The Weekly Wrap-up compiles interesting articles published this week on Photofocus. With our first entry into the new year, we taught you how to create a winter wonderland, how to get out of Auto, using V-flats with groups, Lightroom HDR Panoramas, a great printer for all use cases and working with creative boundaries. We hope you had a great first week of the new year!
How to create realistic snow in Photoshop - The problem with snow added in post-production is that it looks fake more often than not. That’s a shame because creating realistic snow is much easier than people would think. Listen to the Canadian girl and keep on reading to know once and for all the secret to create realistic snow in Photoshop. What’s wrong with fake snow? We’ve all seen pictures with snow. Some with real snow and some with dubious-white-copy-pasted-dots snow. Being a girl living in winter for half of the year, believe me, I know what snow should look like. If you want to add some, you might as well do it the right way — or the only thing people will see looking at your image will be how fake snow just destroyed another beautiful picture. Post-edited snow should add depth and ambiance to an image, not distract from it! Here’s my favorite technique to add snow to my winter pictures — and making it actually believable. 1. Open your image in Photoshop Just in case you missed it… it’s a Photoshop tutorial. 2. Create a new empty layer Go to the top menu and select Layer > New > Layer (or Shift+Cmd+N on Mac; Shift+Ctrl+N on Windows). 3. Brush in snow Plenty of websites offer free downloadable snow effect brushes. I got mine from Brusheezy, one called Snow and another Snow 2. Each one of them contains 15 brushes — it’s always good to have plenty of choices. (Needless to say, stay away from the “Snowflakes” type like this.) Pick a brush to your liking in the brush preset picker and choose white as the foreground color. Put the opacity at 100% to clearly see the effect (we’ll tweak it a little later). 4. Modify the layer That doesn’t look too bad but we can do better. Snow is not a fixed particle in the air. It moves with the wind, goes in all directions and has dimension. With the snow layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. A window will appear. You will be able to choose the angle and the distance of the pixels. You won’t see much in the small preview in the window but you will see it in real time on your picture as you play with the settings. Pick the settings the looks the best for the snow particles and the scene. I went for a -44° angle and a 30 pixels distance. Here is the result of my first snow layer. 5. Stack textures Now that you get the idea, you simply keep on stacking new snow layers. To optimize the realistic effect, change your brush and size on each one of them. I recommend at least a minimum of two different layers to create depth and movement. Change also the values of your Motion Blur filter and play with opacity. The more layers you add, the more you get a snowstorm look. 6. Clean key areas Once you are happy with the result, you’ll notice that your subject is probably a little lost beneath all that snow. Simply create a group with all your snow layers by selecting all of them and click Cmd+G (or Ctrl+G on Windows). Then, add a mask to it (see picture below). Pick your brush (a regular soft round brush) and paint on the mask with the black foreground color. This will allow you to remove snow from precise areas. Remember the basic rules Of course, there and dozens of other different ways to create realistic snow in all kind software. I just wanted to share with you the personal technique I’ve been using for the past years. Whatever technique you decide to go with, remember those basic rules: Size matters: Snowflakes come in many, many different shapes. The more you mix your brushes the more realistic it will look. Opacity: Mix the opacity of your layers to create a multidimensional effect. Blurriness: Snowflakes move with the wind. With the Motion Blur filter, you can create a light snowfall when adding little to no direction to it. And you can create a snowstorm by combining all kind of strongly angled and opposite directions. Density: The more layers you add, the heavier the snowfall will appear. Of course, it’s always magical to be able to take pictures while snow falls during winter. But just like we can’t decide when it will rain, sometimes we have to deal with what mother nature gives us — or not. I hope this will give you a hand on your next winterly escapade!
