Simon on an extended background.

Do you want to shoot a full length portrait of somebody in a controlled environment but have the final image displayed in a landscape format? If so, what’s the best way to go about it? You could choose a suitably wide lens, or backup a sufficient distance and compose the shot in a landscape orientation. As long as the background was okay for your purposes this would achieve the desired results but it would come with limitations. Fortunately, there’s a better and easier way to do it that will give you much more detail in your final image.

Should you decide to use the landscape orientation as mentioned above, you’d end up with an image that had a lot of empty space surrounding a relatively small subject. Essentially you’d have a lot of wasted pixels because chances are, if you’re in a controlled studio environment, you’ll be shooting on a seamless backdrop or a cyclorama wall and so you’ll have a nice, even background of a single color. White is probably the most common although in the example here I’m using a shoot that was done on black seamless. Regardless of what color it is, the point is that you’ll be wasting a lot of pixels on a single color background that could be better used for your subject.

Instead of using landscape orientation, use your camera in a portrait orientation, and fill as much of the frame as you can with your subject. It doesn’t have to be a complete filling of the frame but the more space the main subject occupies, the more pixels will have usable information and the more you can do with the photo. Here’s my original shot.

As shot in portrait orientation.

For sake of demonstration, I’m going to output into a wide, panoramic image as in the image above. You don’t have to go this wide if you don’t want to. Open the photo in Photoshop and make sure the background color in Photoshop is set to match your background in the photo. In this case that’s easy because my background is black. You can set the color in the toolbar – the default is black foreground and white background. Once your background is set to the correct color, take the crop tool (keyboard shortcut – C) and extend the crop outside the actual image canvas. If all you want to do is make it wider, the easiest way is to constrain the whole image inside the crop box and then simply drag the left or right side out as far as you like. Once you’re happy, simply hit enter and it will fill the extra space with the selected background color and you’re done. Save it at it’s new proportions and output as necessary.

Crop to enlarge the background.

That was the 356th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Scott Kelby - Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book For Digital Photographers

One of the perks of leading one of the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalks is that you get a free book for your troubles. This year there was a choice between a Lightroom book and a Photoshop book. I elected to receive the Photoshop CS5 book, mainly because I use Lightroom almost daily (and have done since the very first beta) and am fairly up to date with what it can and cannot do. Photoshop on the other hand doesn’t get anywhere near as much use these days so I’m not always current on the changes. In fact, I don’t even upgrade every time a new release comes out, occasionally skipping a generation because Lightroom meets 95% of my needs. That said, Photoshop CS5 was an upgrade I made, so I was eager to see what was what.

The last time I read a Photoshop book was back when Photoshop CS first came out and I bought Martin Evening’s guide to Photoshop and Bruce Fraser’s guide to Camera Raw. As any Photoshop user knows, there have been a lot of changes since. I’ve read other Kelby books, as well as being a regular browser of his blog, so had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I must say that I am a fan of Scott’s sense of humor and it definitely helps make his books very readable.

After a quick flick through the book upon receiving it, I noted the sections that covered the new features and started on them. Unlike a lot of photographers, I don’t really pay attention to new features in software or with cameras unless I’m planning to buy that particular item. I know people who can quote specs and additions all day, but for me, creating photographs is what it’s all about, not memorising new features. Therefore, there were a number of things I found in the book that I had no idea about – dramatically improved HDR and better selection tools to name two. If it weren’t for Kelby’s book, I probably wouldn’t have even bothered looking at the HDR tools, as I was definitely not impressed by HDR in earlier versions.

This book has a very conversational style that should appeal to a wide ranging audience. For those who are just getting started with Photoshop, it offers by-the-numbers recipes for a lot of common adjustments. If you’re a bit more experienced these may not be necessary but they can give you a good starting point to areas of Photoshop that you’re not 100% familiar with.

Overall, the book covers all you need to know about Photoshop CS5 as it applies to photographers. Camera RAW, curves, black and white conversions, sharpening, print output and more are covered, as it as some quick tips and a look at Scott’s workflow.

On the whole, this book is worth a look. I know that if I hadn’t received it for free for leading the Photowalk, I probably wouldn’t have thought of buying a Photoshop book and that would have been a shame. In the future when I upgrade Photoshop again, I’ll be making a point of picking up the relevant Scott Kelby Photoshop book at the same time.

