Trillium
Photographic
Club
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Useful Links |
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Members Sites |
| Rino Masaro |
| Bob Walling |
Revised 03/22/08
- If you have a Tip send it to trilliumph@trilliumphotoclub.org
Current Tips:
- Blending Modes
- Calibration Images
- Colour Management presentation by Christopher Wade
- Creating a Vignette
- Diminishing Depth of Field
- Electronic (Digital) Imaging Tips
- Electronic Image Resizing Guidelines
- How to Prepare Images For the Members Gallery
- Producing an Inkjet Print
- Scale
- Snow
- Improving Skies in Photoshop
- Creating a Digital Orton
- Producing an Inkjet Print (Click here to view.)
An Adobe Acrobat tutorial showing five steps to managing the colour of an inkjet print.
Step 1 - Setting a Default Colour Profile
Step 2 - Calibrate your Monitor and Install Calibrated profile.
Step 3 - Obtain profiles for your printer and/or papers used.
Step 4 - Installing Generic Profiles
Step 5 - Printing
- Colour Management presentation by Christopher Wade of PIXEL PLACE, (www.pixelplace.ca.)
Clicking on "Colour Management" downloads a ZIP file. Unzip it to a new folder on your hard drive. Windows Users: - Open the folder and click on PPTVIEW.EXE. Select Colour Management.pps from the open dialog box when prompted.
Mac Users: - You may view the presentation only if you have PowerPoint. Just run Colour Management.pps. with PowerPoint.
- How to Prepare Images For the Members' Gallery
- Complete digital editing of your image.
- Resize the image to approximately 4 in. by 6 in. if vertical or 6 in. by 4 in. if horizontal and a resolution of approximately 100 to 150 dpi.
This should give an image of approximately 640 by 480 pixels.
Check the image information to verify these dimensions.- Save the image as a JPEG type image. Adjust the compression to produce an image no larger than 100 K. This will insure adequate image resolution on a web site and at the same time keep download time to a practical minimum.
- Submit your images as an email attachment, to trilliumphotoclub@sympatico.ca.
- Diminishing Depth of Field or Selective Focus (Print this item and practice the exercise)
This tip courtesy "The Photo Dimensions Work Book" by Courtney Milne
You don't need special equipment to accomplish selective focus, though telephoto and macro lenses are particularly suited to the technique. The purpose of this exercise is to produce three types of selective focus: soft foreground, soft background, and both soft with a sharp midground. Selective focus is a valuable technique for creating mood and establishing what is sharp as a dominant shape. The two key factors are exposing at a large aperture, and achieving the right proportion of distances.
a) Soft Foreground: The closer you get to the foreground, focusing at some distance, the softer it will appear. Move the camera right up until it touches an overhanging branch of leaves. The softest effects are achieved by reducing the foregroundtocamera distance and increasing the background distance. Always expose at large lens openings to produce shallow depth of field, the larger the opening the better. The further away from the point of focus you can keep outoffocus material, the softer it will appear.
b) Soft Background: Focus as close as your lens will allow and move up until the foreground is sharp in the viewfinder. Select scenes and angles that provide relatively great distances between foreground and background. The further the distance, the easier it will be to render the background out of focus.
c) Both soft with Sharp Midground: Try a foreground almost touching the lens, a midground at one or two meters, and a background at least a hundred meters away. Focus on the midground. At the largest lens opening, both foreground and background material can be purposely blurred. Record what you do and relate your notes to the resulting images.
NOTES
Date _________
Place ____________________
Frame # 1 2 3 4 5 6
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- Snow
During a snowstorm is one of the best times to reach for the camera. Familiar landscapes are transformed and people are having fun. Using a few simple techniques, you can ensure that your photographs do justice to the snowscape.
The light meter in your camera judges your exposure as though everything should be gray, and as a result, it will give you shutter speed and aperture settings that limit the amount of light coming into the photograph. This turns the snow gray in photographs, rather than the glistening white you want to capture. You can account for this by exposing your picture one "stop" brighter than what your light meter recommends: Set your aperture one number lower, use a shutter speed that is twice as long or set your camera one film speed lower. The brighter it is, the more you will have to adjust the exposure. If you are looking towards the sun you may have to over/expose a full two stops.
A limitation of snow photography is that cold temperatures will suck power from your batteries, causing camera problems. Keep an extra set of batteries with you and keep the camera close to your body for warmth. Also, keep condensation in mind when entering a warm building after being in the cold. This can fog your lens and pull moisture into your camera. It is probably a good idea to keep your camera in its bag until it warms up in the new climate.
Choose colorful subjects when shooting in the snow, in order to bring life and contrast to the photograph. A child in a red snowsuit is always a good choice. It is easier to achieve silhouette photographs in snow, because you can set you camera to expose correctly for the bright snow, which will under/expose a back/lit subject. Similarly, exposing properly for your subject can over/expose the background, putting them in the middle of a surreal white scene. If your camera has an exposure lock feature, an easy way to set you camera's exposure is to get close enough to your subject or the snow that they fill the whole viewfinder. Use the light meter or automatic exposure control to set the exposure, then set the exposure lock and back up to take the picture.
