If you’ve ever wondered what the small icons in the Layer palette do, you might be surprised at how useful they can be. Here’s what the Lock Transparent Pixels icon does and how you can use it.

There are times when you are working with content on layers in Photoshop that the layers can do things that you don’t expect them to do. For example, in this image, I have extracted the background to a layer of its own by selecting it and then choose Layer > New > Layer via Copy.

I now want to blur this layer so if I select it and apply a Gaussian blur filter to it, you will see that the Gaussian blur filter pushes the background over the edges of the flower.

This time, instead of selecting the layer contents I selected the Lock Transparent Pixels icon in the layers palette.

Now when I apply the same heavy blur filter you’ll see that the edges of the background are maintained.

The layer is blurred but only the area that was covered by the original pixels is blurred and the blur isn’t permitted to ‘bleed’ into the area that contains fully transparent pixels.

This option is useful when painting over details to change their color. For example, when you photograph someone against a green screen background you will find hairs and areas around the very edge of your subject may have a green tinge. Or when you extract a subject, like a building, photographed in bright sunlight it may display some chromatic aberration around its edges.

If you select the layer by Control + Clicking on it (Command + Click on the Mac) and sample a color from adjacent pixels you can set the Brush to Color mode and paint over the edges. The problem is that, as you paint, the color is built up on partially transparent pixels which, if you paint too many times, begin to lose their transparency.

If, on the other hand, instead of selecting the layer, you click the Lock Transparent Pixels option and then paint with the brush set to the same Color blend mode and sampling colors from the image as you go, you’ll paint out the problem colors but without affecting transparency.

The same option can be used when you fill a selection with a foreground or background color by pressing Alt + Backspace (, Option + Delete on the Mac). If the selection is partially transparent and if you simply Control + Click on the layer to select it, the more you fill it the more transparency is lost. On the other hand, if you select Lock Transparent Pixels you can fill it over and over again and no transparency is lost.

In short, using Lock Transparent Pixels ensures that an object on a layer can never become more or less transparent than it was when first created and that its edges won’t change if you, for example, add a blur to it.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Photoshop: Working with Locked Pixels

Lightroom has more tricks up its sleeve than simple photo fixes such as exposure and contrast. It’s possible to craft images inside Lightroom and, in many ways, the tools in Lightroom make the task easier than it would be in Photoshop or another editing program.

In this post I’ll show you a way to turn a relatively hum drum image into something much more visually exciting. So, when you don’t get the image you want straight out of the camera see if, armed with some simple Lightroom tools, you can coax some better results from it. Remember too that this is a creative technique – you’re not looking for realism as much as a way to create a different look for your image.

Step 1

Start out with an image that has what I call “good bones”. It needs to be pleasingly composed and it needs to have something that compels you to want to look at it and to spend some time working with it. Good contenders for this process are images with interesting skies and these include heavy clouds and clouds captured at sunset and sunrise.

Step 2

In the Develop module use the adjustments in the Basic panel to apply global adjustments to the image. I focus in detail on the adjustments that aren’t available in the Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter such as Blacks, Fill Light, Recovery and Vibrance.

I will adjust the Recovery slider at least half way to the right and adjust Fill Light to get some detail from shadows. I’ll adjust the Blacks even to the extent of plugging some shadows for now. I’ll also use other adjustments such as Exposure and Brightness just as a start.

The fact that none of these changes are permanent is a big plus because if you don’t like the results later on you can come back and readjust them.

Step 3

Having dealt with the overall image I’ll now turn my attention to parts of it. Here there are three areas in particular – the hut and bottom right of the image, the bottom left and the sky.

Starting with the hut I’ll drag the Graduated filter in from the bottom right of the image. Then I’ll bring some detail out in that area by adjusting Brightness, Exposure and Clarity.

Step 4

The sky is treated the same way as the hut. This time the Graduated Filter is dragged down from the top. Then I decreased Exposure and Brightness to reveal the detail in the clouds. I added some Contrast and Clarity and a hint of dull yellow color.

Step 5

In the bottom left of the image another Graduated Filter adjustment fine tunes this area of the image and adds a hint of dirty yellow color. Reducing both Sharpness and Clarity softens the details here.

At this point I might consider adding a second Graduated Filter over the top of this one to again reduce Clarity to soften the details even more. The Graduated Filter can be used cumulatively so adding one on top of the other enhances the effect.

Step 6

Once I’ve finished with the Graduated Filter, I will return to the Basic panel and fine tune the settings there. Here I adjusted the Brightness and Fill Light to lighten the image a little.

