HIGHLIGHTING EFFECTS
Sometimes, when I take a photo and am going over it in photoshop, I decide that I would like to highlight a certain area. In this picture above, I wanted to emphasize the center. I did this by making all the surrounding sections darker. I used a plug-in called Color Efex Pro and a filter called lighten/darker. This could also be done by created a duplicate layer on top. Darken it. Then soft erase out the center. It's pretty simple stuff but can really add the dramatic feel to the image.
COLOR DESATURATION
Sometimes when I want to shift focus on a picture, I alter the color composition. Sometimes a picture is too full of color and I want to bring the attention back to the subject. If I don't do a straight up black and white conversion, I do a desaturation treatment. In this case, I used a Color Efex Pro filter called Color Selector. It lets you retain some of the color of you picture but pulls out other parts of the spectrum. It's not like color filtering or sepia tinting. It is different, and in some cases works well.
(Now that I actually put them side by side, I am not sure which version I like better. It's not the first time that's happened.)
STYLIZED BLACK AND WHITE RESCUE
Sometimes you are looking through photos and see shots that didn't turn out the way you wanted and there are others that you don't think are workable at all. This photo is one of the latter. It was very cloudy and dark. I was in a hurry and did not get the settings right and ended up with a murky dark picture. Whenever I tried to brighten it up through various methods, it got way too grainy and noisy and did not look good. I then decided to go in a different direction. I added more grain, pumped up the gain, converted it to black and white and cropped it down to frame better. I then added a moderate vignette and called it good. I really like the way this one ended up, maybe even more because it was so hopeless to begin with. Below is the original shot.
SQUARE CROPPING
I tend to go back and forth on square cropping pictures. Sometimes it works really well and other times it cuts out too much. They are for certainly harder to get framed because finding square frames at anything over an 8x8 is difficult in most Stores. Michael's craft store often has frames on sale and is one of the only consistent places we have found square frames. Square framing picture projects work really well when you are doing a series of pictures and want to hang them all up in a row or in other shapes. The last set of square frames we bought were not made for pictures really. They were made for scrapbook pages and they turned out really well. In the end, let the picture dictate if and how you crop it. Some pictures to me just feel square and that is the way I make them. Sometimes it is just and accident. In the case of the picture above, I took the picture crooked and as I was trying to find a suitable crop. I was also trying to focus the picture on the people on the right, my friends. It felt too crowded. I then added a warming filter and the end result turned out quite pleasing.
HANDHELD HDR
We were pulling into my wife grandmother's house when I saw a great view of Mt. McLoughlin. I grabbed the 50D and thought I might try an HDR shot. I don't do these often, mainly because I am lazy and they take a lot more post production work but they can be pretty effective in getting a dynamic shot.
I got this shot by combining three exposures using the auto-bracketing feature of the camera. It takes a light, medium and dark exposure. It helps if you use a tripod because the more difference in shots, the harder they are to blend. Also, fast memory cards help as well because your camera will be able to write quicker to it. After I got the shots I wanted, I blended them together using a program called Photomatix. I then applied a slight vignette using the lens correction filter in Photoshop. This is not a perfect shot by any means but for on the fly with no tripod, it turned out pretty good. HDR shots often make good black and white images because of all the contrasting like this shot below.
MULTI SHOT PANS
Here is a panoramic shot that I put together from nine separate shots at the famous Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach. In Photoshop, use the automation photomerge tool. Make sure that you don't use any automated camera modes that auto select exposure and aperture. The little green box is not your friend. What will happen is that your pictures won't blend well in the merge because the settings will be different from shot to shot. Find the right settings in manual and stick with them and you should get a good result.
(Canon 50D, 55-250 EFS, f 5.6, ISO 200, 1/100, 250mm)
HIGH CONTRASTING
There are many people out there who are straight out of the camera people. They don't want to touch what comes off their memory card. It is what it is. That is not usually the way it turns out for me. I figure that your DSLR or point and shoot is already processing your image to a certain extent so why shouldn't I take that one or two steps further and get what looks good to my eyes. This photo is an example of how I treat most black and white shots. You can get the high contrast look a number of different ways. One way is to duplicate layer in photo shop and then set the new layer to overlay. From there, convert it to black and white and adjust the opacity of the top layer until it looks good. What I usually do is use a plug-in called Color Efex Pro and there is a dynamic contrast filter that I apply during the conversion. My overall photographic post-producing philosophy is make whatever looks good to you.
