What are some good forums for talking about editing photos in Photoshop or GIMP? Where do you talk about such things?
EDIT: Other than here, of course.
Completely agree with jrista, but assuming you meant "other than this cool place", I like dgrin's "Finishing School" subforum.
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I am trying to do a Photoshop tutorial, seems easy, but I can't understand one phrase: `First, I add a curves layer and create a slanted S. What does slanted S mean? Maybe I should "write" S in curves editor? Thanx.
P.S. The tutorial is big, and you can use Ctrl+F to find an occurence of this words in the text.
I just don't understand the meaning of "Slanted S". It's just my assumption that it means draw an S-shaped curve.
Use 2 points to create an 'S' shape in the curves editor.
See: http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/curves/images/basic_s_curve.jpg
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I have a photo that I would like to post process to add a rain effect. Can anybody explain how I would go about adding the effect or suggest a good tutorial?
Ideally I would be able to use my existing software (Photoshop Elements 8).
A good place to start: http://www.pxleyes.com/tutorials/photoshop/category/rain/
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What are good resources (tutorials/books/videos/etc) for a beginning photographer?
Keep in mind that this is for a beginning photographer, who has recently moved from a point-and-shoot to an entry-level DSLR, and is interested in digging deeper into photography in general.
Examples of good topics for the resources to cover:
Try http://kelbytv.com/ for some great video tutorials.
also Photography Basics to understand the fundamentals.
I will link to similar questions on this site that have some resources as well
Should be enough in these resources:
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I would like to know if there any good online resources for indoor product photography ?
Preferably with a Table Top setup.
Im looking for commercial grade product photography tutorials/resources.
I would like to add that I already own a Tabletop setup. It includes 3 Lights, a Cube box where the product is placed etc. I would be using a Nikon D90 camera.
The book Light Science and Magic is just about the best resource on product photography for beginners. It's about lighting in general but it's written by a product photographer and most of the material and importantly the examples relates to indoor small product photography (there's a bit on portraits later on).
It's very easy to read yet in covers the vast majority of product shoots you're likely to come across, starting from basic principals (inverse square law, hard and soft light, specular and diffuse reflections) and then goes through each type of material (metal, glass, etc.) in turn, including a section on troubleshooting and emergency techniques for really difficult subjects.
The second edition is available on Google books so you can get a taste:
If you've got a spare $30 I'd highly recommend picking up a hard copy of the third edition.
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We just upgraded to a DSLR (a Canon T2i Rebel) Since I am used to a point-and-shoot, I have no idea what settings mean what and how to use them. What are some good resources for learning how to shoot photos with a DSLR? It would be nice if the articles/books were written specifically for people going from a point-and-shoot to a DSLR.
John Greengo's course in creativeLIVE is fantastic for beginners. It will teach you the fundamentals of photography (with bias toward DSLR cameras) - from camera control to image composition. It is long (a few hours of watch) but excellent and thorough.
The same instructor also gave intro courses for specific cameras:
Canon T2i
Nikon D3100
Canon 60D
Nikon D7000
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I recently purchased Nikon D7000 and would like to learn how to use it properly and want to learn photography using it. Can anyone suggest good online tutorials which I can look at or any DVDs which I can purchase?
Try out this website from Nikon. It contains an interactive digital tutorial on how to use the D7000. It should be helpful in learning about your new camera.
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Inspired by the question here by sebastian.b, and the response to the subsequent meta question. I would like to ask how to achieve a specific photo effect.
There may be more photographers that pull this off, but I know of two specific ones. The first is the wonderful photographer, Dave Hill. I know that he does lots of post processing, and his talent goes beyond a short list of tips that I can learn from a website, but I think there is something that I can hope to understand.
What is the Dave Hill effect? I have heard people talk about it, but what is it actually and how does one achieve it?
and
On his webpage, the "Nerd ad", "Allen Robinson", and "Jon Heder" shots give the subjects a specific skin tone/saturation. In general, his portrait shots are amazing. The detail and texture mystifies me. How can I pull this eerie feeling off?
Now the second photographer is skylove from flikr. His shots are also extremely impressive.
Again, he is using some black magic to make skin tone amazing. His subjects look beyond real, and I love it. Three specific examples are energy, discovering, king to defeat. Looking at energy, beyond the absolutely phenomenal idea for the shot and execution, and just focusing on the subject, he has this plaster/grey look, and his skin looks wonderful. Similar things are true for those other shots I linked.
