Digital Diversity

If your new to the world of DSLR’s like my self you will more than likely have purchased a camera body with a kit lens.  The latest kit lens tends to be the 18-55mm IS lens. This is a nice little lens that gives you a wide to mid zoom range. A lot of people will find this lens is a good place to start as you can take nice landscapes, scenes, snaps and event shots with it. It probably wont take you long till you wonder about extra lenses and read one of the many many many websites / forums where this subject is discussed. It can be fairly daunting and often make you feel your current lens is sub par. This article is intended to simply show you the starter lenses I have chosen that wont break the bank and give you a great place to start. The idea is to have some nice starter lenses that will get you going, then later when you work out what you use most you can then decide whether you want to upgrade to a lens that fits your needs better. Many people read these forums and websites and just decide on a £900 lens without really knowing if its for them. Then down the line they have these expensive lenses sitting there not being used.

So what lenses do I use?

I currently have 3 lenses. None of them broke the bank and all of them are of a reasonable quality that will give me nice results as long as I use them right. These Lenses are:

• Canon 18 – 55 mm f/3.5-5.6 IS (came with camera)
• Canon 55-250 mm F4-5.6 IS (£166 of amazon)
• Canon 50 mm F1.8 (£80 of amazon)
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In this third instalment of my Portrait re-touching Photoshop tutorials I will be talking about altering the hair. Hair is a big part of some ones over all look and simply changing the colour can give big impact to your photographs.

This tutorial will cover 2 areas. The first is removing stray hairs from around the head and face. The second is changing the colour.

For this tutorial I recommend you have an understanding of the following. Each subject is linked to the appropriate Photoshop tutorial
• Layers and Masks
• Adjustment layers
• Hue / Saturation adjustment layers
• Cloning and healing

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So you have been out taking photos of your family, friends or even for a client. You get home and you have plenty of decent single portrait shots but not a single decent group shot. They are looking the wrong way or pulling faces, generally not giving you the picture you want.

Well you can always save the day by replacing the heads using some other shots you took that did come out well.

Using a combination of photographs that already match up, colour & light correcting, some clever masking and a bit of cloning you should be able to get a result your happy with.

For this tutorial it will help if you already understand the following.
• Layers and masks
• Adjustment layers and colour correction
• Cloning and healing

The images in this tutorial are the property of Blueberry Moon Photography. She was kind enough to let me use these shots for this tutorial. These in no way represent her high standard of work. You can view her excellent photography work here.

Using this technique you can go from this

To this

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