuguese, his photoshop is in English, and it is quite easy to follow his moves, as long as you know photoshop at least to a certain degree. Mpaolo speak English, so you can look him up on FB and ask about the tutorials. I actually have a few of them myself, and they are really very very helpful indeed. Today, I published my next video tutorial. In this episode I will show you how you can bring your night photography editing to another level by masking beautiful bokeh of night cityscape lights onto the original image. For more tutorials visit my Youtube channel. You will find there photoshop tips and tricks, HDR photography tutorials, photography techniques related tutorials In this next episode of my photography tips and tricks and photoshop tutorials I will explain not only how to recognise camera dust in post processing, but also talk about how the dust gets into your camera, how to reduce the dust spots on your photo by adjusting aperture, and show you many photoshop tools that can be used to deal with it during retouching, including removal of camera dust from complex textures, such as architecture. If you are interested in my other photoshop tutorials or HDR photography tutorials, please visit my YouTube channel. Here is another video tutorial on photoshop and lightroom techniques. In this episode I will guide you through a process of retouching eyes, from basic clean up, through increasing the brightness of the irises, adding or enhancing catch lights, accentuating eyebrows and eyelashes, and even on how to use the liquify tool. This is a second part to my other video on skin retouching, which can be found here. Here is my next tutorials on photoshop tips and tricks, and in this episode I talk about my techniques for skin smoothing and how do I deal with skin tone transitions from dark to bright. I am discussing the frequency separation skin retouching, which is a non destructive way of working on a photo, meaning that you do not change the pixels on the actual photo, but the entire work is done on separate layers in photoshop. In this tutorials I work with various tools, which should give you a good starting idea on how to retouch your portraits, or boudoir photography, or any photos with people as your subject. Many thanks to Jamosa Ladiva, who was modelling for me during that photo shoot, and kindly agreed for me to use her photo in the tutorial. My other tutorials are available on my YouTube channel. My new photo editing tutorial on how to transform the mood in your photo into a steampunk coolness. In this video I am working on a photo that I published in my article on Japan in Photography, which you can find here. Also, check out my other video tutorials. I have launched a new menu on my website, titled "photography tutorials", where I will be posting my youtube channel videos on photography techniques, and image post processing. I plan to cover many various subjects in my videos, though my main focus will stay with HDR image capturing and post processing, as well as the photo processing software, such as HDR efex pro 2, photomatix, photoshop, lightroom, topaz and nik software products, and so on. You will find there both short and long video tutorial for beginners, intermediate and advanced levels. In the future I also might venture into photo manipulation, composite photography and digital art. You can find all my videos on youtube channel, this site here, or my google+ account. Suggestions, ideas, and requests are more than welcome! For cool daily photos from Japan, visit my blog at www.japan-in-photography.com! |
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AuthorPonte Ryuurui (品天龍涙) Archives
August 2020
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