Back to Photoshop Basics

We're taking the blog back to photoshop basics for beginners. This post, while something of a tutorial, is really more of a really quick trip through the controls in photoshop's raw converter plugin.

If you have a newer version of photoshop you can download the free plugin for raw conversion from their site. There are a variety of camera formats supported, but you must be careful which version of the plugin you download. The most recent version on the site is Camera Raw 5.6 for Photoshop CS4. Some versions work only with some versions of photoshop. And some older versions of the plugin may not open your version of camera raw files, so you do need to read the documentation for what you are downloading.

CS2 and older doesn't support newer cameras. I discovered that when I bought my Nikon D700. My first shoot with the camera was all in raw, only to discover the PS CS2 with it's raw converter wouldn't open those files. Downloading the newer converter plugin didn't work either, because it wasn't designed to work in CS2. Downloading and updating to CS3 didn't work either, since my operating system was Win2000Pro - I also had to upgrade to Win XP. I couldn't do that without entirely wiping out the current computer system and starting with a hard formatted disc drive. I couldn't afford to do that - I had a lot of old programs I still use, and some that wouldn't work on WinXP.

So my solution was to have a new computer system built for me at a cost of $2,000, including a full copy of Windows XP Pro. Then another $200 to upgrade to Photoshop CS3. So my camera purchase ($2000+) wound up costing me more than double the original price.

That's a warning - don't install an updated raw plugin to photoshop uless you know everything is going be supported.

If you've bought a new camera and have an older photoshop version, try the software that came with your camera. Most manufacturers provide software that will open their own raw files.

These instructions are for Photoshop CS3 since that's what I use. I suppose one of these days I'll have to update to CS4 and have a look at the new raw converter, but for now, what I've got suits my purpose.

When you open your raw file in photoshop you'll be presented with a separate screen from the raw converter, with it's own set of controls for adjusting your image.

From Raw Converter Edits

On the right are a series of controls that will allow you to adjust a number of things from the white balance to the exposure. Across the top of the control panel are a series of little buttons or icons, that when clicked will take you to other sections of the converter - controls for adjusting the light and dark portions of your images, very much like the native curves function in photoshop; settings to allow you to sharpen your image, and to remove chromatic abberations (affectionately known as purple fringe, but is often seen as red or blue); as well you'll find controls for hue and saturation showing all the colours, allowing you to adjust the saturation of individual colours, and their intensity; if your lens has a tendency to vignette the corners (where the outer edges or corners look darker than the rest of the image) you can also make adjustments to this, you can calibrate your camera colours, and save settings from one image in a series so you can use the same settings on the balance of the images.

In many cases, once processed from the raw converter images may not need anything further. This of course depends on what you intend for the image use, but straight forward portraits or stock objects shot on white backgrounds are likely to need nothing more.

The main panel gives you some control over the white balance - in the drop down box are options like "as shot", or "auto", or "sun, shade, cloudy" and a few others like tungsten and fluorescent. Selecting one of the options can change the look of the overall tone of your image.

Below that the temperature and tint controls also allow you to change whether the image looks warm or cool.

The exposure slider allows you to correct your exposure if you were a little off. Keep in mind when you do this, if you underexposed the shot by too much when you shot it, you are most likely going to create some noise by adjusting the exposure. How much will depend on the camera make & model and it's censor type.

The recovery slider will allow you to reduce the exposure in areas that are over exposed, but like the exposure slider these controls should be used carefully.

Fill light works a little like the fill light on a flash unit - sometimes helping you to get more even lighting between background and foreground, but it also reduces the contrast.

The slider for blacks darkens or lightens the blacks in the image, either creating more contrast (darkening blacks) or less contrast (lightening) blacks. Most of the balance of the controls work on the overall image, much the same as any similar control in an image editor.

I seldom use many of the controls on the main panel, preferring to gain a little more control by using the other sections available.

When you click the little icon on the top row that looks like a chart it will take you to the Tone Curve control panel. Here you have a lot more control. You can lighten the lights, tone down or brighten the highlights, darken or lighten the darks and shadows, all individually. This is usually a better option than using the exposure slider on the main panel. You have control over how the tones work together in your images. When you adjust these sliders you'll see the curve line on the chart change, and the histogram at the top will also change. The image is still open in the left hand side of the pane, so you'll see the effects of this on your image as you work.

