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