Filed Under camera and photo
by Fabian Toulouse
One of the largest challenges for photographers whether professional or amateur has always been lighting. Lighting leaves people confused about such issues as over-exposure with a flash or the existence of good available light. Certainly, with digital cameras that allow you to see the images you have captured, the results can be seen immediately, but correcting problems can still be difficult.
Lighting question can leave you scratching your head. In low light do you use the flash on your camera and risk glaring light and ugly shadowing or do you obtain a handheld flash with which to experiment? Do you have enough natural light to forget the flash altogether? How do you complete a white balance? What about light sources that color the scene oddly? What are the best ways to photograph evening scenes like fireworks or cityscapes?
Photography lighting tips online can answer a lot of questions for both amateurs and aspiring professionals. Interesting articles carefully explain various processes for taking excellent, creative pictures in all kinds of light settings. There is information not only on lighting questions, but on all sorts of topics such as photographing lively animals, capturing the real essence of your human subjects, and creating unique compositions.
If you are really interested in becoming a competent photographer, you might want to try taking a course or two online. There are some exceptional programs out there, and you may even be compelled to pursue photography as more than just a nice hobby. After all, all sorts of professions need photographers, from criminal investigation to real estate!
Even if you do not have professional aspirations, learning to be a skillful photographer is a praiseworthy goal. It affords you the tools to create a lovely photographic record of the people and important (or even everyday) events of your life, and it offers a super outlet for that little bit of artist in all of us!
Filed Under camera and photo
by David Peters
1. When working on a colour image, you can use the Paint Brush tool to selectively “paint away” colour to black and white. It can make one portion of your image really stand out. In the Paint Brush Options palette, change the blend mode to Colour, and paint away the colour
2) Press Shift to add more to the selection or Alt to take away from the selection when using your magic wand tool.
3. Follow steps FILE > Automate > Web Images Gallery to have Photoshop’s image gallery build a webpage of thumbnailed images for you. Great if you have a lot of images to display.
4. Double click on the ‘T’ on a Type layer in the Layers Palette to automatically select the entire text layer.
There are at least two ways to switch between the various measurement units that Photoshop displays.
5) The first is to change them in your Preferences by going to the Photoshop menu under Preferences and selecting Units & Rulers (in Photoshop 7 under Mac OS 9, Preferences is found under the Edit menu). From here you can change the ruler units and click OK.
6) The second way is to open the Info Palette (go to the Window menu and choose Info) and click on the small triangle next to the cross in the lower left quadrant to pull up a menu that will allow you to change units.
7) To cycle through different screen modes, simply press the F key
You can select just the pixels without the transparency area of the layer by holding the Cmd/Ctrl key and clicking the mouse on that layer in the Layers palette.
9) If you have a particular layer style that you use often you can have that style saved to be displayed in your layers palette. In the Blending Options, find “Save Style” located just under OK and Cancel. Name your style, save it and now notice how it will be found in the Styles palette. One note however, the style must be in its own layer.
10. From time to time when you combine multiple images, there can be a bit of fringe around the edges of the composite images. Hide this with steps: Layers > Matting > Defringe. At the dialogue box, pick the default setting; should that not work, undo it, and try Defringe again at a setting of 2.
11. Got too many layers? Simply select the right layer by using the move tool ( V ) Right click the mouse over the layer and a drop down list will come up.
On the other hand, you can allocate your layers into layer sets. On the bottom of your layers palette, click the ‘create new layers set’ (looks like a folder), name the new layer set, and just drag the layers you like in that set. Highlight the set right click and choose copy to copy your sets with ease.
12. Press Shift-Command-M (Mac)/ Shift-Control-M (PC) to toggle between Photoshop and ImageReady.
13. Press Shift-Command-Option-S (Mac)/ Shift-Control-Alt-S (PC) to access the Save for Web dialogue rapidly,
14. If you want to duplicate your current layer, press Cmd/Ctrl J.
15. To bring up the Extract dialogue box, press Command-Option-X (Mac)/ Control-Alt-X (PC). Within the Extract dialogue box, switch to the Extract Edge Highlighter tool by pressing the letter “b.”, the Fill tool by pressing the letter “k.”, and change the Edge Highlighter’s brush size by holding the ] key to make it larger and the [ to make it smaller.