Back at the top of the converter now, click on the little icon that looks like a triangle. This opens the panel where you can adjust the sharpness, and reduce the noise in your image (if there is any). I generally have the sharpening set to very low or OFF in my cameras, preferring to sharpen the image myself when it needs it. I seldom use this panel in the converter, preferring adobe's own sharpening functions for the little I use it, and using Neat Image for noise control where necessary. For home users, Neat Image has a free version. I recommend you try it - if you plan to use it for commercial purposes, then purchase the Pro + version as this comes with a plugin for photoshop.

Remember that these adjustments can just as easily be changed back to the original settings. When you open your raw image into photoshop, you would save it either as a .tiff, .psd or .dng file if you want to keep the 16-bit format, or as a .jpg if you switch to 8-bit, so you can try the sharpening and noise reduction in the raw converter on your own and decide whether or not it provides enough for your purposes.

The next icon (looks like squiggly lines) brings up the HSL/Grayscale dialogue box. This box has three sections - the first one it opens on is the "Hue" option. This controls the over hue of the image. I seldom adjust this, but it can be useful if you want the image to be more blue or more green - you can adjust each of these colour sliders independently. When you click on the saturation tab an almost identical box will show, but this controls the saturation of each of those colours in your image. You can increase the saturation of yellows, oranges and reds in an autumn image, for instance, without changing the saturation of the greens and blues. Or you can decrease the saturation of yellows in grass that's too bright, without affecting the other colours in an image. This is another of the adjustment boxes I use most often. Clicking on the luminance tab brings another identical box, but this one allows you to adjust how light or how dark each of the colours is. You can darken the reds to almost burgundy without affecting how bright your yellows are. You can darken the blues if your sky is slightly over exposed. This too is a useful tool for me.

The option you'll see in this section is at the top - there is a little box that allows you to convert the image to grayscale. But it's much more than just converting to grayscale. The lightness and darkness of each of the colours can be adjusted in grayscale, allowing you to select whether the blues are light or dark. So in the black and white version you can add drama to a sky full of clouds by darkening the blue tones, or make the entire sky white by lightening them.

If you follow the link here you'll get a picasa album with larger versions of these images - this also shows the other sections of the HSL/Grayscale box - just page through the album to see the other sections.

The next section is where you can remove vignetting from the corners of your images, or control the fringe (chromatic abberations) on your images. If you look at an image up close that has areas of high contrast - for instance between the sky and a series of tree tops you might notice an acqua or red line around the edges of the trees. In some cases this line may show as purple, or blue too. You can reduce this effect by using the controls in this section. When the fringing is minor in nature, you can usually remove it altogether.

The vignetting has two controls - one to select where the vignetting centers and one to decrease the vignetting, but for those who like to add vignettes to an image, you can also do that here. Playing around with center slider will show you fairly quickly what it does.

The balance of the two panels you'll find are the camera calibration panel - I don't use this, so you'll have to explore it on your own. And the panel where you can save and name your settings, and it is fairly self-explanatory.

Below you'll see the image from the first photo adjusted and processed completely in the raw converter. All that remains now is to print it. No further editing is really necessary.

From Raw Converter Edits

The final photo shows the above image converted to grayscale and adjusted in the raw converter - also ready to go with no more processing.

From Raw Converter Edits

A Wedding Favor Template

A couple of weeks back I wrote on do-it-yourself wedding favors for brides on a budget, and how photography can be used to assist the couple.

In that article I mentioned a "green" alternative to the standard wedding favor - a seed packet for seeds you have either purchased in bulk or harvested yourself. Back when I wrote that, I had intended to include a template for a seed packet, but time constraints prevented me from creating one. (See the end of the article for the psd template link.)
I finally managed to finish the seed packet template so I'm uploading the .pdf file for those of you who might want to use it. In the template you'll find the seed packet pattern, along with a new photo frame I created for the front, as well as a cover image. The cover image should be replaced with one of your own, and you can opt to not use the frame at all simply by turning of it's visibility. The text used in this template is "formal script" but you can select any text you prefer. Each section of text is on it's own layer within the psd file, so you can move, change or delete it.

It's fairly simple to use and of course now that you have the package template you could use any of your own images to create the front. If you really need to slash the budget and have lots of time, then print your own on heavier quality presentation paper. If you have less time and more money, once you have your design completed, save it as a .jpg file and take to a nearby printer and ask them to print as many as you need.

You can download the free Wedding Seed Packet from this link.

It's a short post today, but hopefully a useful one.

Wedding Blogs & Photographers – Do They Go Together?

This of course depends on what the question means. Many wedding photographers will use a blog for exposure, and for sharing tips and other articles. But that’s not what we mean when we say “Wedding Blog”.

