Have you ever had a problem getting the crop marquee to stay where you want it. Especially if you are only cropping a small portion and the marquee is near the edge of the frame. You drag out the marquee and it snaps back to the edge of the frame. The reason for this behavior is that, by default, Snap is enabled and Document Bounds is selected. (Located in the View menu shown on the left. View > Snap.) To permanently disable that behavior you can click either Snap or Snap To > Document Bounds to remove the check mark and disable the feature.
But a faster way to work is to temporarily disable snapping by simply holding down the Control key while dragging the crop boundary. This will allow more accurate placement of the outline when placement of the crop is critical. So when you are trying to place the crop marquee near the edge of the frame and it jumps back to the edge; holding down Control and then dragging will enable you to place the bounding exactly where you want it and it will stay there. Give it a try.
Last week I posted an image of a Union Solder’s Coat. This is an updated version of that image.
I did two more things in Nik Silver Effects Pro for this update. The first was to add a control point to add contrast and slightly darken to the bottom of the solder’s jacket. This accentuated the folds in the coat and created more depth.
The other was to add a bit of a vignette. Besides the usual framing to draw the viewers eye into the subject, the vignette added to the chiaroscuro-the visual interplay of highlight and shadow to make the coats the focal point of the image. Read the rest of this entry »
Anyone who has taken any of my image editing classes knows I’m a strong proponent of nondestructive editing in Photoshop. And I’m always surprised by the number of experienced Photoshop users that don’t know it’s possible to do a nondestructive crop. So I thought I would do a post to show how simple it is.
First off, some basics. In the default Photoshop workspace the Tools panel is a vertical bar on the left. This bar hold all the tools, including the Crop Tool. And across the top of the workspace, just below the menu bar, is the Options Bar. Every tool has a unique Options bar that lets you set various options to determine how the tool will behave. And the Crop Tool is a little unique in that it’s Option Bar changes after a crop outline is made. Here is what the Crop Tool’s Option Bar looks like when the tool is selected but before a corp outline is made:
And here is what it looks like after a crop outline is made:
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Since I’m on a B&W kick I thought I would post another monochrome image. This is another shot processed with Silver Effects Pro.
This was shot last week at Fort Delaware, which is on Pea Patch Island in the middle of the Delaware River off of Delaware City. It was originally built to protect the entrance to Philadelphia. As evidenced by the number of large gun emplacements. Even though the fort was used to house POWs in WW II it is most noted for it’s use to house POWs during the Civil War. This scene is a recreation of a union solder’s coat and a woman’s coat (his wife?) hagging next to the door. The scene is lit with available light through the open door.
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I’m not big on Photoshop plug-ins. Most of the time they “simplify” things you can already do in Photoshop but at the expense of control.
When I work on an image I start by evaluating the image and deciding where it is I want to take it; that is, what do I want to “say” with the image. After I figure out where I want to take the image then I think about how best to accomplish that in Photoshop. So I’m not big on opening up a filter or a plug-in and then clicking around to see what happens. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I never click and/or drag on a setting to see what will happen–especially when learning to use a new tool. Read the rest of this entry »
This image is a composite of two different interpretations of the same raw file. One with a cool White Balance to enhance the blues and greens in the sky and foreground grass. The other version is a warm White Balance to enhance the coat of the horse. I outlined the technique for Double Processing a Single Raw File in yesterdays post.
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Sometimes processing raw files is a compromise. For example when adjusting the exposure to make the sky look its best results in the foreground being too dark. There are things that can be done during capture to mitigate the problem. Use of a Graduated Neutral Density filter will darken a sky relative to the foreground exposure. Or taking an exposure bracket sequence and process as an Exposure Blend or as a HDR. But what if we didn’t do these things and the dynamic range is just to too great to have detail in both the highlights and the shadows from a single file? One solution is to take advantage of the “hidden” dynamic range of a raw file and to process that raw capture twice, once for the highlights and again for the shadows, and to then blend the resulting files in Photoshop.
As with most things in Photoshop there are a number of ways to accomplish this. Here is one way that is efficient, relatively quick, and straight froward. Smart Objects are at the heart of this technique. Yesterday I did a post on Smart Objects. So if you haven’t read it, now might be a good time to take a look at it.
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I started to do a How-to post that shows a technique to Double Process a Single Raw File inside a Photoshop document. Since the technique relies heavily on the use of Smart Objects I thought it would be helpful to explain a little about Smart Objects first.
In Photoshop a Smart Object is a layer that contains a copy of the original referenced Photoshop or Illustrator file. (And yes it does make you file size a little larger but IMHO that a small price for the huge benefits.) From a practical point of view this means that you can edit the version of the file in the Smart Object nondestructively by opening the file in it’s application. For example, if you bring a raw file into Photoshop as a Smart Object, you can re-open the file in ACR and make edits to it. When you do this the original version of the file is not modified. Only the version within your Photoshop document, the Smart Object, is edited. That means that the preview for the raw file in either Bridge or Lightroom will remain unchanged because the edits are not applied to this version of the file. The Smart Object version of the file is independent of the original file. Read the rest of this entry »