Step 7

At this point I cropped the image to remove some excess detail from the bottom and right edges to focus interest more in the water and the hut.

Step 8

To finish, I used the Adjustment Brush on the plastic crates. By painting over them with the brush and reducing the Exposure slightly they are made a little less distracting.

At any time I can revisit any of the changes I have made including those applied with a Gradient Filter or the Adjustment Brush and adjust the settings if desired.

Not every image will lend itself to this treatment but many will. You should note too that here I was working on a jpg image and because of the in camera processing applied to jpg images and the fact that much of the data that the camera captures is discarded in the process of saving an image as a jpg, the scope for adjusting this image was significantly less than would have been the case if I had the image captured as a raw file.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

8 Steps to Crafting Images in Lightroom

When you’ve been using a program like Photoshop for a length of time, you begin to develop a wish list of things you’d like to see in future versions. Sometimes these are addressed by new releases and sometimes they’re not.

Now I know Photoshop CS5 has just been released but there are still things on my wish list that aren’t in Photoshop. Here are some things I’d like to see in the next version of Photoshop:

1. Clarity

While Vibrance, which first made its appearance in Lightroom, has now been included as an adjustment in Photoshop, Clarity has not yet made the grade – it’s available in Camera Raw but not in Photoshop itself.

In Lightroom and ACR the Clarity slider lets you adjust the midtone contrast and it gives a much needed boost to the midtones in an image with quite spectacular results. At the top of my list for the next version of Photoshop would be the inclusion of a Clarity adjustment.

2. Paste into a Selection

One thing I’d love to see in Photoshop is the ability to paste a copied item from one image in Photoshop into a second image but with the copied selection being pasted in at a specific size.

In short, I’d like to make a selection on the target image with the marquee tool and have Photoshop paste the clipboard contents into the marquee area at a size that fits it to the selection.

You can make a selection and paste the clipboard contents into it but the pasted image isn’t resized to fit – I’d like the option to do both.

3. Print Multiple Images

Having used Paint Shop Pro for many years, the feature that I’d love to see Photoshop ‘borrow” from that program is some means of easily assembling multiple images to a layout for printing on a single sheet of paper.

PaintShop Pro has a very smart Print Layout tool which displays images down the left of the screen which you can drag and drop into a page for printing. You can drag to resize the images, right click and size them to a fixed size or add them automatically in position on a pre-designed template – built in or custom made.

Adobe has some workarounds to this problem available: Lightroom 3 has a multiple print feature which is reasonably flexible and simple to use and which I wrote about in this post. You can assemble multiple images for printing on a single page through Adobe Bridge but the tool is a little cumbersome and it’s in Bridge and not where most people will expect it to be – in Photoshop itself.

You can add the Picture Package tool back into Photoshop CS4 and CS5 (which Adobe removed in these versions) as I explained in this post.

But, workarounds aside, I dream of the day a really smart multiple picture print tool appears in Photoshop.

So, now you know the top three things I’d like to see in Photoshop CS6 – now it’s up to you – what’s on your wish list?

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Photoshop CS6 – What’s on your wish list?

Using metadata correctly means that images can be fully catalogued and images can be retrieved at any time without necessarily knowing which folder the file is in. King Penguins, Macquarie Island – Canon 5D MkII, 300f2.8L 1/500 second @ f5.6.

Filing

Where do you actually put your image files?

Do you file images in folders with meaningful names like “Sydney 01-01-2010” and “Perth 11-03-2010”, or “Flowers” or some such. What if it’s a picture of a flower in Perth; which folder would you put it in? Or would you put it in both? This is a physical filing system, not unlike literal files in a literal filing cabinet. It can serve as a filing system but it neglects the single most useful aspect of digital imagery – metadata.

Correct use of metadata means that computers can do what they are best at, remembering large amounts of data and making connections between lists and records. An image with metadata such as City = ‘Perth’ and Caption = ‘flower’ can easily be referenced by a database which merely matches an image file’s metadata with the words Flower and Perth and displays its location on you hard drive. If you search for ‘Flower’ and ‘Perth’ the database will list all files which are tagged with those words – and here’s the trick, the file does not have to be in any particular place on your hard drive as long as the database has previously recorded its position. In other words it has already catalogued all the file locations. You could have a dozen images of flowers in Perth in a dozen different locations and the database can effortlessly list those files when you search for those terms. This is what computers do best, and they are very good at it.