In this case, it’s a blog for a bride and groom to allow their friends and family to keep up with their wedding plans. Lots of couples do this today. Some use free wedding websites, some use free blogs, and some might even be lucky enough to have a Wedding Planner who provides such a service.
But a photographer who provides a free wedding blog is probably going to be a pretty rare occurrence. Mostly because, well photographers are photographers and not usually web designers.
With the world of free blogs out there just waiting to be created (see the end of the article for a list of free blog spaces) a small home-based wedding photography business can easily opt to provide a free wedding blog for their clients. Keep in mind, in these articles we are dealing with very small “on the side” businesses and lower-budget weddings and if the only difference between the couple choosing your business over the closest competitor’s business is the fact that you’ve got the ability to offer them a wedding blog set-up, then for some of you, it might make sense to delve into this.
In fact the only thing it should cost you is the time to set it up, and if you handle your wedding blog service right, it won’t take much of that.
Two free blog services that make this an easy proposition are Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. Since blogger allows you to edit the html and CSS and create custom blog templates, it would probably get my vote over the free wordpress blogs. Wordpress has some nice options and functions, but you are limited in how much change you can make and have no access to make template changes.
Another benefit to blogger is that you can pretty much use any template that was designed for blogger, and if you run a search for “free wedding templates for blogger” you can find quite a lot of nice templates all ready to upload, such as this ivory wedding template.
Initially, creating your first basic blog layout and setup designed primarily for weddings is going to take you some time – depending on how much editing you want to do, it could take you from half an hour to a couple of days, but once you’ve got a site design that you like, that will be the basic set up for every free blog you set up. You simply will change the image designs for the header, and the blog names whenever you set up a new free blog for a couple. That should take you anywhere from a few minutes to 20  minutes.
Below is a sample site I set up in about half an hour (the picture will take you to the site to see the page set ups)

There are a couple of ways you can set this up – either all under one umbrella using a single account you create specifically for that purpose or setting up a separate account for each couple.
A blogger account for instance would allow you to set up hundreds of blogs in one place. For each individual blog, you can determine who has access to edit that blog, and you send the couple an “invitation” to author the blog. Once they accept, they become an admin or author, depending on how you set it up. They only have access to the blog they receive the invitation for, not for any of the other blogs under your umbrella. This method would make it simple for you to keep track of the one’s you’ve set up, and allows you to create multiple blogs in advance, simply changing the names at a later date when a blog is assigned to a couple.
The other method is simply to open a gmail account (free) for the couple – in this case we’ll use John and Jane. So the gmail account you open might be johnandjaneswedding @ gmail . com. Then you can open a blogger account using that email, and set up a blog using the template design you created. Then you turn the email address and password, along with the log in information over to the couple, who carries it on from there.
Both Blogger and Wordpress offer the opportunity for the couple to purchase a domain name, and point that at their free blog, so if the couple decides to buy the domain name john and janes wedding . com, the free blog can easily be converted to their domain with a minimum of fuss.
Creating a blog on blogger using an blogger account created for the couple also gives them access to Picasa Web Albums. All the images uploaded to the blog are stored there. This means that you could place additional wedding-related images – your own selection of “stock images” you create for this purpose, thereby giving your couple options to change images or add other images to their blog. Picasa also provides free slideshows, easily inserted into the blog.
In either case, one of the things you will require are simple instructions on how to edit the blogs and log into their accounts. This is something you can do either by writing your own simple instructions, or giving the couple the address of Blogger’s help center. My own inclination would be write instructions that even a non-web person could follow and keep photocopies to hand out.
Once you have turned the blog over to the couple, your responsibility for it should end. From there on out, the couple maintains the blog on their own – blogger is very easy to learn, which much help available, so even “newbies” to web blogging shouldn’t have any problem using it.
Some things to keep in mind – the couple may already have started their own blog or website, or might want something more than a blog. In that case you can keep a list of free wedding websites to point them to, instead. And of course, this makes it much simpler for you.
To be prepared for this, simply keep a list of wedding websites that offer both a free website, and/or the ability to update to a premium website. There are many such sites available as you can see by this list, which took me less than five minutes to find:
Momentville
Wedding Announcer
Wedding Space
Big Day Page
Our Bride Space
Wedding Project
If you do weddings as a sideline to supplement your income, and you are a photographer who deals often with couples whose budget is very limited, this might be an option that is worth thinking about.
Free Blog Spaces

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