Some ideas I have had that might contribute to this are HDR or possibly just phenomenal lighting setups. I have watched the videos on Dave Hill's website, but they just make me think more-so that he sold his soul to Mephistopheles.
I would appreciate any suggestions on how to achieve these results, or even some direction to go in this direction.
Thanks so much!
Most people seem to think it's all done in 'shop but a lot of work goes into the actual setup. Many of the supposed "Dave Hill look" imitations have just used HDR style tonemapping, and the results are nothing like the work of Dave Hill. Compare this:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=dave%20hill%20look&w=all
with this:
No simlarity at all! Yes there is a lot of post production in Dave's work, but you need to get close with the lighting in order to get the same look. Here is an example, showing what is possible with lighting alone. The first image is straight out of camera:
...the second image is the final image after Photoshop, mostly saturation, contrast and a little high pass filter in an overlay blending layer. I should have pointed out I didn't set out to get the Dave Hill look, I just wanted to play around and see what worked with the subject (the singer in a Ska band). I could have done more in post to get slightly closer to Dave's images.
The key to the look sculpted light. This means large lightsources at oblique angles to the subject. I used two square softboxes right up close and a bare hotshoe strobe for the hair light. Here's how the lights were placed:
The softboxes were brought in really close to maximise the softness of the light, and angled toward the camera to increase the sculpting effect and falloff nicely across the face. Two "gobos" were used to stop flare interfering with the picture (the black lines in the diagram) which is absolutely essential when angling the strobes toward the camera! The hairlight at the back was bare (i.e. no modifier) to really penetrate Aaron's hair and make it glow. As less power is required for an unmodified light I substituted a hotshoe flash for the big monolight.
You can replicate this look on the cheap with a couple of hotshoe flashes but softboxes are important. Something like an umbrellabox is a good option if you're using small battery flashes. You just don't get the same effect with umbrellas as they spill too much light out the sides, and are in general harder to fine tune as you don't get a crisp edge to the light. The curved profile of the umbrella also makes it hard to get close. Getting close basically makes your softboxes bigger. Dave would have used huge octoboxes further away to give the model more space but he gets paid more than I do ;)
edit you can actually see Dave's setups in his behind the scenes videos (which I've just noticed you mentioned in your question!). And yup there's some big octoboxes! http://www.davehillphoto.com/bts/
Here's another example of the same look in a group shot I did for the band Asking Alexandria. This one required a bit more post production (as lighting groups is much harder) so I'll take it step by step to show you what sort of post production you can do to push the look to it's limits.
As before lighting is still very important. I used a very similar setup to the previous example but with the softboxes much more symmetrical. The models stood in a triangle pattern so the light hits everybody. The hairlight is also much higher this time as we're lighting the top of the head, not shining through anyone's hair (which would have required three hairlights in this example). You can see the lightstand for the hair light in the straight out of camera shot, behind the guy on the left.
Here's the image after Raw conversion in Adobe Camera Raw, where I added a little of the clarity slider, brought up the black point and used a lot of the fill light slider. I wasn't going for any specific look, just to get an image with detail and a good tonal range to work with. The background clutter has been removed by a manual selection. Also note I've made the image taller by adding more black. I planned to do this so I shot the original very tightly cropped to make the most of my megapixels (I didn't do this with Aaron as some of the shots we took involved a lot of movement).
Here I've faded a little of the ground into the image with a gradient mask in order to ground the models and make them look a little less like they're floating in space!
Next I went mental with the Photomatix tonemapping plug-in! With any sort of HDR work taste and subtlety is important. I find the easiest way to achieve this is to push it as far as I can and then fade it into the original at a very low opacity to retain some realism.
Here it is reduced in opacity to 30%. I actually lowered it to 15% in the final version, I just wanted to show the effect in bringing out the details in the legs and shoes that was lost due to the fact I concentrated on lighting the faces (and didn't have any striplights to hand). It's also done a nice job with the hair.
Now here's pièce de résistance of the post processing. I've duplicated the original applied a high pass filter (which removes small details such as noise) and leaves large scale tone changes. The layer is blended back in at 30% with the blending mode set to overlay, this is very important as it sort of amplifies the high pass by lightening the lights and darkening the darks. It's starting to look how I want it now.
Here's the final image after some fiddling dodging and burning here and there, some minor colour correction (I moved the jeans away from cyan and desaturated for a more pleasing look). Desaturated skin tones makes this lighting technique look better in almost all cases. Finally the image is resized and sharpening applied, leaving an image which I think captures the look you are going for based on the examples posted.
