Description | Speakers
If you believe taking great photos is the end of the line, think again. Any great photographer will tell you that it’s not enough to know basic photography rules – you’ve got to know how to edit those photos to make them really “pop”. Whether you’re using the latest version of Photoshop or a freebie program online, Pauline/OHMommy, Amy from The Bitchin’ Wives Club and Ryan Marshall from Pacing the Panic Room will walk you through basic editing using brightening and contrast, color enhancement, adjusting hues and saturation levels, artistic additions, cropping, blurring, watermarking, editing file sizes and more.
PanicRoom – Bottom line is to just take good pictures from the start. Know your camera, and don’t rely on post production to constantly try to make a bad picture look better.
PanicRoom – “Just be careful that you don’t get caught up following trends … come up with your own ed’iting philosophy, you’ll never find your own style if you’re just chasing trends.”
PanicRoom – His first pictures were all vingnette, he was stuck in that trend. Months of vignette and he missed opportunities, it didn’t make any sense with the picture. “It [vignette] was something I learned to do, and I did it for every picture’.”
PanicRoom – “I shoot everything in RAW”, and he brings it into Adobe Bridge, which formats it into a JPEG, but a point and shoot won’t shoot RAW.
PanicRoom – “Sometimes your kids are running around and they aren’t in the perfect light or the perfect setting” – you have to take the picture anyway. You can’t miss that moment.
PanicRoom – Shows us a finished image. A picture of his wife balancing on a bike, but there is no kickstand. It’s layers – two images. Her brother is actually holding the bike up, but he removes the brother in post production.
PanicRoom – He plays with color balance first – it’s very subtle changes, and depends on the photo. Play around with it.
PanicRoom – He’s searching for the photo he wants to show us; it’s clear that he’s taken over 40 versions of the picture of his wife on the bike to try to get it right – seems we need to take more pictures! They key is to just keep on shooting for that “good” picture, rather than taking one and hoping it’s right.
How he took the picture:
Set up on a tripod, so that nothing moves! You need two nearly identical pictures.
1st picture: Wife on the bike, brother on left holding it up.
2nd picture: Wife holding bike on the right, no brother.
In Photoshop, lay the two images over each other, wife balancing on top – and erase the brother. When you erase the brother, the other photo shows through, and the background looks seamless.
Talks about color correction, and goes to the color balance and gives the photo just a little tweak here and there to adjust the way the light in the background, and his wife’s skin tone in the light, look.
Once you have the picture at a great point, lock the layers, make a copy of that, and keep it as a “backup” layer. Gives you a chance to go back to a good point if you make too many tweaks and go too far.
PanicRoom – Then gives an example a picture he took yesterday of another blogger. He applies the vignette affect on a new layer, then adjusts the opacity so that it’s more subtle. Then he applies the fuse blow, and it looks ridiculous at full strength, but brings it down to 7% or so and it looks more natural and glowy, but not ridiculous.
PanicRoom – “It’s all self control” – figuring out what the best combination of effects and at what intensity or level works best for each photo and for the story you are trying to tell. “Just learn self control.”
PanicRoom – “You don’t want to ruin these moments, these memories, with bad editing … in editing you should be trying to enhance a photo, not save a photo.” There are times when you’ll need to save a photo, but it shouldn’t be the norm.
OHMommy – She’s going to review Photoshop Actions to “cheat.” Photoshop is expensive, but nothing compares. It’s much cheaper on a student license. And Photoshop Elements has much of what you need, and will allow for Actions, so that’s key.
OHMommy – “What are actions? Essentially they are pre-recorded steps that you can use over and over again.” They are time-savers, and help you save the exact steps that you used.
OHMommy – Shows a photo straight out of the camera, then the after effect – after applying two simple steps — or actions.
OHMommy – The sharpen action can make a huge difference. There are lots – and you can download them to your computer. The download provides a file that you can use in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to enhance your photos. Some are free and some are paid.
To Install:
1. Save the file to the appropriate location in the Photoshop directory on your computer.
2. Open Photoshop
3. Click on Windows.
4. Click Actions and they Actions list appears.
OHMommy – When in doubt, it’s always better to “underexpose your image” – rather than overexpose. Underexposure is easy to fix in post production.
OHMommy uses the “downsizing” image to make sure her images are not a great quality so that no one bothers to download it and steal it, because the quality is poor. What it does is that it sets the DPI low – to 72ppi.
Note that PPI is not reflective of the image size in pixels on your blog or website. PPI stands for pixels per inch – how many pixels are packed into an inch in a photo, or how high the resolution is.
OHMommy – “Make mistakes often and find your style. Everybody has a different style.”
OHMommy participated in the daily photo challenge for a year and then turned the results into a great keepsake for her family – great idea!
BitchinWife – Talking about online editing and storage and organization. There are three ways to manage your photos: “Edit, edit, edit.” Go through your pictures, delete, edit, make sure what you’re saving is what you want.
“Upload to Flickr” – buy the PRO version so you have unlimited space – $20 per year – and upload everything either automatically with something like an EyeFi card or using a program once you import; it saves the images in full size and you can download them from Flickr later when you want them, you don’t have to store copies on your computer. {Editors note: I don’t recommend this. There are no guarentees that Flickr won’t lose or corrupt your photos. I’d recommend using an external backup drive of some sort – which is her third recommendation.}
BitchinWife – She organizes all her photos by date, so that she can find a photo by having an idea of when she took the photo. This is easy on a Mac using iPhoto, it basically does it automatically. She says don’t be lazy about organization! It won’t get easier later, it’ll just be harder.
Anyway, I was sick of the old design and I wanted something new, and also something that would be more of a lifestream.
Just ... no. {Wardrobe malfunction}
Excess