Portrait Tips: How to use V-flats to light a group - When you light a portrait, a good rule of thumb is that your light should be about the same size as your subject. That’s easy for a single individual where any softbox will work, but what about lighting a group of people? A light that big is hard to find. V-flats offer an easy way to make a large light that gives soft, even coverage for your group. You can use them to make soft light on the whole group, but you can also move your subjects around for different effects. V-flat as a modifier The V-flat is two large sheets (typically 7 or 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide, each) of white foam core taped together to make a V-shape if you viewed them from above. Just position your light in the middle of the V with the light shining toward the tape holding the boards together. Now when the flash fires, it shines into the V-flat and reflects all around inside the v and then shines out. That means that the little tiny flash head is now making a huge light shining out onto your subjects. You can adjust where the light aims by adjusting the wide portion of the V. You can also make the light larger or smaller by making the wide part of the V wider or narrower. The key thing to remember is that the light isn’t only pouring out of the opening in the V, but also the reflection of the white is illuminating them, too. A V-flat is probably the easiest large modifier to use and since it can be adjusted larger and smaller, it’s also one of the most versatile. For these portraits, I used it with a studio strobe, but it works just as well with a speedlight — the only difference is how much light the flash produces. I use the terrific tools from V-Flat World. Arrange the set I started here with the V-flat positioned about 8 feet away from my subjects and the V-flat set at about a 90-degree angle. Aim the center of the V-flat at the far side of the group of people so they get a little more light than the people nearer to it. The people closer are collecting more light on their skin and so aiming it across the group helps everyone appear the same brightness. Here’s a diagram of the whole setup. Since the surface of the V-flat is large, the light shining out is very soft and flattering. Modify the modifier As I mentioned above, you can alter the size of the opening and affect the size of the light. But you can also move your subjects in relation to the light and change the way the light reveals contours. Here, the subjects are positioned closer to the camera with the light coming more directly from the side. This setup yields a lot more drama. The light from the side accentuates the body’s contours. Shadows reveal the shape of your subject’s body and face. If you want the shadows on the face to be less dark, then move your subject away from the light a little and add a white reflector (which could be another V-flat) to the other side. Work it Start your shoot with the safe setup and then work it for some more creative lighting. You’ll find that the size of the V-flat makes it very forgiving and easy to use as a light. It’ll shine a gentle light across your group and that makes it easy to get soft light on the whole bunch. Then scoot your subjects closer to the camera and try some different looks. You’ll get a lot of variety with one simple lighting setup using V-flats. Portrait Tips come out each week, and you can see them all right here.
How to use Lightroom’s new Photomerge: HDR Panorama - Making panoramas is a wonderful way to photograph a scene with the best perspective. Shooting brackets for HDR is a wonderful way to get the best exposure for a scene. So why not do both? I’ve been doing both for several years, but it’s always taken a lot of thought and process on the computer to get the pictures all put together. Do you do the HDR first, or stitch the panorama first? Lightroom’s Classic’s latest update brought the two together, and it’s pretty awesome. Lightroom has processed HDR brackets and panoramas separately for several years. Having them together in one place is convenient and powerful. Is it good? Lightroom does a good panorama — it’s not the best thing out there, but it’s in a tool you already own and it’s extremely convenient. It works well, but it’s a little bit slow. Still, it’s fine. Lightroom also does a good HDR — it’s not as powerful or as creative as Aurora HDR, but again, it’s built-in. My favorite thing about both of these tools is that they output a DNG file which retains full white balance control and camera profile options. This new HDR Panorama is a compilation of the two tools. The results appear to be exactly as good as they have ever been from Lightroom, just combined. The biggest drawback for me is that it’s slow. It takes a while to cook these complex files. But you can speed it up a little, as I’ll discuss below. Select the frames In Lightroom’s Develop module, select all the pictures that belong in your HDR panorama. This could be a lot of pictures. If you shoot