dslrBlog » Photo Editing and Digital Workflow

Tips on Fashion Photography

DSLRBlog Editors — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:30:16 +0000

My most recent work has been focused on Fashion and Food. Fashion photography is relatively new to me, but several colleagues of mine use models regularly to support their portfolio work. After recently winning the local Frederick, MD Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk and reading his “Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It” book I was inspired to work on my portrait lighting. Because I love to mix things up and challenge myself by taking the lovely studio lighting out of the equation, I chose to see what I could do with the sun’s harsh light. It sounds strange, but I learn better this way. Take images in all types of lighting scenarios and play with exposure and aperture. You may want to try this approach to understand how best to find the light you want in your images.

I also didn’t have a model with experience or the patience for me to go through multiple lighting adjustments. Go figure. The image of my daughter with makeup was setup in window sunlight. No other light source was used on my model. I applied all the makeup (I am no makeup artist either, so had to have some fun with this one) and no digital manipulation of color was used. The photo was taken with a Nikon D90 in RAW. The settings included:

Exposure 0.004 sec (1/250)
Aperture f/8.0
Focal Length 105 mm
ISO Speed 200

The image was imported into Lightroom 3.6. I cropped the image in tight and added more exposure (+4) because I wanted the blown out white effect. From there, I softened the harsh light with an adjustment brush , reduced tint, and also added some minor saturation to the eye color and dramatically reduced temperature (original RAW had more skin warmth/yellow), then I did a lot of spot removal because some of the makeup didn’t blend into her skin well. Finally, I reduced the sharpness of her cheeks/nose a touch because I didn’t want to see pores or tiny hairs. Done. Give this a try with various models and makeup. YouTube has a plethora of videos on makeup application to give you some ideas. This process gave me great ideas for more fashion makeup shots using ambient as well as studio lighting.

As an amateur photographer of three years, Joelle Herman loves it all and typically spends a week to a month on a subject. She also finds that being a part of a local camera club (Frederick Camera Clique) helps in networking, learning and exploring your passion.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jneo/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/joelleherman
Google+: Joelle Herman Photography

Flickr Photo Editing Live

DSLRBlog Editors — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:58:06 +0000

Flickr has now launched the joint-venture photo-editing feature with Picnik. This allows you to do basic tweaks to the pics in your photo stream. While not Photoshop, the ability is welcome, particularly when you have uploaded your pics on the move, for example from your phone camera.

When you first hit the edit button you are asked to allow Picnik into your account.

After that the editing interface should load. On my Mac’s Firefox it doesn’t, boo! Luckily I also have Safari.

Strangely even in Safari I found I had to click through twice or more to actually get to edit. When it does work though it is a welcome addition!

More info at the Flickr Blog

The Future of Photography Technology at Stanford

DSLRBlog Editors — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:10:51 +0000

If you want to see where Photography Technology is headed, watch this (very long) video from the ScobleShow

Marc Levoy, Stanford University Professor, who is jointly appointed in computer science and electrical engineering. But that’s the geeky way of explaining this dude is doing some radical stuff with cameras. He shows us a camera that can refocus the image AFTER you shoot it! Talks about other research to stitch images together, digitize statues, among many others.

Some stuff you will have seen or heard before, but seeing it demonstrated and in context with all the other research is very very cool.

Personally I think the video could have had the same interesting content in half the length with some editing but if you have time, definitely take a look!

Added: It looks like the Podtech people heard us

Virgin Mobile Flickr Photo PR Disaster

DSLRBlog Editors — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:32:25 +0000

I just read this fascinating story over at Gillianic Tendencies

What it seems to have happened is that Virgin Mobile, or an advertising agency they hired, decided to save lotsa moola and attempt some good PR (backfiring, obviously) by using Flickr photos with Creative Commons licenses (specifically, the ones that allowed commercial use) in a recent ad campaign. Which, fine, is legal, though, perhaps, cheap-assed. What’s getting people especially crazy over this (and this doesn’t include me, thankfully) is that they’re using these photos without the models’ permissions

It seems some random person has spotted Gillians Flickr photo of a smashed car used on an advertisement. No problem there, it was CC licensed in a way that meant only attribution was necessary. Notification to these Flickr users would have been the polite thing, but ok it’s not a requirement.

The crazy thing though is there are people in these advertisements. Without model releases. Being insulted.

There is more coverage here and over at Flickr.

Tags: flickr, virgin, copyright, cc, license, pr, disaster

Vista Considered Harmful to Photographers

DSLRBlog Editors — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 21:50:20 +0000

What is it they always say, “Never use version 1″. Good advice, particularly when considering upgrading an operating system. I switched to Mac but I still need to have one foot in the Microsoft camp. It turns out Windows Vista Destroys Photo Metadata. This news doesn’t add any incentive to upgrade.