That was the 339th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Jiufen, Taiwan

Browse through any photo sharing site and you won’t have to look too far before you come across an image that has a tilted horizon. Most of the time, these shots occur as a result of inexperienced photographers not taking an extra second at shooting time to double check things in the viewfinder but I have seen them pop up in professional retail photography from time to time as well. I should note that some people use tilted photographs as an intended artistic effect, however these will often have a dramatic tilt to them. When unintended, the sloping horizon is much more likely to be less angled. Fixing these in the processing stage is a pretty straightforward matter though, so let’s take a look at how to correct it in both Lightroom and Photoshop.

Lightroom.

Crop and Straighten in Lightroom

Begin with your photograph that has a crooked horizon and press “R” to open the Crop and Straighten tool. Click on the ruler that is immediately left of where it says Angle to select the straighten tool. Now, all that’s left to do is move over to your image and click on the horizon to place one end of the ruler. Hold the mouse button down and drag the tool across the screen along what should be the horizon, releasing when you have drawn a line. How long your line is will depend on the photo – in a scene such as this one it’s a pretty defined horizon so I’ll typically use about 2/3 of the horizon in forming my straightening line. Once you release the mouse button, Lightroom will automatically rotate the image for you. Easy. Once you get the hang of it – and it’s pretty simple – straightening a horizon only takes a second or two.

Photoshop.

Ruler tool in Photoshop

With an image that’s already open in Photoshop and needs straightening, the procedure is just as easy. Introduced in Photoshop CS5 is a dedicated straightening tool that makes the job much easier than it used to be (and it used to be quite easy). Simply select the Ruler tool from the Toolbar – it’s found with the Eyedropper tool, so if you don’t see it, right-click on the Eyedropper to access the flyout options. Now, simply find the horizon, click and drag from left to right across the screen. Once you’ve drawn a line that you feel is suitable, all you have to do is click on Straighten in the menu bar up top and Photoshop does the rest.

Straighten in Photoshop

So there you have it. Now there’s no excuse for showing photographs with tilted horizons.

That was the 306th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Final image of Emily, a young Taiwanese model.

Nothing takes the viewers attention away from the subject like a messy background. This is particularly noticeable in portrait photography, especially when done outside somewhere. The best way to avoid these distracting backgrounds is to shoot with a shallow depth of field but there are a number of reasons why that may not always be possible. It may be too bright, you may not have the budget for a f2.8 lens, you may be experimenting, you may simply have set the wrong aperture. Fortunately, you can simulate a shallow depth of field in Photoshop fairly easily. It may not be as desirable as doing it in camera, but it works well in a pinch.

Before we get into it, I want to remind you about Selina Maitreya’s The View From Here. Selina brings 3 decades of portfolio consultancy experience and wisdom to this MP3 series that’s a must-have for anyone either contemplating becoming a working photographer or professionals looking for a little extra inspiration. Normally $199, it’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

Original image pre-Photoshop.

Start by opening the image you want to try this technique on in Photoshop. For this, I’m use the Quick Selection tool to draw a roughly selection around my model. Simply “paint” over the area you want to select and Photoshop will do all the hard work. You don’t have to use the Quick Selection tool if you have a different preferred method for making selections. I find it easiest to use but you may not.

Detail crop showing roughly done Quick Selection

If you select too much, simply hold down the Option/Alt key and paint over that area to deselect it. If the selection looks a bit uneven, click on the Refine Edge button in the menu bar. In the dialog box that pops up, choose a view mode that allows you to eliminate the background (on white, on black, overlay or black and white work best), make sure the Smart Radius checkbox is ticked and dragh the radius slider to the right the smooth out the selection. When it looks okay to you in the preview, make sure output in set to Selection and click OK. Whenever I make a selection, I like to quickly save it by going to Select > Save Selection. This saves a bit of time if I want to revisit it later and it’s no longer selected. This is particularly useful for tricky, time-consuming selections.

