Creative Live

There was recently a free Photohop conference week on Creative Live, this was a free broadcast of all the Photoshop courses that are available on their website,  it showed two channels so that it made people think that they would not be able to watch all of the videos and this would convince them that they needed to buy the course; however after the broadcasts they repeated them so that the two channels were active at all times, this meant I got to watch videos that had been on while previously while I was watching the other channel.

Colour Toning with Kara Plicinic

This was the first video I watched, she was very professional and friendly and I enjoyed watching her tutorial. She talked about colour toning and other useful bits of information about using photoshop; blend modes, maksing, gradient maps and colour toning.

She explained that colour toning in Photoshop worked the same way as in colour dark room printing; if the image is too red then add cyan to balance out the colour tone.

The colours are not separate from each other so changing one bar to fix the red might make the image too yellow, this would then need adjusting to make the colours appear correct.

She explained colourizing and if this was selected then the image would be changed into one colour as a ‘monotone’ look, but it would keep the different toning and shading details. The colour could still be changed using the tool sliders.

She asked what the difference was between creating and selecting colours by eye or using colour swatch codes and doing it by numbers. The difference is that people see colours differently and also monitors show and represent colours differently. If a client asked for a specifc colour I could not use a different colour because I personally prefer the colour. Some brands and companies have certain colour swatches copyrighted such as “Cadbury Purple” and this means their brand is instantly recognisable so working on a project for this company I would need to use this colour, not another colour I prefer because I am not creating the work for me but to the clients needs.

In the video the talk about blending modes and she says that many professionals do not have much idea about how they work and if it is applied then what they would look like. But she says I would need to know the basic jist of what they do ie. Mulitply darkens and Screen lightens.

She gave out a useful tip because on macs it does not look possible to scroll through the options like on a windows operating system. But this is possible by selecting the move tool then while holding shift I can press the plus and minus tools to scroll up and down through the blending modes. This is very useful and since I have learnt this I have sped up my workflow and I know this is going to continue being useful in the industry.

She explained gradient maps and how they work; it ‘maps’ the tones to the image and works like monotoning but this way there is more flexibility in the editing process and it is also non destructive. I can set it so that shadows become one tone and highlights become another, I think that this will be a good skill to master so that I can create more interesting photographs and they will be unique to me. The map is:

Shadows to highlights so in this example my shadows would become black and my highlights white, I can change this colour and even add colours into the middle to change the range of midtones.

In her video if I had purchased this then I would receive some free Photoshop actions, because I have not purchased the tutorial I did not receive these but after watching her play the actions I knew I could create my own as they were just different colour versions of gradient maps.

She talked about how to create actions and how to play them, they can only be played if the window is in ‘Button mode’ because otherwise it would be in editing mode.

To create an Action:

1.      turn off button mode

2.      make a set (group folder)

3.      make an action (larger icon)

4.      name it

5.      press record

6.      do what you want the action to do

7.      hit stop

Advanced Photoshop Compositing

This tutorial video with Jason Hoppe shows how to create and blend together different layers to make believeable composites; this is extremely useful to me because I am creating composites in my university module and this is what I wil be exhibiting in my Graduate Show.

The first useful tip that was given was that in Photoshop if I hold down the option key (or alt) it turns off all the other visible layers apart from the one selected. I have since been since been using this to see my before and after edits more easily and it impresses people that  I can turn off five or six layers without doing them individually.

I can also make selections through colour channels and this makes the selection more believable,  it makes more realistic tonal selections and this is essential when I am going to be compositing.

Water

Water is a difficult option to blend because there is a colour in the water and even shooting on white the white would show up when placing it on a background. To solve this there is a way to remove the colour from inbetween the water, this is easier with white but I think it possible to do wth any colour.

If I double click the layer with the water on I can then select “Blending options” and in within this first screen I can then change the opacity of the white on the ‘Blend If’ sliders so that it becomes hidden, it still remains in the layer but does not show on the document. To remove this completely from the layer I need to merge it with a blank new layer that is underneath.

He also gave reference to a website called Composite Stock . Com this website is a stock image company that supplies backgrounds and people and other options for retouchers looking to practice.  In their images they shoot with a cone in the corner so that when transferring people into backgrounds the scale and sizing can be kept the same so that people do not become overly massive compared to what they should be in relation to the background.  I think that this is a good idea and that this is something I should have implemented within my own work so that I can accurately recreate the scaling to lifesize scale.

This is the video in which I found about Smug Mug and the plugin for Lightroom. I have researched this but I decided for now that I am not going throught this workflow option as I do not mainly use Lightroom.

He talked about some mobile editng apps that could be useful however as the phone I currently have is a windows phone many of these apps are not available to download for me:

Adobe Capture

Lightroom

Adobe Post

Another useful tip he gave out was that when using the eye dropper tool it is defaulted to selecting one pixels colour worth, but this can be changed so that when selecting it can give anaverage colour of so many pixels.

He then goes on explaining about how to change colours in Photoshop and the various methods of doing this. One method is to use the hue and saturation sliders to change the colour of a certain hue, this is useful for changing colours nut not useful when the colour needs to match another colour specifically.

He then walked through a step by step on changing three blue tshirts into different colours from sampled colours in different docuements. I used this in my work because when some of the photographs of the pairs of shoes were placed next to each otherthey did not match up completely so  changed the colours in order for them to do so.

Another walkthrough given was using this technique to change the colours of water in order for it to bend better.

Understanding Colour Space

Jared Platt led this video on colour spacing; the first thing mentioned was that clients do not have colour balanced screens so sometimes when they are complaining about final outcomes it is not your work but the colour balance on their screen is wrong. This relates to the previous video in which is was explained about using colour swatches because then the client has no claim to fight against;if they don’t like the colour it is not the retouchers fault it is what was asked for.

This also means you can then give the client to print through you because your screen and printer is calibrated and they know that the colours will be correct through you.

He gave a workflow on how to calibrate from the beginning to the end of the process. This means calibrating the camera and the display screen, the computer monitor, and the printer.

Camera Calibration

Shoot in Raw over Jpeg.

Shoot in picture style ‘Neutral’ as this is a good average of the settings, this can also be customised.

Trust the RGB histogram to make sure the tonal range and exposure is good because the display screen is not always the best viewer.

He also recommended buying a Colour Passport which works the same as the grey cards that  am currently using in the university studio. I looked at these products and they range from £80 to £200 depending on the quality and size

Screen Calibration

 Along with the colour passport there is also colour monitor software that balances the monitor.

Using this means that I would need a stable working environment and I would need to keep my lighting conditions the same and I would need to be able to keep my brightness settings the same, if I am changing locations and moving lighting conditions then this is not something that is possbible, I also need to make sure that anybody else who used the computer understood that the brightness settings are not to be changed.

He recommends that once a month the screen gets recalibrated.

Printer Calibration

New printers gives options to calibrate to colour profiles for different types of paper. Ie Canon printers will come with profiles for canon papers.

All paper types have profiles

All printers should too.

These profiles are availble to download into Photoshop and Lghtroom for proofing views and converting to profile for export.

Note

I have watched more than just these three videos but I did not take notes as I was watching the rest of them because I was listening while I was also working.