So I stayed up a little late

So I stayed up last night til midnight watching a video of our 166th Ward Talent Show. What a fun time. There is so much talent in our youth today and it is really fun having them share it with us.
This image however shows the way I feel today. I took this picture in Texas back in 1973 but it has always been one of my favorites. I was driving down the street when I happened to notice this little fellow taking a nap. Since I always have my camera as close as possible it wasn't hard to stop the car, whip out the camera and get an image to last a life time. The squirrel was up and away only a split second later but because I had my camera near my side I was able to get the shot. So again the moral of the story is to always be alert and be ready.

My Oldest Granddaughter

I love my grandchildren. They are just a lot of fun. Yesterday my son and daughter-in-law asked me to find a picture that I had taken of them at the wedding of my third son Hayden. It was one of those images that just happen and you don't know what a treasure that you have until it is processed. This was done before I had my digital camera so I didn't know I had it for a couple of days after it was shot. Had I been shooting with digital I might have tried to do more with other variations. There was no photoshopping done to this image just a lot of things all happening outside of the camera to make it a very interesting image. The sun is coming down from in front of me at a high autumn angle. Jeff is just goofing around with his hands but they end up reflecting the light back on to Lori and the baby she is carrying, my first grandchild Kasia. The light is also reflecting from Lori onto Jeff into the rest of the area between them. I could have never planned it that way even if I had wanted to do it that way. But sometimes as I said all things just come together correctly despite what you may think you know and what you want to try and do.
The next two images I put in just to show who came from that experience. I was also asked to explain how it is done when going from a color image to a black and white. So for those of you not interested in the technical part you can stop reading here.
The image is taken into photoshop and any blemishes corrected on a new identical layer of the image. Then those two layers are merged into one and another layer created by pressing "command J". I then take that layer and go to the menu bar and select "Image-Mode_LAB" It will then request whether you want to flatten the image. Press "Flatten" ( I have you create a new layer earlier just so that you are always get in the habit of working on a new layer so you have an original layer to fall back to if needed. However here the mode will require you to flatten the image sooner of later no matter what you do in order to get the desired effect). Next open the "Channels" palette and select the Lightness channel. Next go to "Image-Mode" and select "Grayscale". Click OK to discard other channels. This will leave you with the grayscale image that you can work with for the rest of the creation. Now create another new layer. "Command J" and add a new blank layer between the two image layers by pressing Command and selesting the "Create a new layer " icon at he bottom right side of the layers palette next to the garbage icon. With "white" selected as the background layer color press "Command Delete" to fill the blank new layer with white. Next select the top layer and add a "new layer mask". It will need to be filled with black so add it by pressing the "Option " key and selecting the new layer mask icon on the layers pallet. (Third icon from the left.) This will make your image turn all white since you are hiding the top layer behind the mask.
At this point press the letter "B" on your keyboard to select the brush tool that you will need to paint back in the parts of the image that you want. With a large soft brush (maybe 1000 to 1400 master diameter or whatever size fits with the image resolution with which you are working and a hardness of zero) you will now, with the foreground color to white, paint with white on the black mask. You can paint back in whatever part of the image you want to highlight. Change the brush size as needed by pressing the left or right bracket keys on your keyboard.
Next press "command E" twice to flatten the image and again "command J" to create another new image layer. In this step you will lighten the face on the top layer and then reveal the eyes from the bottom layer to make them darker and to stand out so the first thing the viewer notices are the eyes. Change the brightness of the top layer by pressing "command L" and adjust the center levels slider to the left until you have faded the face to be lighter to your desired level. Add a layer mask again only this time leave it white by just selecting the mask icon. Press the letter "X" on your keyboard to switch the foreground back to "black" and then change your brush size to make it slightly smaller than the eyes and brush in the eyes from the bottom layer by painting with black onto the white layer mask. If you find them to be way to dark go back in your history palette and start over by going back to the step prior to using the brush. This time though drop the opacity of your brush from 100 to 50 and brush back in the eyes again. You can also use your Dodge tool to lighten any parts of the image that may appear too dark such as shadows created by the hair and other areas that might be too dark. The last step is to go back to "image-mode" and select "RGB". Now flatten the image again and do a "Save As" and rename the file so that you do not overwrite your original file. I usually just put a capital "A" at the end of the image name. Then just practice and you might find ways to do this even easier. If you do then let me know.

