Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Focus (Photo of the Week project #7)

And now for something completely different: clothed in studio!

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Dreamy Post Processing

1. Duplicate the base layer (command-j on the Mac)
2. Set the duplicated layer blend mode to soft light
3. Apply a Gaussian blur to the duplicated layer (35 pixels in this case)
4. Duplicate the new layer and set the blend mode to screen
5. Knock down the opacity of the new layer (here it's 45%)
6. Add a Hue / Saturation layer and knock back the saturation (-15 in this case)
7. Add a Curves layer and put a bit of a S-curve to it
8. Select the background layer, go to the curves palette and command-click on the RGB channel to select the luminosity
9. Duplicate the background layer to create a luminous layer
10. Apply a Gaussian blur to the luminous layer (4 pixels here)
11. Adjust the opacity to suit

Of course, sometimes you follow a recipe and decide afterwards that you don't necessarily like the entire recipe. In this case, I decided to turn off the second duplicated layer after the fact and tweaked the curves layer a bit.

Here's the before:



And the after:


Another technique for the books. As with all effects, your mileage may vary and really depends on the subject matter.

Duality



Admittedly I haven't been ranting much of late -- likely due to lack of time and energy to do so. I suppose the other reason is that simply very little has attracted my attention of late. One could possibly go on about the inaneness of Canada and the US both heading to the polls in the fall or some other world event but really this is not a place to talk politics or religion or anything remotely civic minded.

As for photography?

Well, one of the reason for the slow down of posts is simply the lack of time means that I'm also not shooting as much. I suppose if anything, I'm anxious to try more variety, more different imagery. This is post is an example of that -- more photomanipulation than normal.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Motion Study (Photo of the Week project #6)



I should probably amend the title but I think I'm actually getting back to doing this once a week. After a bout of family events and general busyness I think I'm back for a bit. I'll be doing a bit of traveling in October and November (alas -- nothing photography related).

This is an experiment in motion and post-processing. Normally I don't incorporate much of either but that's the whole raison d'etre for this particular project.