brackets of seven pictures each one stop apart and then do a four-frame panorama, you’re looking at 28 frames to select. Using all those pictures is what takes so much time. Save time by using fewer frames from your brackets. There’s a good chance that using only the darkest, middle and brightest frames from your brackets will yield as good a result as using all seven frames, but it’ll process much faster. You could potentially reduce the number of frames in your pano, but you should do that while shooting. You only need to overlap twenty to thirty percent. If you’re overlapping eighty percent of your image with the next image, you could shoot fewer frames and save stitching time. Use Photo Merge After you’ve selected your frames, just right-click on one of them and choose Photo Merge > HDR Panorama. Once the preview is generated, you can choose from which style of stitching looks best for your picture. I don’t have any secret to which Projection (Perspective, Cylindrical, or Spherical) looks best under which circumstance — just try each one. Uncheck the box for Auto Crop and try out the Boundary Warp slider instead. As you turn your body or your tripod while shooting the pano, you probably end up moving a little bit crookedly, leaving white space above and below on at least one side of the picture. Also, the different Projections will leave different amounts of white space at the edges as they change the distortion of the picture. Boundary Warp automatically fills in that space with the existing picture and it’s amazing how well it works. Remember that it’s distorting the picture to fill in the empty space and don’t just set it to 100% all the time. You can always crop it without distorting. If you choose the Create Stack option, it’ll take all the frames you used and collapse them into a stack in the library so that they don’t all show all the time. I like this feature because it keeps the library neater and easier to navigate. Now just click the Merge button and go get a snack. Finish the file You can finish this picture just as you would any other picture. You can even send it out to Aurora HDR and Luminar for more creative control (check out how to use Aurora on a single file right here). But having the option to stitch both the HDR and the panorama at the same time inside Lightroom is pretty cool and saves some of the processing headaches. I’m not sure it’s faster to do them this way, but until Aurora HDR starts stitching panos, I’ll probably be utilizing this tool frequently.
Epson SureColor P800 provides superb color, sharpness in a small footprint - I’ll be honest — up until November, I had never used a photo printer, let alone owned one. I always just ordered from my local lab, as the number of prints I was ordering was so low. But as friends and family wanted to get some prints, and I wanted to finally fill my walls with some artwork, I knew it was time to get a printer. After visiting PhotoPlus Expo in October, Epson sent me the SureColor P800 printer for review. When I received it, I saw that it was really the perfect size for my needs. Allowing me to print up to 17″ wide, I could print small and medium-sized prints. Specs The Epson SureColor P800 is an inkjet printer that prints at a maximum resolution of 2800×1440 dpi, and has a maximum print size of 17×22″ for sheet media. It prints an 8×10″ in 113 seconds and offers borderless printing at up to 17″ wide. It comes with an eight-channel drop-on-demand Epson MicroPiezo AMC Print Head and has nine ink slots to hold Epson’s UltraChrome HD pigment-based inks. Each ink cartridge holds 80ml of ink, and the printer features 180 nozzles per ink color. It features an Advanced Black & White mode and also has an optional adapter for 17″ wide roll media. It offers USB 2.0, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity. First impressions Once I set up the printer and connected it to my Mac, I went through a few photos in my Lightroom catalog to run through as test prints. Once I figured out how to print borderless, I printed a few landscape scenes. The color here was spot-on. It matched what I saw on my computer screen, and really popped off the paper. What’s more, the sharpness was really great, providing a great sense of detail throughout the photograph. The blacks were black, and the whites were white — it was almost like I was looking at my OLED television set. For this review, I tried a few different types of paper, including Epson’s Ultra Premium Luster, Hot Press Bright, Velvet Fine Art and Metallic Glossy. Each type of paper brought its own characteristics into the photograph. The Hot Press Bright, for instance, is a heavy textured paper with a matte finish that’s great for black and white photographs. Whereas the Ultra Premium Luster and Metallic Glossy really make colors pop for landscapes and portraits, as it has a glossy finish. While using the main sheet media loader, I didn’t come across any issues. But using the manual feeder for the fine art paper did prove to be a