A bit of bad news about Vista if you’re a photographer. Apparently if you tag a photo’s metadata in Vista, it destroys other important metadata used by image editing apps such as Photoshop. Microsoft’s gotten reports of RAW files generated by Nikon cameras being unreadable after being tagged with Vista or Microsoft’s Photo Info tool.

Now before the anti-Microsoft crowd start foaming at the mouth or the pro-Microsoft guys lynch me, this is not all Microsofts fault. If only the camera manufacturers would produce a standardised format perhaps cockups like this wouldn’t happen?

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 Announced

DSLRBlog Editors — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 16:13:09 +0000

Photoshop Elements users might be interested to hear Adobe has upgraded their product. Not wanting to spend the kind of money required for the full CS package I bought Elements 4 and have been reasonably happy with it so far. I had to patch it up to be able to use layer masks in elements, after that it does everything I need I think. The new Elements 5 upgrade seems to be mostly consumer-oriented features as far as I can see, stuff like scrap book style layouts and mapping (as you might expect).

They have added some editing functionality, not sure of the detail as info is patchy right now at the Adobe Site

Make good photos great with superior editing tools. Fine-tune color, brightness, and exposure using new color curves adjustments; create rich black-and-white conversions; easily correct camera lens distortions; and sharpen blurred edges.

Personally I will be looking out for reviews before upgrading, and even then there will need to be something very compelling!

More Photoshop Elements 5 product info here and the press release is here.

Technorati Tags: adobe, photoshop, elements, elements5, photography, software, news

Layer Masks in Elements 4.0 – Adding Missing Essential Photoshop Tools to Elements

DSLRBlog Editors — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 14:59:31 +0000

When I first bought Elements it was after having used the full Photoshop package for a few years. I was assured by whoever I asked that the major features were present. And they are, to a point. It is only when you try to do something and search the help and nearly throw your mouse through the window that you realise that the few important missing bits are really important!

For example, there is only so long before you find yourself searching help on using layer masks in photoshop elements and find that it isn’t there!.

Search no longer! Get yourself over to Elements Tools

Follow the instructions and you will soon find several features missing in elements and wonder why Adobe dropped them when the package can clearly do it …

Technorati Tags: layer, masks, photoshop, elements, tips, photography, news

Future DSLR Camera Feature? – Digital Face Beautification

DSLRBlog Editors — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 12:23:53 +0000

This new software from Tel Aviv University in Israel aims to “beautify” photographs by subtly tweaking the subjects features to appear more pleasing. From the examples it seems to work too!

Digital Face Beautification

given a frontal photograph of a face (a portrait), our method automatically increases the predicted attractiveness rating of the face. The main challenge is to achieve this goal while introducing only minute, subtle modifications to the original image, such that the resulting “beautified” face maintains a strong, unmistakable similarity to the original

Can you imagine this built into photoshop, or even your camera? Of course this could be taken to extremes – point it at an old street hag and the result looks like a supermodel, heh.

Technorati Tags: photography, software, news

HDR Photography In NY Times

DSLRBlog Editors — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 10:38:31 +0000

You know the bandwagon is well and truly rolling when the traditional media pick up on it, check out the profile of Flickrite Kris Kros (Joe Dejesus) in the New York Times

H.D.R. is one of many digital darkroom techniques catching the fancy of amateur photographers. With the rising popularity of digital single-lens reflex cameras and more powerful personal computers has come a growing interest in visual experiments. At the same time, software makers like Adobe are increasingly automating many of those processes, including H.D.R. While they may not always be straightforward, tricky digital techniques no longer require months of experience or hours of study.

Fad or not, his pictures can be very very cool. It is well worth spending some time skimming through his photostream. Definitely deserves the attention.

Technorati Tags: hdr, photography, photoshop, tips

Photographer Ethics: Should the camera never lie?

DSLRBlog Editors — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:08:36 +0000

Two stories about Newspapers “doctoring” images, one laughable, the other more serious from The Digital Photography Weblog

the Charlotte Observer has sacked a staff photographer for altering the colour of an image to, as he states, “to restore the actual color of the sky”. He said the color was lost when he underexposed the photo to offset the glare of the sun.

OK this is plainly ridiculous, the “truth” of the story was restored by this superficial change, who cares what colour the sky was though really? So either way, an over reaction right? How about this one …

The Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper acknowledged Friday that it manipulated two photos to make it appear that two Cuban police officers were ignoring prostitutes gesturing to a tourist.

In this one the image was intentionally created to show a false impression of Police neglect of the prostitute problem. As far as I can tell this photographer was not sacked.

Technorati Tags: photography, news, law, ethics, media