Using good catalogue software means you simply do not have to arrange your files in any sort of logical folder structure as long as the software has catalogued all the locations of all the images. If all your images live on one hard drive, and that hard drive has been fully catalogued, then the folder structure of that hard drive can be anything you want.

OK, so we have established that using something like Idimager, Lightroom or Expressions Media 2 is a good idea. That’s one part of the problem. The other part is how do we store those files off-site as a back-up on DVDs (given that we can only fit 4.5GB of images onto one DVD) in such as manner that we can easily retrieve a file if it’s lost or corrupted somehow. How do we know where it is? We could catalogue each DVDs as as well I suppose but that would be very time consuming and fortunately it’s not necessary.

The trick is to mirror the contents of your DVDs on your hard drive by using folders with the exact same names as the DVDs, containing the exact same images. If we catalogue a hard drive laid out like this then the catalogue will, at the same time, be a catalogue of the DVDs.

This panel from Expressions Media 2 shows the folders on the networked PC. D Drive \ DVDs 151-200 \ DVD161. The green dot means that is what is currently being displayed in a browser window ( see screenshot below).

The Bucket System

I follow the 3-2-1 approach to archiving and back up. That’s at least three copies of each image, on two different media types (HD and DVD) and at least one copy stored fully off-site.

I also follow the ‘Bucket’ approach to archiving popularised by Peter Krogh in his book The DAM Book. I had been using a similar system for a few years when I came across Peter’s book. It was great to have my own methods re-affirmed and developed, so I bought the book, made some changes to my workflow and have been following this path ever since.

The Bucket system is based around optical media of finite size, like DVDs. Please feel free to substitute ‘BlueRay’ for ‘DVD’ in this article as technology has moved on. Regardless of the actual media that you use, the point remains the same – you put your files into folders called buckets and when a bucket is ‘full’ you burn it to a DVD, start a new bucket with a new folder name and start filling that up, and so on. A bucket is considered ‘full’ when it approaches the size of the optical media to which it will be burned.

So ‘Buckets’ are simply folders that are created to be filled with images until they reach, for single sided DVDs, the 4.5GB mark at which point they are burned to DVD and filed off-site. I name these folders on my hard drive DVD001, DVD002, DVD003 and so on. When I burn the DVD its title in the DVD burning software will be the exact same, DVD001 etc and I will write DVD001 on the case (not on the DVD).

Now, here is the crucial point. If you keep your images in these bucket folders on your main hard-drive, or wherever you habitually store your images, you can import them into a cataloguer still within these folders leaving the folders as they are with the same folder name, DVD001 etc. The cataloguer will reference these folders by their folder name and so you have an exact mirror of what is on your hard drive burned to a set of DVDs. For each physical DVD there will be a corresponding folder on your hard-drive with the exact same name containing the exact same files. This makes it amazingly easy to track down a file if for some reason you cannot access it on the hard drive. The cataloguer will tell you which folder it should be in, and all you need to do is find the DVD of the same name.

The browser window in Expressions Media 2 shows the thumbnails of the images in the folder and identifies the individual file at the top, in the status bar. In this case this file is clearly in a folder named DVD161. It's of course also on a DVD called DVD161 which is stored off-site but which could be retrieved and the whole catalogue rebuilt in the event of a disaster.

So, I edit my images and add metadata , make adjustments in Lightroom (and then convert them all to DNG format) and then take the whole collection and split it into new folders each containing about 4.5GB of images. These folders are sequentially named, i.e. DVD001, DVD001 etc and then the whole set of folders is imported into the cataloguer which in my case is Expressions Media 2. Each folder is also copied onto a second computer which acts as a local backup and burned to a DVD of the same name.

The net result is that I have three sets of identical folders containing identical images. Two sets on two different hard-drives (on two different PCs in my case) and the third set on DVDs stored off-site. The cataloguer has imported this exact folder structure as well, so any file references will match the physical DVD names as well as the identically named folders on the two hard-drives. It even works over a network.

There is one slight fly in the ointment here – adding files to folders so that they total 4.5GB is tedious because you can normally only do it manually. You have to select groups of files, copy them into the ‘bucket’ and keep checking the total folder size. It’s a bottleneck. I despaired of finding a way to automate this after searching the net and only finding one application for the Mac that could do this (Big Mean Folder Machine) and none whatsoever for the PC. So, to cut a long story short, I made my own application for PC, called Bucketeer and by the time you read this it should be available from my website (look under Products / Software).