Today I am going to try to illustrate something that I quite discovered by accident last night. I had taken a picture of an engaged couple, while doing her bridals last week, where he was putting the engagement ring on her finger. We had to do the entire shoot indoors since it was snowing outdoors so I wanted to see if I could add sparkle to the ring as though the sun were shining on it and the image taken through a star filter. I have tried this before but never been successful to any degree that I liked until last night. I recently told you that I have been learning to use masks in photoshop and so as I applied a mask to the star layer last night I suddenly discovered that my answer lay in that process the entire time because as I opened the mask with a very soft brush effect it made the rays go out to a small point, faded as it would with the start filter to some degree. The star filter still leaves the end somewhat crisp but with a brush in photoshop the stars as they are applied are all the same width from the diamond to the end and that is what had been bothering me in the past. Well with the mask those stars seem to diminish in size more as they should. Then this morning as I was trying to recreate a step by step of the process I decided to see if I could add some color to the rays of the star.So I added another layer, then added a color gradient to the layer, added a mask and redrew the star rays so that the color gradient would only show in the path of the light from the ring. I then added a few more layers around the original ring to give the effect of looking through one of the multiple image filters that used to be very popular in wedding photography. (I never used one because I couldn't afford them and now I won't need one anyway.)
Well I hope you have enjoyed this little blog because I enjoyed learning these new tricks that I can now add to my wedding images. You be the judge as to whether you would want the original image in your wedding album or one similar to the final image (#5), Of course they will never be the same as this one since the process of creating always adds the chance to do something different. The very first image in this set is what I had created last night. You see I didn't create it the same today because I had a chance to think about it during the night and this morning and figure ways to try and make it even a little better. I actually like less images around the main image as I did last night and I like to slight color that I added to the one today so even the next time I would try this effect I would add color and less surrounding images. Practice creates difference, not always better or worse just different. Whether it is better or worse would depend totally upon the viewer.

More Photoshop questions

I recently took this photo of the cattails and thought them to be somewhat interesting since there were three of them beginning to shed their seeds. It reminded me of a lesson we had in varsity scouts one time when we started fires using cattails and cactus plants. The cattails had to be in the shedding season and not at the end of the first year so that the wood could have air sucked up through the fibers in the stem. In other words the fact that they were dried out meant the water that is in the stem by the end of the first year will have a chance to dry out by the end of the second year. If you want to learn more about this I'll have to do it one on one. It was the first time that I had actually started a fire using that method.
Anyway I thought that they would make a neat picture so I zoomed in on them and took the picture with a wide open lens setting so that the rather busy background trees and brush would be blurred out. It worked except for the fact that it was a somewhat cloudy day so the lighting was all very soft and all the same. This left me with an image where the foreground and the background were hard to distinguish from each other because there was no difference in the intensity of the light. So in thinking about this image I decided to see if in photoshop I could separate the two areas and make the cattails stand out a little bit more. Well here is the results. You decide which you like. To do this to the photo I had to use a layer mask which has recently been something I have spent a lot of time learning and practicing. I really don't know how I worked on images before without them because they make it so much easier to get results from your mind to the image.

Continuing Friday photo fun

OK so I said Saturday that I might include more of the photos that I had taken of the apricot blossoms with the butterfly and the bees. Well today's image is one with a bee in flight. I determined through my very precise method of photographing the bees that day that they were extremely active and thus very hard to catch the way that I wanted to do it. I wanted a bee just a very short distance from the blossom so that it would appear to hover near the tree. Wow I must have tried 100 times and finally got this one. Bees are very active and somehow collect huge loads that they put on their legs so quickly that I had a very hard time catching them where I wanted them. Well that is basically the lesson in photography that is extremely hard to learn for most people. I have always taken a lot of images of the same thing and back in the film days that got to be rather expensive. In the digital world though it is no more expensive than the first one until it comes to taking the time to go through them but that was something that had to be done in the negative world of film as well and with Photoshops Bridge application it is very easy to see multiple images at one time making it easy to even see just the one that you want. There is one problem there too however and that is I have always liked to keep everything that I shoot because I have found that with the different personalities that surround my life that there are just as many varying opinions about my images and which one a particular person would pick. (That happens more often with images of the person though than images of nature. Why is it we are so particular with what we look like in a picture?) Well just in case you didn't catch my humor in the statement of "my very precise method of photographing" I hope you will learn that the more images that you take will produce a much higher chance of getting at least one real good one. I am still searching through the birds and the bees (and the butterflies and flowers) to find the perfect one from Friday's shoot.