Making Your Own Brushes In Photoshop

A friend was checking out a few of my recent images and asked how the backgrounds were made.  Just flip down through the last couple of posts (you might have to dig down four or five) to see what he was looking at.  I explained that the backgrounds came from Brushes made from shots of clouds I had taken.   To get the effect you see in the images, cloud brushes are just about the ideal thing to use.  Clouds aren’t solid.  Clouds have texture.  Clouds are readily available.  If there aren’t any today, look out the window tomorrow.  Sooner or later you find some interesting clouds.  I keep Folders of clouds.  I Keyword every cloud image so I can pull them up quickly in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (any version).  I pop them into scenes that have bald skies and I use them to make Brushes for creative backgrounds.  Clouds are useful little suckers.  Today’s (main) image is a Brush I made this morning to be able to capture the steps to make a cloud Brush.  To follow along, hit the “Read More”.
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Wednesday Q&A: Is It Time To Put The Kelby Group On The Shelf?

Based on the title you may think this post will be a rant about Kelby Media, Photoshop TV, Kelby Training, and The Grid and their support of Adobe Photoshop CC (PSCC).  It’s not.  They make a lot of good points about who will benefit from PSCC, who might want to think twice about it and who should probably stay away.  No, it’s about the fact that even the esteemed folks working with Kelby are beginning to show their age as far as Photoshop goes.  One thing that bugs me is how they’re missing the point on Smart Objects.  They say ‘oh, I open all my images in PS as Smart Objects’.  They’ll do a couple things and then say that their next step is to use the antiquated CTRL/ALT(OPT)/SHIFT/E salute to put a composite on the top of the stack before going on to other steps.  Doing the C/A/S/E thing breaks the link between the Smart Object and the original RAW image.  I don’t understand why they think that’s the way they should go.  Drives me nuts.  To find out how it makes me crazy, hit the “Read More”.
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Using Photoshop As A Planning Tool

Today’s image is more of a “my thoughts” type of thing, rather than some sort of wonder art.  It show how I approach an image in the develop process.  You only see one “markup” on the left.  There were more as the image was “developed”.  Why?  How?  The “why” is easy.  It’s to create a plan for the image and give a set of “attack” plans.  The “how” is equally easy.  Even though all the work of the image was done using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Beta (LR5B), the planning is done with Adobe Photoshop CS6 (any version of PSCS or PSE could have been used).  The only reason for using an application with a Layers function is to be able to put separate thoughts on separate Layers.  Each Layer was “assigned” a different color for its Pencil Tool (B).  The Pencil function in PS or PSE is found grouped with the Brush Tool (B).  Using separate Layers lets each set of thoughts stand only or they can be seen as a whole (as in the markup).  To check out the sequence of thoughts, hit the “Read More”.

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Wednesday Q&A: Photoshop CC - Yes, Or Kick It To The Curb

Today’s image is another that’s just eye candy.  I might offer a paragraph at the end, but the news out there about Adobe Photoshop CC is far more important.  So, Adobe’s going subscription for either the whole shebang (all [almost all] Adobe applications) for $49.95 per month or $19.95 on a per application basis.  I use Adobe Photoshop CS6 and (at the moment) Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Beta.  I’ve kept up with all the updates since Adobe Photoshop 7.  I don’t use any of the other Adobe applications.  No In Design, no Illustrator, no Premier, Muse, etc.  I understand that LR will continue to be a consumer product, not subscription (at this time).  It’s come down to being available for $79.00 at most outlets in the USA.  Version updates (CS3 to CS4, CS4 to CS5, etc) have been about every 18 to 24 months and have cost $199.00 for each version.  That works out to somewhere between $8.00 and $11.00 per month.  Adobe has a one year “special offer” for those who are up to date (using CS6) for $10.00.  That works out right in the ballpark of what we’ve been paying for the past ten years or so.  If they make that a permanent subscription price for plain old PS (not an Extended Version), I’d sign up today and happily pay by the month.  I’ve never used 3D, I don’t believe I need 3D.  If I had it available to me I might find it to be a wonderful thing, but I don’t think so.  Hopefully Adobe will figure out a slightly more tiered pricing structure during this first year.  I do have a couple thoughts on what I “might” do if I would have to go up to $19.95 a month for PS CC only.  Hit the “Read more” to find out what my thoughts are.
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When Can't You Snap The Shutter?

