An interesting feature of the latest version of Photoshop is the ability to use the alignment and merge capabilities that Photoshop uses for panoramas and HDR to extend the depth of field of your images. We look at how it stacks up. We are still coming to terms with the features in Photoshop CS4, and indeed in the rest of the suite. One that intrigued us was the ability to extend the depth of field of your images. So we decided to make this the feature we would have our first deep look at. Extended DOF makes use of the image align and merger capabilities that are well used for panoramas and HDR imaging. In this use you load up a series of images taken with different points of focus into layers … Read entire article »

A day of boredom caused me to play with my camera gear and see if I could do something different. Here are the resulting floral photographs. Below are some flower images I took using a technique I have documented over on Experimental Digital Photography of using portable flash and a wireless or wired connection to your camera and masking (see the link at the end of the article). The resulting images, I feel, have some real potential and I will be doing more experimentation with it. I’ll let the images do most of the talking for themselves. When the lighting comes up through the green base the color of the light is affected. Sometimes you will get a real hotspot if the part of the flower that touches the hole in the mask is … Read entire article »

Lately lots of questions about the law and how it applies to photographers have been appearing on the mailing lists I belong to. Here are some resources. There are many legal issues that can crop up for photographers and people using photographs in artwork or for other purposes. Two great resources for these questions are some web sites run by lawyers who are also photographers. The first is Bert P. Krages web site.He is a lawyer who is also a photographer and has prepared a PDFdocument of your rights to photograph that you can carry with youin case of problems. It is for the US but a link to one for the UK is onhis site. The other is http://www.photoattorney.com/,which contains great information. A blog by a lawyer, Carolyn Wright,there is great information … Read entire article »

In this tutorial we examine how to create a web page by using the slice tools in Photoshop and ImageReady. In this tutorial we are going to use Photoshop and ImageReady to create a web page using rollover buttons and the slice tool. Note that this is only one way of many that can achieve the same result but it does illustrate the use of the facilities in Photoshop and ImageReady. Note this is a long page. 1.    Prepare your background image to the right size.2.    Position guides to make creation and positioning of content and slices easier3.    Create content for the page design4.    Place your initial text which is going to form your buttons5.    Switch to ImageReady6.    Use the Slice Tool to generate slices for all parts of the page that … Read entire article »

Convert Color Images To Monochrome – Which Channel To Watch Monochrome, black and white or grayscale images are sometimes far more effective than color ones. Ansel Adams’ work is a good example, as is a Hitchcock movie. However, since most film shot is color and all digital cameras capture full color images, there is usually a requirement to convert the images from color to monochrome using your favorite image-editing program. As we shall see in this article some ways of doing this are better than others. Part 2 will cover how to re-introduce selected color into an image. When professional photographers shoot monochrome film they rarely do so without a colored filter attached. The reason for this is that film responds differently than one might expect. Film (and the CCD in your camera or scanner) is more and less sensitive to different … Read entire article »

The hand coloring of images is an old process, but doing it digitally offers so many advantages. Digital Hand Coloring Digital hand coloring is a different process, though similar. Here we have two options. The first involves a direct digital analogue of traditional hand coloring, where we use the paintbrushes to apply color to an image using a blending mode that allows the underlying tonal values to show through. The second involves the full use of PhotoShop’s selection and masking abilities to isolate parts of the image for color application. Let’s walk step by step through the first process. Digital Painted Hand Color Here is one sample process: 1.    Open your image to be hand colored in Photoshop. 2.    Convert it to grayscale if necessary, then convert to RGB. 3.    Adjust the contrast and brightness of the image to suit your aim. Use Adjustment Layers … Read entire article »

Split toning is where we get a different color effect in different parts of the image. Digital Split Toning Digitally we work exactly the same way as in the previous tutorials but we need at least two different color layers or adjustment layers. For this example we will use a warm and a cool tone. 1.    Put your monochrome image into RGB mode. 2.    Pick your warm color. 3.    Create a layer, fill it with the warm color and change the blending mode to color. 4.    Turn off this color layer. 5.    Pick a cool color and create a cool tone layer. Set the blending mode to color. 6.    Now what we need to do is to find a way to blend these two, so that the warm tone affects perhaps only the highlights and the cool tone only affects the shadow … Read entire article »