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- Scale
Do you like taking pictures of landscapes, wilderness, or architectural scenes? If so, you'll want to find ways of including objects in your photos that give them a sense of scale. For instance, if you're taking a picture of a giant waterfall, including a person or animal somewhere in the shot instantly gives viewers an understanding of how big it is. Conversely, sometimes it's fun to leave out any objects that establish scale to make things look bigger. Shooting from a low angle can help accomplish this as well and give your subject the feel of towering high overhead.
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- Electronic (Digital ) Imaging Tips
- Click Here for notes on "Electronic Clinics Colour Management"
- Click Here for a copy of notes on "What Is a Digital Image"
(Adobe Acrobat Reader Required.)These images are downloadable as JPEG files, 1024 by 768 pixels in size
Click on chart thumbnail image for full page view.
- Click
here to download a set of the Calibration Images.
(All three images are contained within a ZIP file.)
Preferred image size for clinics:
Horizontal - 1024 pixels on the long side.
Vertical - 768 pixels on the height.For best results - save the original image file as a tif, then resize the tif file.
Save the resized image as a jpg file type at best quality. This should result in
files in excess of 300 KB. This file size will ensure the best quality. Lesser
sizes will be accepted, but quality may suffer. Files of over 1000 KB cannot
be accepted. Never resize a jpg file.
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Photoshop Users: -
1. Go to the Image menu and enter as
follows:
2.
Go to the File menu and enter as
follows:
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Paint Shop Pro Users: -
1.
Go to the Image menu and enter as
follows:
2. Go to the File menu and enter as
follows:
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Corel PhotoPaint Users: -
1. Go to the Image menu and enter as
follows:
2. Go to the File menu and enter as
follows:
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Creating a Vignette (Courtesy of WWW.Graphics.com Photoshop Tips)
One of the simplest and most classic edge effects is the vignette. This is when we take a picture and soften the edges as we fade it out. In this case we will be fading to white to help achieve a heavenly effect. There are several methods of creating this effect. The following method will not damage the original image, and it will allow flexibility later -on. To follow along, download the angel.tif image and begin with the image open in Photoshop.
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Choose the elliptical Marquee tool from the toolbar. Make a selection around the portion of the image that you want to add the edge to. If you hold down the Spacebar while drawing the selection, it will enable you to reposition the selection while drawing. |
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Choose Select > Feather from the main menu. Enter a setting in pixels. This will determine the softness of the selection. |
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Currently the main part of the image is selected, we want to just select the portions that we want to fill with white. Choose Select > Inverse to swap the selection. Create a new layer and fill with white as shown at left. Deselect. Creating the new layer protects the original image, and all the effects will be performed on a separate layer. This is a good way to work whenever possible. |
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Another advantage of creating the effect on a new layer is the capability to make modifications. To make the feather softer, simply apply a Gaussian blur by selecting Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
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The image at left shows the final image with the Vignette effect. Try the same technique with a black vignette and a rectangular selection to draw the viewer's eye into the center of the photo. Reduce the opacity of the black to 10-20% for a classic Lens Vignette effect. |
You might not know his name, but you've almost certainly seen photos influenced by a technique he pioneered for film photography. I'm talking about Michael Orton, the creative force behind a breathtakingly gorgeous style. Here's his process, in a nutshell: Take two photos of the same scene (one in focus and the other out of focus, both somewhat overexposed) and combine them. The result is a photograph with a beautiful almost eerie glow.
Here's the rub: I only had a single shot to make that image, so I used a digital shortcut. It took me about a minute to do it, using Corel's Paint Shop Pro--though you can use almost any image editing program. I'll show you how.
Layer Your Photos
Let's start with any photo, for example this photo of autumn colour:
Open the photo in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop and duplicate it in a second layer by choosing Layers, Duplicate from the menu bar. You won't see a difference in the photo itself, but you should see a second layer appear in the Layer Palette on the right side of the screen. (If the Layer Palette isn't visible, toggle it on by choosing View, Palettes, Layers.)
Next, make a second duplicate layer in the same way. You should now see three
layers in the palette. To keep them all straight, right-click the first layer
(the one called "Copy of Background") and choose Rename, then type in
Sharp
and press Enter. Then rename "Copy (2) of Background" to "Blurry."
Overexpose Your Shot
Next, we'll simulate overexposing the photo. Click on Sharp in the Layers Palette and change the blending mode from the default of Normal to Screen. You can find the blending mode in the Layers Palette menu, right above the three layers. Again, you won't see a difference, because you just screened the middle layer. Then right-click Sharp and choose Merge, Merge Down. The Sharp layer will disappear, having just been merged into the original background layer.
Add the Blur
Now it's time to make the top layer blurry. Click the layer you named Blurry to select it, then choose Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur. The amount of blur is controlled by the Radius setting and will depend upon the size of the photo. For a fairly small file, try a setting around 9. If you're working with a larger image, say 6 megapixels, I'd start around 14 or 15. The key is to add a significant amount of blur without completely obscuring the detail.
The final step? With Blurry still selected, change the blend mode from Normal to Multiply. You should get Something like this:
Feel free to experiment with alternative blur levels and blending modes. You might also want to vary the opacity of the top layer to fine-tune the effect.