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I was looking through the Chromasia tutorials again this evening and it got me playing along with some of his post processing. I’ve mentioned Davids stuff before, but it still amazes me how he ses the final photo from the original.

Anyway, a grab shot in Donegal from Christmas/New Year…

I fully accept black and white conversions aren’t everyones cup of tea. But to be honest, if you’re shooting in digital then any black and white is a conversion and it’s all down to the method you use to make the change.

I’d fully recommend the Chromasia tutorials. Some of it is way beyond me, but he’s very free with his time and a decent guy if you ask questions.

I’ve been quiet for the past few weeks. It’s been a combination of things really. MY camera time has been more about family and getting ready for Peoples Photography and in general I’ve been in that “you’ve been at this 2 years and you’ve only got this far?” slump I kind of half expected.

I say I expected it because I had the same feeling last year around this time. I kind of expect it again next year.

This year it only took one website to pull me out of the doldrums. Looking at the work of Chase Jarvis today just kicked me onto my arse and made me want to take photos again. I was struck dumb by the simple beauty of his site, the shots, the videos.

Take a look at his site and be inspired.

I’ll be away to break out the camera now.

I’m really going to have to pull my pennies together to get that Macro lens I mentioned. I can already see just how addictive taking that sort of picture could be.

(no exif information for you right now…)

One thing to note in this picture is that rather than make some tweaks in Lightroom myself to fix up contrast etc, I made use of a preset. Lightroom provides a number of “out of the box” presets which, while interesting, can be quite limited. However, there are a large number of presets available on the web (both charged for and free). these can have quite an effect on your image.

I’m not sure that using a preset isn’t some form of cardinal sin – after all every image should be treated as a new challenge and one size probably shouldn’t fit all. However, as a starting point (or if you like the effect), they can be really useful and give some impressive results.

One of the best preset selections I played with so far were referenced on ReallyJapans blog (kudos to him for sharing the find). You can find them here from the original author Kim Long (thanks to her for sharing them so generously).

I follow a number of different photoblogs and one thing amazes me in all of them is colour. I’ve no idea whether they’re using post processing techniques to tweak curves and saturation or whether they’re using filters on the camera, but whatever they do it always looks amazing.

A couple of great examples of this are Oswegan and ReallyJapan blogs. Whether its abstract stuff or cityscapes, these guys seem to always make the photo stand out.

Given the amount I’ve spent on camera gear in the last year, I’m not really in a position to buy a lot of filters, so I think my summers work will be learning how to make small tweaks in Lightroom/Photoshop/GIMP to improve the colours in the picture.

That’s right, as well as having to live with my blurred and poorly composed shots, you’ll now need to bear with me while I mess up the colour balance and intensity as well.

Seemed appropriate to look to higher powers for inspiration.

(f/7.1, 1/30sec, 55mm, ISO-200, 20/06/2008)

What I wanted was to make the sign feel vibrant against the leaves and tree. To make it draw your eye in whilst still being legible. What I ended up with, well the dirt on the sign looks like noise and the blue looks a little too electric, but I do quite like it.

Last year sometime I mentioned Chromasia as a good place to see amazing photographs.

Well, around the time I bought my camera, the folks at Chromasia started offering some photoshop tutorials for sale. I’ve been debating buying for a while and last week cracked.

They’re very comprehensive and easy to follow. The results speak for themselves when you look at their before and after pictures. Hopefully, some of the things I’ve been learning have started to appear in some of the recent pictures I’ve posted as well (certainly the foot steps picture was haveily influenced by some of the tutorials).

You can buy individual tutorials for about a fiver, annual subscriptions and lifetime subscriptions are £25 and £75 at the moment. To my mind they’re well worth a small investment.

There’s also a sample one available which looks at Tonal Range and Curves

You can find the tutorials below or by using the handy link I’ve added on the right menu.

Photoshop tutorials by chromasia

I came across a couple of different online image editors
recently, specifically Photoshop Express and Flauntr.

Both work via a web interface and seek to provide a
selection of simple tools for image manipulation and management. Now, before I
go any further – replacements for GIMP/Elements/CS3 they aren’t, but they maybe
fill a niche in the whole web portfolio sphere by allowing some tweaks here and
there. 

Essentially both sites offer free registration and a certain
amount of free web space (2GB for Photoshop, but no obvious limit mentioned for
Flauntr) to host pictures for editing. Both allow image uploading from hard
drive as well as imports from a range of photo hosting sites (including flickr
in Flauntr’s case and photobucket in Photoshops). Finally both offer the
ability to save your pictures back to your hard drive. It’s worth noting at this point Photoshop Express is restricted the the United States only, but there was nothing stopping me creating an account and pretending to live there (I’m a bad boy…)

So far they’re both pretty similar.
 

