Photos > General Photos
Photography/Photoshop tips and tricks?
the pope:
i really need to get the new photoshop.....
MayDay:
Obviously, buildings are one of the most common subjects on our forum. However, architectural photos taken with most point-and-shoot cameras end up with serious "keystoning", where the buildings appear wide at the bottom and narrow at the top to the point they look ready to topple over.
Here's a good example of keystoning:
Here's one of the easiest and most accurate fixes in Photoshop. You could use the Perspective tool under the Transform sub-menu but it's less accurate than this process:
For this demonstration, I'll use a photo of what else - the Pinnacle!
Select the Crop tool, and be sure to click "Front Image":
Start from the top left, click and drag to the bottom right of your pic:
Grab the left toggle and bring it towards the center - do the same with the right toggle. This takes practice to get a feel for how much is just right. Double-click and click "yes" when prompted to crop the image:
Be careful or you end up with "trumpeting" - the opposite of keystoning:
Now - the only thing is, the buildings are straighter but the image is a bit too "squat" from being cropped. Fix that by going to "Image Size" - click off the "Constrain Proportions". Add a little to the vertical measurement (another thing that takes practice) until you get the desired result:
And voila! :-)
Robert Pence:
--- Quote from: PigBoy on February 07, 2006, 02:57:39 PM ---Photoshop- The shadow/highlight tool is your new god! (Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight)
--- End quote ---
I second that.
There are a lot of situations where exposure can't be controlled for optimum results when taking a photo, especially on sunny winter days and in early mornings and late afternoons on clear summer days.
Shadow/Highlight is amazingly capable. Its abilities go beyond opening up over-dense shadow areas; it can pull down washed-out highlights, too, without over-darkening normal or shadow areas.
Be sure to click the "show more options" box. Then you can adjust the range of density ("tonal width") over which the exposure correction ("amount") takes effect. The halo or fringe that sometimes occurs along a boundary between a dark area and a lighter area can be managed with the "radius" setting.
Worshiping Shadow/Highlight is the real reason the knees wear out on my jeans :-D
PigBoy:
Thanks for the replies so far!
Rob, perhaps we should start a church? :-D
MayDay, thanks for that tutorial; I hadn't discovered that method. Sometimes I have used the Lens Correction filter to adjust things like that, although it often seems to require further adjustment with transform tools to get it right.
C-Dawg, I was hoping you'd pop in here since you're the main resident film guy. (Although I'm sure Rob has plenty of experience with his scanned Archives.) I think the importance of getting the picture right in the first place is much greater with film than digital; I find Photoshop adjustments much less effective on scanned photos, but then that might have to do with the scanning technology I have. Not that terrible digital photos can be saved, but there seems to be more room to improve them after the fact.
-----------------------
Is there anyone here who has mastered the art of blending layers for a kind of composite shot? It's something I've messed with, and I'll show you what I have done, but I don't really know what I'm doing and was wondering if anybody could teach this subject.
What may be my only example is this. A picture of Madison's "skyline" across the lake at night. The capitol dome is bright white and extremely well-lit, while the rest of the buildings... not so much. (Another good example would probably be including the moon in a night picture.)
So, a picture with the buildings decently exposed makes the capitol way too bright and without detail.
Without moving the camera, I take a picture in which the capitol is all right but everything else is too dark. (Shadow/Highlight does not seem very good for fixing a night shot like this.)
So I open both images in Photoshop, put the dark on one top of the bright one as a new layer and position in properly, then go to the blending options in the layer properties of this new layer.
Here's where I don't understand what I'm doing. The configuration shown seemed to give good results, but I don't really know what it means! Can anyone explain? I know that it made my "dark" layer blend with only the brightest parts of the other layer, but I don't quite understand those sliders.
Anyway, after doing that and making a couple routine adjustments, my result is this.
the pope:
thanks for the tip mayday. Honestly its something i don't pay much attention to, but now that i know how to fix it.......
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