little difficult at first. After my first paper jam, I was able to figure out the loading of the paper, but I needed to do a little extra work in the Printer dialog before I printed. I found the printer to be pretty fast. Photo printers take quality over quantity, meaning that even after you hit the print button, it might take the printer a minute or so to switch gears (especially if you’re switching types and sizes of paper). But once it was ready, I did not find myself waiting long for a print to finish. If nothing else, it’s way better than the two-day wait, or longer, that you’d get from a print lab! How the prints held up I tried a variety of different tests on the prints, including subjecting them to water, scratching and rubbing. While no prints are invincible, I found that the prints I made held up very well. I waited approximately 15 minutes after printing to run my tests, to allow for some drying to occur. Rubbing on the paper produced some minor smudges on the Hot Press Bright and Velvet Fine Art paper, but none of the others. Scratching with scissors produced some smudge-like marks on these as well, and white scratch marks appeared if I scratched hard enough. Water drops, and even holding the prints under my sink with the water on, had no effect on the print. Quality As I mentioned, I’m blown away with the color, sharpness and other aspects of what this printer produced. It’s a great printer no matter what you like to photograph, and where you are at in your career. With my Ireland prints, it made me feel like I was looking outside a window at the beautiful landscapes all over again! And the fact that the prints hold up extremely well is just icing on the cake. The Epson SureColor P800 printer is a great, compact photo printer with big results. It’s small enough to fit easily in a home office and large enough to produce some larger print sizes. It retails for $1195.00, but a $300 mail-in rebate is available through Jan. 31, 2019. Click here for current pricing.
Five steps to get out of Auto mode - When just starting out in photography the typical person will begin their journey with the camera set to Auto. Using this mode tells the camera to choose the ISO, shutter speed, aperture, flash and focus. To be honest, the Auto mode has gotten much better over the years, and it can really lead to nice photographs. But the photographer still needs to think about composition and focal length. There is so much more to photography than simply clicking the shutter button and moving along. It’s an art and with the art comes choices. Decisions have to be made for the creative endgame. Each decision you make when setting up a photograph has an effect on something else. For example, a higher ISO means more sensitivity to light which means you can use faster shutter speeds or smaller apertures. But it also means more noise or grain in your photograph. For the rest of this article, I am going to share my advice to get out away from Auto step by step. Step 1: Switch to Program mode The P mode on your camera is similar to the Auto mode where it will choose your aperture and shutter speed. However, typically unless your camera is also set to Auto ISO, you will have to choose your ISO, and whether to use the built-in flash. Depending on your camera and its lens, you might have the ability to switch to manual focus while in P mode as well. The P in this mode stands for Program and is intended to provide slightly more flexibility of control to the automatic exposure. In fact, in P mode you can even use exposure compensation, which looks like +/- on most cameras. Using exposure compensation allows you to digitally raise or lower the exposure from what the camera chooses. (This button can be used in manual modes too.) Program mode is a good step away from Auto as it allows you more creative control over your photograph. But it’s still technically automatic, so let’s keep stepping away from that, shall we? Step 2: Switch to Aperture Priority Aperture Priority is the mode on your camera that allows you to set the aperture of your lens. But while in that mode, the camera will decide on the shutter speed. While in Aperture Priority, your camera acts like Program mode, but with even more control because of what I just stated above. This means that you can still control the ISO if you want, you still control flash if you want and you can even use Exposure Compensation if you want. But you cannot control the shutter speed. That is what you give up by using this mode. An example of when you might consider using Aperture Priority is a portrait outdoors. If it is bright enough your camera will automatically pick a fast shutter speed to go along with whatever Aperture you specify. Switching to Aperture Priority will unlock new potential because now you’re deciding the depth of field of your photographs. You can choose if the background will be slightly blurry, or extremely blurry. Neat, right? Step 3: Switch to Shutter Priority Just like in Aperture Priority, this mode