Photoshop Express

They’re both reasonably well equipped with a standard set of
tools (crop, rotation, resize) as well as with some more advanced stuff like sharpening
and highlights etc.

What sets them apart?

Well, based on a lunchtimes play, I’d say that Photoshop
Express is the easier product to use. The majority of features are on the left
hand side of the page and usually have handy previews above the image you’re
editing to show you what’s possible with the tool selected.

Express also offers some nice features, like the colour pop
tool above which reduces the image to black/white and your chosen colour and
what appears to be the clone/repair tool from it’s big brothers under the guise
of a touchup button.

Photoshop Express – Pop colour Tool

Flauntr approaches the usability question from a slightly
different angle, making use of a set of tabs to offer different functionality
in sensibly clustered blocks. The downside of this is that unless you know what
you’re looking for you have to spend a lot of time exploring to see what’s
possible. I’d suspect once you know what you’re doing it will all be so much
faster, but I could see this putting a new player off.

Flauntr also provides a pretty little tool called PicasR which allows you to
blend your photograph with the colour tones from some old masters paintings
resulting in some lovely effects. Here’s a few samples based on this picture.
 

Flauntr – Carnlough with Beachside Colours
using

Flauntr – Carnlough With Sunsetsea Colours

using
 

What sets Flauntr apart though, and what makes me think it’ll
be used by the web generation it’s aimed at is the addition of a couple of
simple tabs for social networking and mobile sites. Using these it’s painless
to take your photograph and sculpt it into something to use as your logo/screen
saver on LiveJournal/Bebo/WhereEverTheKidsPlayNow

So, what do I think?

Well, I reckon if you’re into the infernal complexities of
CS3 then this isn’t for you. However, if you enjoy playing with images or if
you want to be able to make small tweaks to existing pictures quickly without
needing to get too complicated then these are definitely appealing. If I had to
pick one, right now it would be Flauntr – in a world where it takes years to
get to grips with CS3, allowing 10 more minutes to learn Flauntr over Express
is not much of an ask.

(Since the web is immortal, it’s worth noting that Photoshop
Express was in Beta on build version 448357 and Flauntr was in Alpha with no
obvious build number).

I’ve done some playing around with HDR over the past few months, but if you want to see it done well, try looking at “Stuck in Customs” a photoblog by Trey Ratcliff.

Some of the pictures border on obscene they are so beautiful.

There is also a nice tutorial on HDR that’s worth a read.

I thought it was about time to mention a couple of other photoblogs I visit quite a lot.

Both are local (Belfast) based part time photographers with oodles more experience than me.

Darrell’s blog, WingedMonkey, has a lot of different shots on it, ranging from extreme macro to landscape. It’s well worth checking out.

Andrews blog, NothingToBeSaid, concentrates on people and uses mostly black and whit. He also uses some strange sort of camera that takes ‘film’ memory cards…

Check them out!

John mentioned durhamtownship to me last week during the photography thing and I finally got a decent chance to check it out last night. It’s a photo blog by Kathleen Connally recording the area she lives in.

When he said it was a fantastic example of a photo blog with some amazing pictures, he wasn’t understating the thing.

If you haven’t visited already, take a look at durhamtownship. It’s pretty bloody brilliant.

No pictures today (again!)

Instead I thought I’d mention this magazine (again!) and say that my first copy as a subscriber arrived last night. I’ve been buying this for the last few months and some of the articles are brilliant.

While hunting for my chosen toy and debating the whole passage of time, I bought a few different magazines. My responses to them ranged from “I wanna spend how much???” to “I just spent £4 on a book of adverts!”. A lot of magazines seemed obsessed with selling me thousand pound lenses and cameras rather than telling me what was in my price range. Little things in Digital SLR Photography like how to make your own reflectors and how to improvise filter mounts make it so much more accessible to people on a budget.

It was their review of the D40X against the 400D helped push me into Canon’s laps (mmmmm comfy), and it was their features of David Nightingale (Chromasia) and other fantastic photographers which makes me want to take better shots.

For those trying to learn the art, the fact the provide the exposure settings for a majority of their shots is superb (and it’s why I do it to).

My one complaint is that their website doesn’t live up to the quality of the magazine. 

If you’re looking for a magazine on Digital SLR Photography you can’t beat this. It does exactly what it says on the tin…erm cover.

Learning To Snap