Photoshop CC Week 8:

Hoover towers above iconic streetlight

The iconic  white globe of a streetlight is backed by historical Hoover Tower, tallest building on campus.  This postcard size iPhone6 image my last project of the Photoshop CC course. 

Let’s look at a possible workflow to render a 4x6 inch image on a Canon MX922 inkjet printer.

1. Import the jpg to the desktop using the Image Capture app.
2. Open Bridge, select the desktop image and open in Adobe Raw
3. Global editing with the Basic Panel and Open Object in Photoshop CC
4. Crop Image to 4 x 6 inches and 300 dpi (discard cropped pixels)
5. Use Text tool to add the copyright and flatten image
6. Save image as jpg with a new file name (don’t overwrite original)
7. Now, add border to saved image using the crop tool (drag out from corner with shift/option pressed)
8. Fill the border with white
9. Check image size to verify: 4 x 6 inches at 300 dpi.
10. Save image, exit Photoshop 
11. Double Click image to open in Preview and click Print
12. Select 4x6 glossy photo paper at high quality and print

Carto

PS Week 7 — Agony

McMurtry Art and Art History Building (to open, fall 2015), Stanford University

The McMurtry Building is being built on the edge of the Rodin Sculpture Garden. I have been watching and photographing the progress: scrape the abandoned anatomy labs, dig basements and raise the building.

Most of my pictures of the progress have been taken with an iPhone6 because that is the camera I carry on a regular basis. I could process the photos with the iPhone App, but iPhone images can also be edited in Photoshop CC and Adobe Photoshop Raw.

The museum curators have taken the wraps off sculptures near the fence so it is now possible to capture the building and one of Rodin's bronze heads in a photo.

Agony in Rodin’s Garden, iPhone6 photo

The workflow for this project was:

1. Import the photo from the iPhone to the desktop using Image Capture 
2. In Adobe Bridge, open the desktop folder and select the image (note that the image resolution is 72 dpi) 
3. Open the image in camera raw and do global edits using the Basic Panel and tools 
4. Make sure the workflow resolution is set to 300 dpi (needed for printing) 
5. Click Open Image to bring the image into Photoshop CC, for pixel level editing 
6. Note: If cropping in done make sure that the Image/Image Size/Resample box is unchecked and (while you’re there) verify that the image resolution is 300 dpi. 
7. Open the file menu and click Save for Web to bring up the save menu, and set the Image Size so that the longest edge is either 800 or 1024 pixels, and set the image quality to 80 or 100% 
8. Click Save to write the converted image to the desktop. 
9. Save the image as a Tiff file after deleting non-visible layers. The Tiff file will be used to print the photo.

These images are ready for blog posting and the Tiff files are ready for printing, but that is next week.

Carto

PS Week 6 — El Salero, a portrait

Costa Rican salt worker resting at mid-day

 A group of birding enthusiasts stand around this Costa Rican salt pond worker; they are asking him if they can walk around the ponds looking for unusual birds. He's agreeable so I also asked him if I could take his photo.

The portrait is well exposed ( the worker was looking right into the camera, Kodak DX3900), but the background is an uninteresting mixture of debris and birder’s legs. I took a photo of the salt ponds to replac the background of the portrait.

The photoshop workflow for the project was the following:

1. Load the salt pond photo into Photoshop CC. This will be the base layer. 
2. Duplicate the base layer and adjust with the basic panel of Photoshop Raw Filter. 
3. Load the salero’s portrait and crop out the background. 
4. Copy and paste the cropped portrait to a new layer in the salt pond photo. 
5. Select the portrait, move to the lower right, and free transform for size. 
6. Add an adjustment layer to the portrait to adjust exposure of his face (mostly the eyes). 
7. Discard the unused base layers and save the active layers as a tiff file. 
8. Flatten image, smart sharpen and save for web. 

Costa Rican salt worker with the salt pond in the background
(composite photo). 

 Carto

Costa Rica is a tourist destination known for its abundance of birds; many of which are not seen in the United States. 'Sal' is the Costa Rican word for salt, and a ‘salero’ is a worker in a salt evaporation pond. The salt ponds are located on the Pacific coast in the dry/arid northwest region.

I noticed (after I posted, of course) that there are some interesting white pen trails coming out of the salt worker's hat. It's easy to make photo editing mistakes, with the selection and pen tools.

PS Week 5 — Earthquake Project

Music Concourse Golden Gate Park (from De Young museum)

The Andy Goldsworthy patio entrance to the De Young museum is a pleasant shelter from the typical foggy breezes of Golden Gate Park.

