Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Yes, that’s right, it’s finally coming. Photoshop is to become an iPad app. Apple’s dream of turning the iPad Pro into a desktop replacement is potentially about to become a little more true thanks to a report from Bloomberg today. All I can say is, it’s about time!
As an artist who shoots mostly composites, more often than not I’m going to be cutting out my subject and placing them in a different scene. A lot of the time I only have a rough idea of what kind of a background I’ll be using, so I just shoot my subject as best as I can and figure out the backdrop later. Sometimes I have no idea what I’m going to do with my model, but a wise and incredibly good-looking man once said, “You don’t always need a plan.”
HOWEVER, if I do a shoot knowing full well what my background looks like before I even pick up my camera, it makes everything a million times easier.
We already know photographer Erik Johansson for his dreamy photo manipulations such as Full Moon Service or the Mirrored Lake Project. This time he was inspired by that magical moment right before falling asleep, when you let go of your rational thoughts and the dreams start to replace them. He illustrated this moment in a mesmerizing photomontage, and he takes you behind the scenes of the photo shoots he did in order to create the final image.
I’m a huge fan of very long and in-depth educational videos on YouTube. People keep going on about how “5-7 minutes is the ideal length!”. Well, no, not for me it isn’t. I love watching long videos. And this is a good one. Presented by retoucher Conny Wallstrom, this hour and a quarter long video teaches you everything you would ever need to know about how frequency separation works.
Star trails are a common subject amongst astrophotographers. When they’re not trying to capture the milky way, they’re showing the path that our stars take in the night sky. The process for creating these isn’t dissimilar from shooting timelapse with digital. You take a lot of photos over a period of time and then stack them on top of each other in Photoshop.
But this technique from Nemanja Sekulic shows you a way to do this with just a single image. It’s not going to be a perfect recreation of how the stars move through the sky, but it will let you achieve a similar effect. Nemanja demonstrates how to (mostly) automate the process using Photoshop actions that you create yourself.
Colour grading tends to specifically refer to the colouring of video and in photography, we often refer to this as colour toning, but whatever you’re happier calling it, this process of making a conscious decision to apply a specific colour-look to an image in post-production is an incredibly powerful tool.
If you are doing any kind of beauty work, you know that skin is one of the hardest things to deal with. You want to make the skin look good, while not ending up with a porcelain face that looks too smooth and textureless to be real.
There are many tricks of the trade for beauty retouchers and Stefan is sharing three of his favorites: 1. How to remove Peach Fuzz (turns out that this is how you call those little facial hairs). 2. How to remove goosebumps. Yea, I know, the easy answer is heat the room up. If you don’t have control over the room temperature, and your model looks like a duck (or a goose), not all is lost. And 3. How to eliminate bruises.
LUTs have become a big thing recently. Once only used for grading video, they’ve become extremely popular for regular photography, too. Photoshop’s been able to read LUTs since at least CS6. But in CC it can also create them, too.
In this video from Unmesh Dinda at Piximperfect, we see how to quickly and easy create LUT files from within Photoshop. From there we can either install them as “filters” for use on future images, or we can even use them in Premiere, Resolve and other editing applications for video, too.
Projected hologram effects have been popular since about 1977. But for most people, it’s only since the advent of applications like Photoshop and After Effects that they’ve become possible to create ourselves. But they can still be quite intimidating to those new to Photoshop. Creating them is a fairly simple process, though.
In this video, photographer Nemanja Sekulic walks us through his technique to create composited holograms in Photoshop. It’s a fairly long video at 13 minutes, but it contains a lot of tips and advice on how to work around potential problems you may face and things for you to experiment with to make the effect your own.
When I first started on my journey of learning my way around Photoshop I was a full-on Apple product fanboy, it just seemed like every creative was using an Apple machine and that I should do the same. Once I went full time I realised that I would build myself a PC that would be much more powerful for the price.
After my build was complete the first thing I did was install the Wacom drivers and Photoshop only to find that some things didn’t work quite as I had expected them to. There were major brush lag issues and the annoyance of Window Ink that would be a shock to anyone having just moved over to Windows from OSX.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
Find my work on My website or follow me on Facebook or My page
