Digital Diversity

I previously wrote an article on basic exposure blending. This was a basic guide on how to create multiple exposures using either exposure bracketing or a single RAW file and then blending them together. This tutorial is a more advanced version of this technique where you take one RAW shot that is exposed correctly for the land and then sky is recovered afterwards and saved as a second file. These 2 files can then be blended together using masks. To finish off, this tutorial will show you how to use photo filters to alter the light in your image.

For this tutorial it will help if you already now the following:
• Layers and Masks
• Photo Filters

This shot was taken from the top of the Scottish history museum. Its just a throw away shot really, not sharp and not that interesting but will be a good example to show off this technique.

(more…)

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

(more…)

There are 2 areas I want to cover here.

• My workflow from start to finish

• Do I really want to delete that shot?

What shots do you delete? Do you shoot Jpeg and keep them all? Do you shoot RAW, save just the keepers in RAW and Jpeg the rest? Do you keep all the RAWs? Do you delete all your out of focus and badly exposed shots but keep the rest?

We all have different ways of choosing what to delete and what to keep and sometimes it can be a hard decision. I have kept many pictures in the past that I will possibly never look at again. They just sit there on my hard drive taking up space. Only recently have I formed a solid set of rules for my self to abide to stop this happening. I have mentioned it before briefly but this is the work flow I tend to follow.
(more…)