While working on a blog posting about the courtyard, I discovered that I did not have an illustration of the realistic earthquake cracks that the Goldsworthy had carved into the stone benches and the limestone flooring.

Fortunately, I had a larger jpg photo that I could crop and adjust to show the fault line.

The planned workflow for this project was:

1. Bring photo into Photoshop CC (drag jpg to my Macbook desktop icon) 
2. Make a background copy and open the copy in Camera Raw (filter) 
3. Crop and adjust exposure in Basic Panel and exit Camera Raw 
4. Select the darker stone and create a curves layer to make lighter. (feather edges to blend with the shadows.) 
5. Zoom in on fault line and with a black 1-pixel pen at 50% opacity darken the fault line by clicking on grey pixels. 
6. Create a curves adjustment layer with a mask to darken fault line foreground stone and the transition between stones 
7. Flatten image and sharpen with smart sharpen filter. Finally, export to the desktop and upload to my blog post.

Adam Goldsworthy, Drawn Stone, De Young museum, 2015

This project seemed suitable to sum up what I had learned about Photoshop CC in the first half of the course.

Here is a link to my post on Carto’s Logbook (Wordpress.com).

Carto

PS Week 4 — Caltrain at Night

Caltrain Station -- California Ave, Palo Alto, CA 8:30 pm

The Caltrain station on California Avenue is deserted at 8:30; the next train is due about 9pm. It is a few minutes after sunset (there is still a glow in the west, but the street lights are on and visible).

The photo was taken in color and converted to B/W in Photoshop CC.

The workflow was:

1. Crop and Adjust exposure in Basic Panel of Camera Raw. 
2. Open in Photoshop and convert and add a Black/White adjustment layer. 
3. Edit the B/W image; remove small flares and lights using the clone tool. 
4. Finally, a curves adjustment was added to bring up the sky. 

The image was flattened and then sharpened with the smart sharpen filter before downloading to the desktop.

Details: Nikon Coolpix P7700 at ISO 1600, 1/5 sec. exposure at f / 8.0 aperture.

Carto

PS Week 3: An Argentine Church

Snapshot of church and garage, Argentina
(1024 x 768 pixels, 628 KB)

The top photo was taken on a trip to northern Argentina. The tour bus stopped for gas and I noticed an unusual church across the street so I took the snapshot and forgot about it. Later, I noticed that power lines were dangling right through the middle of the picture. Now, years later, I want to remove the power line and print the picture.

Project: Remove the power line, adjust tones and sharpen image.

I opened the original snapshot in Lightroom Develop module. With the basic panel sliders, I adjusted the exposure and highlights and passed the file to Photoshop CC for editing.

Step 1: Duplicate the background and rename layer. Remove the power line on the left and right sides of the church with the clone tool. The large power pole on the right of the church was not removed.

Step 2: Duplicate the layer and select with the lasso tool the small pole that is between church and the large pole. Remove the small pole by content-aware fill of the selection. Clean up with the clone tool.

Step 3: Duplicate the layer and begin removing the power line as it crossed the church. Use the patch tool to replace the line where it crosses bricks, and the clone tool where the line crosses solid colored wall areas. (Merge these three layers into a single layer.)

Step 4: Add a curves adjustment layer to lighten the road and darken the sky and add mid-tone contrast.

Step 5: Merge all layers into a single layer and apply smart sharpen (the magic short cut is: Command/Shift/Option E)

Step 6: Save the photo as tif (layers and all, 107 mb), and save a jpg (1024 x 768) for the blog. The result is the photo below: 

Final image,  church and garage ( 1024 x 768 pixels, 592 KB) 

Carto

Note: The tif file will be reduced in size if the merged/sharpened layer is deleted (new size 44.5 mb).
(Click on any photo to enlarge and bring up a slide show of the images.)

PS Week 2 -- Plumb Blossom and Rose

Plum Blossom with Yellow Rose (out of focus in background)

Week two of Photoshop CC introduces camera setup, light and workflow: Let there be light, for without light there is no photography.

Camera setup for this class includes Auto White Balance and Image Quality Raw. In class we practiced using reflected light to fill in shadows on natural light portraits. The discussion of light suggested that the hour before sunset was a good time to take photos.

The quality of light varies over the day. Typically. the light is harsh at mid-day, which causes sharp shadows and glare (look for shade and filtered light). in the early morning the light is cool (tending toward blue) and in the late evening we see warmer colors are softer shadows. Twilight is especially good for photography.