is partially Program mode and partially Manual. Shutter Priority is exactly as it sounds. You are giving yourself control over the shutter speed of your camera. But like Aperture Priority, you’re letting your camera control something for you. In this case of Shutter Priority, you’re letting your camera decide on the aperture to be used. An example of when Shutter Priority might come in handy is a sports game. If your child is playing soccer you can set your shutter speed at 1/1000 and either choose a low ISO or put your camera in Auto ISO. Then the camera will choose the aperture to go along with the frame. But the great part is that at 1/1000 you’re unlikely to have any blur in the motion of your photos. Especially if your child is running after a ball. So the advantage is control over movement in your photo, but you give up the depth of field. Because your camera might pick a shallow depth of field (more background blur) when you might want something deeper (less background blur). Step 4: Learn more about cameras Experiment with scene modes, if your camera has it, but do this only to pay attention to what settings are turned on for each of the modes. For example, portrait mode will pop up the flash and turn on red-eye reduction. It will also try to use a small aperture whenever possible. Now I want you to browse the Photofocus website, head over to YouTube and attend some photography workshops. Learn everything you can about aperture, ISO and shutter speed. You can learn for free, so please don’t skip. Once you increase your knowledge, it’s time to put it to the test. Experiment — especially if you use a digital camera. One advantage of digital is you’re not wasting film and not paying every time you click the shutter button. It’s OK to make mistakes because you can learn from them. Step 5: Switch to Manual mode Now that you’ve experimented with Program, Shutter and Aperture modes, you should have an understanding of how more of your camera settings work. You should now have a better understanding of: Aperture Shutter Speed ISO Flash Exposure Compensation Focus Focal lengths And so much more! Don’t end your training here, though. Keep experimenting, keep learning and keep making art. That’s the only way you’ll learn.
Limit yourself to learn - Limit yourself. With all the options we have in photography today why is this important? We get caught up in the big picture, the gear, the “rules,” the latest and greatest apps, plug-ins and software and it can all be quite overwhelming. How do you possibly learn all this stuff? How does this particular thing help me be a better photographer? Set limits One way to become a better photographer is to limit yourself. There are many ways to do this. Choose one area This can be your home, your backyard, a local park. The thing is to go there and look around. What do you notice, anything you’ve never noticed before? Slow down, breathe, take in the scenery, the sights, sounds and smells. All of this becomes part of the images you create. Think about how a child would see the same location — from their point of view, from their innocence, from their play, from their wonder and imagination. Choose one lens Pick one lens. I know, I know for some of you this is very difficult. Use your 50mm, your 100mm macro (don’t even shoot macro with it) or pick one focal length and stick to it with your telephoto lens. Be creative. Shoot everything at 84mm. Why not? Why? It will force you to choose compositions and subjects in a different way than if you have a wider or more zoomed point. Want to force the issue further? Leave your camera bag at home. Only carry your body and that lens. Seriously, the panic attack will subside. These images were shot with my Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. Choose one subject It can be anything. A flower, car, fence, barn, grass, sculpture, tree — anything and everything is a potential subject. Spend time with it, walk around, change your level of sight. Lay on the ground, stand above it, shoot it straight on. Get under it. All of this forces you to look at your subject differently. Shoot it wide, shoot it close, shoot the entire thing, shoot sections of it. There are so many options, open your mind, use your imagination. The sky’s the limit. (Shoot the sky!) Limit yourself to one spot Now stop! Don’t move. Really. Take all of your images in a set amount of time from exactly where you planted your feet. You can twist and turn your body, you can look up or down, you can crouch or stand on tiptoes but you cannot move your feet. What can you see in this limited space? Get creative. By limiting our options we force our minds to create, we force our imagination to work, to think of new ways, new ideas, new options to get an image we want or even to create an image we have never even thought of before. Next time you’re out, try one or all of these then share your work with us. We’d love to see what our readers are creating and how you’re all putting our tips and tricks in action!
