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and sometimes… It’s better not to use a flash

Sometimes it’s good to get out and flex the old photography muscles by shooting a little differently to how you normally would. It keeps the soul young and the stops the boredom from creeping in.

This is exactly what I did a few weeks back when I had a client shoot come in, who wanted natural light, Dark beauty themed images. I myself love flash, I pretty much always use a flash whether shooting composite or location, but I wanted to take this small challenge on. The shoot was great, I got to shoot in Selby Abbey, such a beautiful place. The thing with buildings like that though is they are usually gloomy. So natural light plus large gloomy, gothic abbey equals some ninja like editing afterward. When shooting natural light I tend to underexpose and then bring back detail later in Camera Raw. I had no choice in the abbey but to shoot dark, I even had to raise my ISO (something I hate haha) but I like a challenge now and again when editing to realize the vision in my head. SO I will walk you through the steps it took me to get to the image above.

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The Image Manipulation Store is closing. 35% off on everything for 48 hours

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Everything good must come to an end. The bad news first, the image manipulation store is closing.

Now the good news, we are reopening as RAW Exchange intl. The store is now just to big to simply be swallowed as a sub-site of DIYPhotography and we are giving it the place it deserves. A new server, new domain and a huge sale to celebrate! Here is the rundown:

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THANK YOU! + best image manipulation store sale EVER

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6 months ago we started the image manipulation store. Today we are celebrating our 1000 member on the Image Manipulation Facebook group (it is an awesome group of compositors, check it out!). It has been an awesome journey and we want to a huge THANK YOU!

For 24 hours only we will be selling 100 packages for the ridiculous price of $199. This is a ridiculous price because it includes 100 of our packages. Basically making it a $2-per-package no brainer. Or you can look it at as a 90% discount. Either way if you are a compositor, you can’t afford to miss this sale.

This is our way of saying Thank You! for the last six months. It has been a crazy trip and we could not have made it without you.

This sale is limited to 200 bundles and 24 hours, which ever goes out first. So maybe it is best not to wait till the last minute.

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Here is how to composite around the world, get free LUT sets and win a 30% discount

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I know how hard it is to find a good set of backplates for your composites. If you don’t travel the world, your options are kinda limited. Well, we got someone to travel the world for you. And she travels with an 80 mega pixels Mamia Cred medium format camera. Rebecca Bathory travels to exotic locations (and some exotic if you know where to look) location to capture stunning backplates.

So far, Rebecca traveled to Venice, Japan, Angkor Wat and London. But it is today that we are officially releasing both the Japan and the Angkor Wat packages.

Before going into the individual packages, we really wanted to pack those (already awesome) packages with value, so if you get of of the City packages (London aside), you will also get a set movie looks that you can apply to your photos for free. Those looks are actually powerful LUT files to match several very popular film looks (like horror, fantasy, 80’s stock and so on). Those are usually $10 a pack, but if you buy a City Series package we are throwing that in too.

Oh, we are also running a huge 30% discount on all City Series and Looks packages. It’s a rare number, I know, but we think that experimenting with those 80MP rare backplates can really take your work to the next level so we are making it easy to try.

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We are giving away our best package yet – Free Auxiliary Layers – today only!

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UPDATE: well, I guess you got it by now, you don’t need our Auxiliary Layers as they are no different from the layers you make yourself in Photoshop :), just some harmless April’s fools mischief – If you did download the package, there is a sweet 20% off surprise for you there.

It’s been a while since we opened the Image Manipulation Store and we are quite happy with how it works and the community forming around it. This is why we approached our German partners and asked them to create the most awesome package they can. They said yes! thus creating the Auxiliary Layers package.

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This extending and blending fabric tutorial is guaranteed to make you laugh

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Sometimes you need a long piece of fabric to create a big fancy dress or to make a surreal photo like the one above. Sadly, most fabric resources (including our own fabric package) are just not that long. The solution is to blend pieces of fabric together until you get the length of fabric that you need.

This tutorial by Joseph Parry shows exactly that. How to blend pieces of fabric together to make them longer and it is the exact same technique that Joseph used to create the photo above using some pre-made fabric textures.

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53 Free Wings for Compositing

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More great news today, we are trying something new with the store: Splash packages

We are still running our 30% off sale and we are doing our first splash package. This is a FREE wings for compositing package available for 24 hours only. Then we take it off. You can download it and tell your friends so they can get it too. Sharing, and making people happy, as you can tell, is a big part of our business.

In 24 hours it will be gone.

When we put it on again, we will make a notification on our store’s Facebook page, and this will be the only way to get it. So to get future splash free packages, like the page and mark it for “receive notifications”.

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We are having a huge 30% sale on the image store

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Our image manipulation store is now at 93 products, and this is quite awesome. We are trying really hard to keep the prices low, and frankly, most of our textures are around $15 per package, which I think that is quite awesome.

We are able to grow mostly through how sharing, liking and commenting on Facebook and other social media works, so keep on spreading the word. This is what allows us to give you a 30% discount on everything you buy for thre days starting on March 3rd (today). Just use the coupon happy333 on checkout.

But there is another reason we are making this coupon.

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Decay Photos From A Town Abandoned 30 Years Ago Near Chernobyl

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I have some amazing news today! We are releasing not one, but two new back-plate packages in our decay archives. Those are not regular packages though. They were taken at Prypjat – a city only 4km away from the nuclear planet of Chernobyl. Sadly, the radiation never quite went away and the city was never re-inhabited. Nature completely took over.

Each package has 30 files: 80 megapixel, 8bit TIFF. gorgeous, right?

Ok, here are the links to get those gorgeous back plates:

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