Photoshop workflow uses Bridge (or Image Capture) to import the photos from the camera. Basic image processing (white balance, exposure, highlights, shadows) will de carried out with the sliders of the basic panel in Camera Raw. 

With that in mind, I took the camera into the back yard to capture images of spring blossoms in the warm glow just before sunset. For the first shot I set the camera mode to A for aperture priority, and rotated the command dial to aperture setting of f / 5.3. The camera automatically set the shutter speed to 1/250 sec. I focused on the white plum blossoms. The shallow depth-of-field should put the yellow roses out of focus. The result was shown above:

Plum Blossom, Nikon 5100, zoom lens (44mm), ISO 800, f / 5.3, 1/250 sec.

These settings seemed to work so I moved about the yard (changing the focal length of the zoom lens as needed).  I took a dozen shots with minor adjustments to the camera settings.

Meyer Lemon, Nikon 5100,18-55mm (50mm), f/3.5-5.6, ISO 800, f / 5.6, 1/160 sec.

Yellow Rose, Nikon 5100, 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6 (125mm), ISO 800, f / 5.3, 1/250 sec.

(Click on any photo to enlarge and bring up a slide show of the images.)

Once the photos were taken, it was time to begin Photoshop workflow to convert Raw images to JPG for uploading to this blog post.

1. Import. Cable up my camera to the USB port my my Macbook Air. I also cabled up the usb storage drive where I archive all my photos. I launched the Adobe Bridge, turned on my camera and dropped down the file menu and clicked “Get Photos from Camera…”. I selected my D5100 and navigated to the hard drive where I found the folder holding images for the Art 35 class. I created a new sub-folder, week 2, and clicked the ‘Get Media’ button. The photos loaded without problems and the images displayed in the Essentials Panel of Bridge.
2. Sorting. I created a collection ‘Week 2’ for the photos and pressed the space bar for a full screen review. I assigned a single star (click ‘1’ with photo selected) and then I filtered by ‘1 star’ to show only one star photos. The four best shots were then given a second star.
3. Basic Edits. With the ‘two star’ photos selected, I clicked File/Open in Camera Raw to begin the edit process. First I cropped the photos to a 5 to 7 ratio, and then I used the Basic Panel to adjust the whte balance and lighting.
4. Workflow Presets. In camera raw, with the photos selected, I opened the workflow settings (the blue link at the bottom of screen) and created a preset for the blog— sRGB color space, resize to 1024 width in pixels, high quality. I checked the 'sharpen for screen' and ‘don’t enlarge’ boxes.
5. Resize images WWW. With the two-star images selected in bridge, open camera raw and with the imaged selected and click Open to take the images into Photoshop CC. In Photoshop, open Image/Image Size and set the width to 1024 pixels. Click the box for bicubic sharpening on reduction. Close Photoshop and return to Bridge (File/Close and Go to Bridge).
6. JPG Output. I selected the two star images and opened Tools/Photoshop/Image Processor selected the desktop for output. Click Run to write the Jpg files to the dashboard (the are written to a sub-directory named JPG). The files were then uploaded to Blogger. I added this text and published the blog. There are lots of steps in this workflow and the same results could be arrived at in many ways.

Rose Bud, Nikon 5100, 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 (50mm), ISO 800, f / 5.6, 1/160 sec exposure. 

Nikon on WWW describes this out-of-focus effect in a ’Tips and Tricks’ tutorial : see Bokeh for Beginners.

Carto

PS Week 1 - A Yellow Rose

Photoshop CC assignment: take a series of photos outdoors using the manual (M) mode on the camera ( in my case a Nikon D5100 with a 35.0 mm f / 1.8 lens). Shoot the images in RAW (image quality RAW), and not JPG.

Yellow Rose, 1 / 1600 sec f / 2.8 (cropped) Aperature Priority

Ok, I got the effect I wanted: focus on foreground rose and blurred background. Next I tried to extend the depth of view to get the foreground and background into focus. It took two shots for a hand-held photo.

Yellow Rose, 1 / 50 sec f / 16 (cropped), Manual

Yellow Rose, 1 / 50 sec f / 16 (cropped), Manual

Note: In the bottom two photos, I first focused on the far flowers and then, in the second photo, I focused on the large flower. Radial filters were used to darken the background and emphasize the large yellow rose in both shots.

These photos were processed in Lightroom (not part of the Photoshop CC course), so I need to modify the workflow to use the Adobe Bridge application and Camera Raw. You can compare these photos with others I took at the same time for posting on my Wordpress blog: Carto’s Logbook, Ephemeral — Blossoms, Tra la, Tra la.

Carto