Refine in overlay mode

Now that you have your subject selected, press Command/Ctrl – Shift – I to inverse it, thus making everything but your model selected. Go to Filter > Blur > Lens Blur. The Lens Blur dialog will open which gives you a few options. This filter takes a bit of processing time, so if that’s an issue, choose the Faster option for your preview, otherwise choose More Accurate. The more accurate option is substantially slower but this is only a preview, so it’s not necessary to use it if you don’t want. To add the blur, just drag the radius slider to the right until it looks good to your eye. For this image, I used a radius of 60. Then click OK. Once it processes (which can take a while), and goes back into Photoshop proper, you can delect by pressing Command/Ctrl – D.

Lens Blur sliders

Notice the unnatural blur on the ground around her feet.

Notice in the screenshot immediately above that the ground beneath her feet looks very strange being as blurry as it is. You’re going to want to reduce the blur effect here because it looks very unnatural. To do that, take the History Brush tool (Y), and using a large, soft-edged brush, paint the ground around her feet and just behind her. If you use a large brush, you can paint it out in one stroke, and it’ll appear to fade naturally behind her giving a more realistic effect.

That’s all there is to it. Give it a try next time you are unable to shoot with a sufficiently open aperture yet still want a shallow depth of field.

That was the 297th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

The National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan is one of the largest art museums in the world, with a collection of over 677 000 pieces of antique Chinese art.

Issues of perspective and the control thereof occur in photography quite regularly, particularly when it comes to architectural photography. One solution to the problem of buildings that appear to be leaning is to use a perspective control or tilt-shift lens. These allow the photographer to control the appearance of perspective in the image and avoid the common problem of converging parallel lines. The drawback to these lenses is their price. They don’t come cheap and unless you need to use one regularly for professional purposes, they may be too expensive. A further issue for the travel photographer is that it’s just one more piece of equipment that has to be carried. It’s fine if you have a base to work out of and assistants to help you but if you’re on a lengthy, solo trip somewhere, then the extra weight and space may be put to better use in some other way.

Fortunately for those you choose not to use a perspective correction lens, there’s a solution of sorts known as perspective cropping. It’s a relatively simple process in Photoshop to do and can achieve some pretty decent results. The opening photograph above, of Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, shows the museum after perspective cropping (and a black and white conversion) have been carried out. Below is the original.

Notice the verticals are not vertical. We can fix that with perspective cropping.

Open the image in Photoshop and select the Crop tool (C). Drag the bounding box around the image as you normally would if you were going to crop it. In the menu bar at the top of the screen, you’ll see a check box labeled “perspective”. Make sure that it is checked – by default it’s unchecked.

Check the perspective box.

Next, take one of the corners and drag it. As long as you’ve checked the perspective box, the corner you drag will move while the others stay fixed in place. This allows you to get angled lines around your subject. You can adjust each of the four corners as necessary.

Drag the corners of the crop bounding box as necessary.

I find the simplest way is to anchor the bottom so that it lines up with the bottom of what should be a vertical line and then drag the top corners to adjust the angle. Line it up directly on the side of a building or other vertical. Don’t worry if you need to bring the edges in from the edge of the frame. All you need to do here is get the angles correct. Once you’re happy with that, drag the entire line out to the edge of the frame. In the center of the vertical will be a drag box to move horizontally so just drag this to the frame edge, or wherever else you want the frame crop to be.

Crop bounding box positioned.

Finally, all you need to do is hit the enter key and Photoshop works its magic and it jumps into place. You may need to adjust it slightly if you eyeballed it the first time and were a little off, in which case simply repeat the procedure as necessary. Once it’s too your liking, simply apply whatever further adjustments you’d like and you’re done.

After perspective cropping.

That was the 283rd Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Kite surfing at Sizhiwan, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

For most people, the main objective after the picture has been taken is to either have it look good for posting on Flickr or sending as email, or to make an inkjet print at home, or a print at a photolab. The first thing you need to do is to adjust the tonal range so that the photo has a good, full contrast. In general, the biggest concern will be how light or dark the photo is – are the blacks black and the whites white? And for that, we can look at Levels in Photoshop. So lets start with an image that needs some adjustment.

Kite surfing at Sizhiwan, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Image as shown before Levels adjustment.

