Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
The Infinite Color Panel has arrived and I have been pushing the create button ever since. The panel has been announced for quite some time and when it was close to being released you could feel the hype picking up on Facebook. The $129,- Photoshop extension looks deceptively simple, so why would you buy a big button?
The lines between photo’s and video are getting thinner everyday. With our social media being able to display both indistinguishable on our timelines, Live Photo’s, selfie filters, etc. its become more and more practice to post video’s of our life and creations then ever. A video keeps a viewer engaged longer and with so much available media that a good thing.
Video is also becoming more beautiful and high res. 4K high resolution display are common. With that much resolution at our fingertips, there’s more room to display our photo’s and video’s. As photographers we’ve always been used to working on high resolution files. But with the possibility of adding motion to our photo’s has sparked Motion Posters and Cinemagraphs, and now Artymates
Artymate by Karen Alsop and Sandra Voelker, is a new Photoshop CC version only extension that adds animation to your images. Floating objects, moving clouds, flapping butterflies, wavy hair and even fire can be added to an image. With a simple enough interface, and a plethora of howto tutorials, you’ll be adding animations to your photo’s in no time.
A while ago I started working as a designer for a new Dutch magazine about smartphone photography called Phonographer. Next to being a photographer and photoshop wizard I do love to shoot with my iPhone. And I’m an avid geek when it comes to accessories and things with buttons.
Now shooting with an iPhone comes with its own pro’s and con’s. The pro’s of course being its size, the amount of apps and editing possibilities and its online options. The con’s are for instance sensor size, and ergonomics. But every instance of a new smartphone camera gets better and better. As an allround camera its getting quite serious in almost every aspect.
Now the only thing I was missing from turning my smartphone into a more useful photographic tool was the ability to use an off-camera flash, or trigger my studio lights. We all know how we felt the first time we used an external light source with our camera, the way it opened up our ability to be more creative with our photography.
Last week I created my latest entry for The Dark Realm Collective’s Winter ArtPack. Go check out the amazing other creations the talented artists made for this pack.
I want to talk about how I created the image in photoshop.
As a digital artist I use a plethora of different stock images (like the fine images ofRAWexchange) to accompany the images I photograph and combine it all into my pieces. As most of my colleagues, we’re always looking at the best quality stock, which usually means large pixel image sizes. The more pixels we have the better we can do our magic.
I’m always looking for good stock images to use in my photoshop composites. I find them online, or use the awesome Texture Store. Or I make my own. But sometimes its impossible to find the right image that fits your idea.
And if you do find the right image, it’s at the wrong angle or too small, or not lighted the way you want to. So you’ll just end up with a crappy composite, or spending hours of time to get it right.
A while ago I was preparing a workshop and looking into the possibility to teach everyone about using photoshop’s built in 3D options. Photoshop has been developing integration with 3D for a while and you can even get as far as prepare a file for 3D printing now.
Following you will find a detailed guide on how to make these cartoonish portraits, but first I must share how they came to be. If you just want the tutorial, jump a paragraph or two forward.
A few weeks ago I traveled to Birmingham UK, to hang out at the Photography Show. I met up with the people from DIY Photography and they interviewed me on my work, (you can view that interview here). I spent a few days hanging around the Inspired PhotoGear stand, where we played with Light Blasters, Lollipods, RoundFlash Dish and Ring’s and I fell in love with the Cosyspeed Holster Bag, which now houses my Olympus OMD.
(I also met the awesome people from Amersham Studio’s, who will host my next UK photoshop workshop this June, together with my agency Draumlist, but I digress)
I’m affiliated with the Dark Realm Collective (DRC), it’s an art group that specializes in Dark / Horror / Supernatural subjects – the group was founded October 2014 by Matt Seff Barnes. As a collective, we release four ‘art packs’ a year; each pack has a title, and a selection of five ‘themes’ for the artists to choose from.
This easter we used witches as our theme. With a few theme-titles to choose from and to spark our imagination.
Time to dust up on your Color Balance Adjustment Layer. Here’s a quick Photoshop trick that will add some more magic (or magical fire and ice) to your composites.
This technique works wonders using dust particles shot against a back background. You can shoot this yourself or use a pre-made dust resource if you don’t have the energies to vacuum all the mess such a shoot creates.
The year comes to an end and just before the busy days of watching StarWars and celebrating the holidays I’m rushing to finish some images and close this year off. One of the images that needed to be done was my contribution to the Dark Realm Collective – Black Christmas Art Pack.
I’ve been part of this collective since its conception and we’ve been making awesome dark images throughout the year, mostly themed around festive holidays and events. Naturally we needed to do a Christmas theme.
So for the Christmas art pack we had a few themes to pick from, the themes are more of a guide to get us started.
In the text below I am going to show you how it was done step by step. If you want to use any of the packages from this tutorial, the nice guys from the Image Manipulation Store agreed to provide a 20% off coupon (till Dec 30th), for any of the packages used here. Just use coupon code whitewalker4 on checkout.
Here’s a quick, yet powerful, tip on how to move a portrait from great to awesome fairly quickly. While this method is quick the results can be very impressive if done right. You would need a fire on black pattern like the Fire Pack from the texture store (either the commercial package, or the CC-BY license, but then you have to link every image to the store) , a copy of photoshop and of course, a portrait, preferably on black.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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