I was giving my sister-in-law a ride down to one of the New York airports this morning and she was telling me this story about how she had gotten in trouble taking some pictures over at the local mall.  Now, mind you, she was taking pictures of the swans swimming around in the retention ponds outside the mall, beyond the parking lots.  A security guard (???) went over to her and said she couldn’t take pictures, it was against the law.  Yeah, right.  Today’s image presents sort of the two sides to that story.  It is a photograph, taken with a digital camera and “photoshopped” to look like a sketch.  The house is the Mark Twain House at Nook Farm in Hartford Connecticut.  It’s on private property as is the mall in this discussion.  If today’s image were a “real” sketch, the artist could have sat at the same spot, put up an easel and sketched away.  (Would have been a really nice pencil sketch, but you can probably find a hundred artists who could do it justice.)  At times, the (whatever it is) Nook Farm Association or Mark Twain Society or something invites/sponsors/encourages artists to do “en plein air” work in the yards.  I don’t know that the mall does the same type of thing, but it’s certainly something they “could” do.  So, the question is:  Canvas? Yes. Camera? No.  Hit the “Read More” to find out what’s up. 

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A Rant On Using Manual Exposure Mode On Your Camera

Raw images are notoriously dull.  Straight out of the camera there’s no sharpening, no contrast or color adjustment, no here’s Nikon’s (or Canon or Sony or whoever) best guess as to what the finished image should look like.  Take a look at this past Monday’s post.  It has a before (right out of the camera) and after (the lead image) and demonstrates where an image can be taken to by developing a RAW image.  Typically photographers fall into a few categories.  Those who shoot exclusively RAW and will develop an image.  Those who shoot exclusively JPG and let the camera make the decisions.  Those who consider what they’re shooting and why and decide either to shoot RAW or JPG.  If they’re shooting personal stuff that might become a portfolio piece, they shoot RAW.  If they’re shooting a local high school baseball game, they shoot JPGs to get the shots to the newspaper or school without needing to do additional work.  Then there’s another, rather odd duck, sort of shooter.  He/she will shoot everything in RAW.  If the images will be developed or printed as is, they still shoot RAW.  It’s rather bizarre.  Another case would be something that I came across the other night.  I was out doing some test shooting with some friends.  We have a night shoot coming up and were trying to get the parameters down.  Somehow the subject came up and one of the women said she only shoots in Manual mode.  She was very proud of that fact.  Now, she has one of the more expensive cameras out there.  I don’t understand why someone would buy an expensive computer (the camera) and then use it as if it was a shoebox.  Knowing her, she’s just not that capable enough to determine exposure just by looking at a scene.  It appears she’ll take a shot, say “oops, it’s too dark (or light)”, fiddle with the settings, try another shot and keep going.  Again, another bizarre thing to do to get an image.  I understand why she doesn’t shoot sports.  As we were shooting she would make comments like “I was at F10, but it was too dark.  I’ll switch to F 9 and try again”.  Really, was she so close to a great exposure that she was changing by 1/3 stops to get the absolute perfect exposure?  No, she was closed to 3 stops off than 1/3 of a stop.  I suggested she change it by a full stop.  She said she had, from F 10 to F9.  Where’s a rim shot when you need it?  (Music term, not photography.)  To find out my thoughts on using manual settings on a camera, hit the “Read More”.

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Wednesday Q&A: Import Issue In Lightroom For A Friend

I was out with a group of photographers last night and a friend asked me a question about importing images into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4. (I believe he said he hadn’t gone up to LR5 Beta yet.)  His file system is a date system, where the first level folder is the year.  The next level down is the month.  He said he was very faithful to Keywording.  If you’re absolutely on top of Keywording you could dump all your images into one giant folder and depend on Keywords to find any images you want.  Trick is you’d have to be 100% true to Keywording every image.  Naturally you can do it by the batch.  Highlight everything that has to do with the same subject and add the keywords to all of them at once.  You can also use the Paint spray can found at the bottom of the Grid View to apply Keywords just by “spraying” over images.  As with almost anything coming from Adobe, there’s a dozen different ways to accomplish a task.  The issue this friend had was ending up with a duplicate year folder filled with the same thing he puts in the folder he created.  To learn what the problem might be, hit the “Read More”.
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