We can see that this shot is a little underexposed and lacks contrast. If we look at the histogram display, we see that all the values are over towards the left. The histogram is a graph that displays the tonal levels from dark (black) on the left to light (white) on the right. The graph will look different for every different photo – there’s no such thing as an ideal, one-size-fits-all histogram. In general though, we want to see our graph spaced over the entire histogram, not bunched to the left like the following screenshot.

The histogram palette in Photoshop.

To fix things, we want to go to our Layers palette (F7) and create a Levels adjustment layer, as shown below. We can make the same adjustments directly onto the image without using Layers, but this is destructive – we permanently change the pixels. Using Layers means that we can non-destructively adjust the image without permanently changing pixels. This allows us to revisit the image in the future and make further adjustments as we desire without degrading the image. Non-destructive editing is always a better choice than destructive editing – it’s one of the reasons why we shoot RAW instead of jpg, assuming our camera is capable of it.

Creating a Levels Adjustment Layer in Photoshop

This will bring up the Levels dialog. To improve the tonal range, we want to use the highlight slider (shown below) and drag it to the left. For finer control, hold down the option/alt (Mac/PC) key while you click on the slider to see exactly where the highlights pop out. You want to drag it closer to where the tonal values are on the histogram. Then do the same with the shadow slider, located on the left, but drag it to the right.

Levels before and after highligt adjustment.

Once things look good, click ok in the Levels dialog. Notice the difference in both the image and the resulting histogram. You can now save the file as a TIFF or PSD which allows you to preserve the layer structure. As mentioned above, this lets us revisit the file in the future. To make changes it’s simply a matter of double-clicking the adjustment layer icon in the Levels layer. To save it as a jpg for print or the web, simply flatten or merge the layers (Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-E) or choose the option from the Layer menu at the top of the screen.

That was the 31st Daily PhotoTip rounding out the first month. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Forman posted a new photoessay at his site that feature gritty, urban type post processing. Quite a few people are interested in this type of look, so I decided to create a tutorial that outlines the steps you can take to achieve a similar result.

Starting with our RAW file, we import it into Lightroom or Photoshop. Both use the same RAW processing engine and have the same controls. My screenshot below is from Lightroom, but you can use the same settings in Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop. I always recommend shooting RAW but for those who insist on throwing away image data and shooting JPG, you can apply the same settings on your files.

The first step is to adjust the Recovery, Fill Light, Contrast, Clarity and Vibrance to +100.

Then, drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left (-100) and slowly ease it back until the color starts to appear. In this case, that was -76. Next, adjust the Blacks to balance the photo – setting the Fill Light to +100 will make it look washed out. Finally, adjust the Exposure slider if necessary and add a vignette in the vignette panel to darken the edges.

You may find that it makes peoples skin appear overly sharp – if that’s the case, you may want to soften the skin. Open the image in Photoshop, hit CTRL/CMD – J to duplicate the layer, apply a Gaussian blur of 20 (Filter>Blur>Gaussian) and lower the opacity to around 50%.  Click the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, get the Brush tool, choose a soft-edged brush, and then paint over the skin, while avoiding the eyes, eyebrows, lips, teeth, nostrils, hair—-these are details areas you want to keep sharp.

Here are a couple more examples. At the end of the post, there’s a Lightroom Develop preset that’ll apply the basic settings with a single click. Feel free to download it and use it if you are a Lightroom user. To install, simply open Lightroom and go to the Develop module. In the Presets panel, right click and choose Import to import the preset.

[download id="6"]

My friend Kenneth of Investor Blogger and Obblogatory recently requested some basic Photoshop tutorials. Perhaps the best place to start is with a tutorial on Levels. Make sure you click on the images for a larger version – the small ones don’t fully show the details and color.

For most people, the main objective after the picture has been taken is to either have it look good for posting on Flickr or sending as email, or to make an inkjet print at home, or a print at a photolab. The first thing you need to do is to adjust the tonal range so that the photo has a good, full contrast. In general, the biggest concern will be how light or dark the photo is – are the blacks black and the whites white? And for that, we can look at Levels in Photoshop. So lets start with an image that needs some adjustment.