It's worth noting that you need a dark place in order to pull this off otherwise you lose control over the light and you will have difficulties getting the deep shadows required for maximum contrast. The first image of Aaron was shot in a black walled studio, but if you don't have access to a studio you can get the same effect in any large space. The size is important as the light that gets reflected back from other objects falls off with the squre of the distance (double the space, 4x less light bouncing off walls), up to the point where it is totally overpowered by the subject and you get a nice black background. If you're looking for a large space, the great outdoors comes in very handy!
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What are the best tutorials available to learn photography?
Does a tutorial need to be specific to my camera model?
This is nearly impossible to condense into a single question / answer. The entire site you see here, as well as countless others, is devoted to pretty much exactly the thing you describe.
You asked about learning your specific camera, and yes, you're going to have to do that. Your user's manual is a great place to start. If you have a relatively popular camera, you may very well find additional books that attempt to present the same material in a manner better suited for learning, rather than reference. If you tell us what camera you have, we might even be able to help with this; that question is probably well-suited to a question of its own.
But that's just the beginning.
Next, you're going to have to learn about photography. You're going to need to learn about exposure, lighting, composition, and all the other topics you see here that don't tie to a specific camera. There's no such thing as the best tutorial of all, because everyone learns differently. Therefore, I'd recommend soaking in whatever reading you can get your hands on (and there's a ton of it on the web) until you feel confident targeting some of those specific areas above. If you're looking for a book, anything in Amazon's "digital photography" list would get you started -- there are some great books that show up right at the top of this list.
You should plan on reading a little and practicing a lot, then repeat until you've taken a few thousand photos. At that point, you should be fairly self-sustaining (you'll have a good idea what you need to get better at). If you come up with specific questions along the way, this site is a fantastic resource for answers, of course.
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While I'm not a big fan of HDR images that hase been pushed over-the-top, I must admit that most of the images found on this Flickr site strike a good balance between very vivid colors and a "natural" (no HDR halos for starters..) look. However, were could I find a tutorial that helps me create my own pictures towards this direction? What are the secrets?
I'd usually just say something to the effect that to get really good results consistently you have to put a lot of work in and that goes above and beyond simply feeding images into Photomatix, and whilst that's still true, I think in this case I can offer some more specific advice.
I pretty sure those images were done by manually blending two images, one of the sky and one of the foreground. This is based on the overall look, lack of halos, the existence of actual deep shadows, and a slight artefact on the second one that looks like a telltale masking sign.
Most scenes you'd use HDR to capture have a dynamic range that's roughly divided into two sections, the foreground, and the sky. The sky is usually much brighter as it's the source of illumination (like when you get a flashgun or the reflection of a flash in a photo, it's really bright). However the sky itself has a relatively low dynamic range, which fits into the range the camera can capture. Likewise with the foreground (to a slightly lesser extent). It's just the combination which is too much for the camera.
This leads to an alternative way of producing images of such scenes. Shoot two images one exposed for the foreground and one for the sky. Each can be processed using standard techniques to give a punchy contrasty, but not abnormal looking image. As each image is processed normally you get none of the HDR tells, the painting like effect, the lack of any deep shadows, the grungeness (where the software tries to add contrast to areas that shouldn't have any) and the halos where dark and light are blended into each other but not along proper edges:
Here's an image I produced from a 7 shot HDR image with Photomatix. It looks horrible and displays all of the artifacts listed above. I wasn't trying to create a bad image, but I didn't have long to play with the sliders. I'm sure you can do better but the resulting image will always have a lot of the same qualities.
I decided to start from scratch and took just the brightest and darkest images. Here's the darkest image, given a contrasty raw conversion:
Sky looks good, but the subject is just a silhouette. Here's the brightest image, given similar treatment:
Again subject is good but the sky has gone to almost pure white! However it's a relatively simple job to merge the two into one image. The white sky gives a basis to create a mask, although some additional manual selection is required around the edges of the guitarist. Here's the final blended image:
It still has an unreal look to it, but without distracting artifacts. There is no halo as the transition from light to dark takes place along a hard boundary (the subject's outline).
A few notes, the shadow was taken from a third medium exposure as the one from the bright exposure looks dodgy. The hair is mostly from the dark image, the light/dark boundary goes through the area of hair closest to the face. This avoids the task of cutting round hair, which can be very tricky. The bright image had to be warped slightly with the liquify tool due to subject movement, some parts of the dark image were showing through!
The results aren't perfect but I look forward to using the same approach on landscape/architectural photos when I have the opportunity.
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