[singlepic id=153 w=500]

We can see that this shot is a little underexposed and lacks contrast. If we look at the histogram display, we see that all the values are over towards the left. The histogram is a graph that displays the tonal levels from dark (black) on the left to light (white) on the right. The graph will look different for every different photo – there’s no such thing as an ideal, one-size-fits-all histogram. In general though, we want to see our graph spaced over the entire histogram, not bunched to the left like the following screenshot.

[singlepic id=154 w=500]

To fix things, we want to go to our Layers palette (F7) and create a Levels adjustment layer, as shown below. We can make the same adjustments directly onto the image without using Layers, but this is destructive – we permanently change the pixels. Using Layers means that we can non-destructively adjust the image without permanently changing pixels. This allows us to revisit the image in the future and make further adjustments as we desire without degrading the image. Non-destructive editing is always a better choice than destructive editing – it’s one of the reasons why we shoot RAW instead of jpg, assuming our camera is capable of it.

[singlepic id=156 w=500]

This will bring up the Levels dialog. To improve the tonal range, we want to use the highlight slider (shown below) and drag it to the left. For finer control, hold down the option/alt (Mac/PC) key while you click on the slider to see exactly where the highlights pop out.

[singlepic id=158 w=500]

You want to drag it closer to where the tonal values are on the histogram.

[singlepic id=159 w=500]

And now do the same with the shadow slider, located on the left. Again, you can hold down Option/Alt for finer control.

[singlepic id=160 w=500]

Once things look good, click ok in the Levels dialog. Notice the difference in both the image and the resulting histogram.

[singlepic id=155 w=500]

You can now save the file as a TIFF or PSD which allows you to preserve the layer structure. As mentioned above, this lets us revisit the file in the future. To make changes it’s simply a matter of double-clicking the adjustment layer icon in the Levels layer.

[singlepic id=157 w=500]

To save it as a jpg for print or the web, simply flatten or merge the layers (Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-E) or choose the option from the Layer menu at the top of the screen.

And there we have it – our finished image. Or, our image that’s ready for any further editing we wish to do.

[singlepic id=152 w=500]

Neil Wade has a pretty sweet lighting tutorial over at his blog that teaches you how to photograph incense smoke and make some cool smoke art. So I thought I’d take it a step further and look at an alternative post-processing method to which results in the below picture.

So lets walk through the steps in Photoshop that takes the black background with bluish smoke and turns it into a white background with multi-colored smoke.

1. Follow the steps that Neil details to get your shot.

2. Open the image in Photoshop.

3. Now, we want to make the background white. As we already have a black background, changing it to white is as simple as inverting the colors, black being the opposite of white. To do that we can use Cmd-I on a Mac or Ctrl-I on a PC. (In case it’s not clear, that’s I for ice cream, not L) Voila, our black is now white. If there are patches of off-white they can be made white with a simple Levels adjustment.

4. Next, we need to duplicate the layer. Cmd/Ctrl – J will do that for us. You’ll now have 2 layers – the background and layer 1.

5. With layer 1 active (it’ll be the highlighted one), we need to select the smoke. There are a number of different ways to select things in Photoshop, and everyone has their preferred way of doing it so feel free to use your method of choice. I found the simplest way was by selecting the white background (I used Select > Color Range) and inverting the selection (Cmd/Ctrl – Shift – I).

6. Next take the gradient tool. Simply press the G key and you’ll have it. In the options bar at the top, choose a colored gradient and drag the tool inside the image from bottom left/right to top right/left over the smoke. It’ll now look like a solid multicolored mess.

7. The next step is to change the layer blending mode to color. Flatten the image (Layer > Flatten or Shift – Cmd/Ctrl -E to merge them).

8. Then, it’s simply a matter of mirroring the image. Again, there are numerous ways to do this. The simplest is probably to open a new document that’s double the width and paste the smoke picture onto it. Then, go back to the smoke image, flip the image (Image > Rotate Canvas > Flip Horizontal/Vertical). Then simply paste this onto the new document and align the two halves. Flatten and crop as desired.

9. As an added bonus step, hit Cmd/Ctrl – I again to once more invert the colors. It’ll look like this.

And there you have it. Your very own rainbow smoke.

Feedback is always welcome, especially on these tutorials as I’ve only just started this section on the site. Is the above easy enough to follow, or is it too basic or too difficult? Would it be easier to understand if I posted screenshots of the steps? Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see, learn etc.