Bucketeer simply takes a large folder of images and copies the contents to new folders of a specified size. Each folder is named sequentially so I end up with one big folder and the same images in a set of smaller folders named in a sequence like DVD001, DVD002 – exactly the method outlined above. All I then have to do is burn each folder to a DVD (manually for now) and it’s all done – no more trial-and-error multiple selections to fill a 4.5GB DVD.

The bucket system is a boon for small collections of a few tens of thousands of images. Bigger collections might benefit from an enterprise level system with servers and dedicated RAID drive arrays but, for most of us, DVDs and BlueRay discs will do just fine as long as you have a good cataloguing system and a methodical apprioach to filing, archiving and backup.

Nick Rains has been a professional photographer for 28 years and his work has been published in books, calendars and magazines all over the world. He currently specialises in feature work around Australia and is a regular contributor to Australian Geographic magazine. Nick is also the Editor of Better Digital Camera magazine and regularly conducts advanced photographic workshops around the country.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

File Archiving Strategy – the Bucket System

{An Ounce of Prevention}

So first, I offer a few tips to prevent glare so you can see those eyes. Then, I’ll give you a quick little tip for how I use editing software to soften the blow of glare when it does happen.

• All those tips for creating great catchlights? Forget ‘em. Reflectors aimed at the eyes, facing a light source…all these techniques will only show up as mirror-like reflections in the glass.
• When using artificial or studio lighting, have your subject turn away from the lights just a tad and pay attention to what’s going on in the glasses.
• As if pop-up flash wasn’t already a no-no, it’s even more so when your subject is wearing glasses
• A rather strange suggestion is to have your subjects tilt the glasses downward only 1/2 an inch (just push them up from where they rest on their ears). This tiny bit of angle and make a huge difference. In the same manner, you can also experiment with having them tilt their head or the angle from which you’re shooting.

{A Pound of Cure}

If you couldn’t avoid glare or didn’t realise it was happening, there’s a rather easy fix you can do in any editing program which allows for work with layers in your image. If you troll the web, you’ll find a few ways to edit out glare and no one particular method is a cure-all method. You’ll have to use the tools in your editing arsenal to draw on your creativity and what you know to do the trick. For the image below, these are the steps I took to remove the umbrella glare.

Original Image:

1. I used the healing brush tool on ‘replace’ mode with a very soft edged brush to replace the reflections using a sample of the area directly next to the reflection. In progress using the brush:

2. I sized down the brush and resampled using the black eye liner. I used the brush to draw on new liner, resampling the brush continuously throughout the process.

3. That’s it! Check out the after:

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

How to Prevent & Edit out Reflections on Glasses

Destructive editing. Do the very words make you shudder? For many, the main rule of editing is to avoid destruction at all costs. So today, we’re going to talk about dodging and burning the non-destructive way.

For beginners, dodging and burning are tools in Photoshop and other editing programs which darken (burn) or lighten (dodge) desired areas. The problem with the tools is that they can’t be used on transparent layers and must be used on the actual image. This has a few problems:

• It destroys pixels
• You can’t create a transparent layer and dodge/burn on it, your work can’t be masked for easy ‘undoing’
• Although you can’t do it on a transparent layer, you can duplicate the layer, add a mask and dodge/burn that layer but this increases the file size

The way I solve all these problems is use a Photoshop action that either creates separate transparent layers with masks or one transparent layer with mask that you can paint white to dodge and black to burn. My personal favourite is actually a free one from MCP Actions called ‘Touch of Light/Touch of Darkness’. This creates two transparent layers with masks. One for dodging, one for burning. So dodge and burn your heart out!

Edited solely with a non-destructive dodge/burn method

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Non Destructive Dodging and Burning

In an earlier blog post, I discussed a typical Lightroom workflow and I advocated using the Exposure slider to lighten an image. I also said that I preferred to skip using the Lightroom Brightness slider altogether.

I’ve recently changed my mind about the Brightness slider and I’d encourage you, if you haven’t already done so, to experiment with it on your images.

However, before we begin a word of warning about Brightness/Contrast in general. Brightness adjustments in some programs aren’t as good as in others. If you’re using Photoshop CS2 or earlier, for example, use Curves or Levels to lighten an image not Brightness. In Photoshop CS3 the Brightness/Contrast tool was re-engineered and instead of adjusting all pixels equally as it used to do with the result that highlight areas were routinely destroyed in the process, it now protects the lightest pixels as it lightens the image. Before trusting your image to a program’s Brightness and Contrast tool, check your histogram before and after using it and make sure you aren’t blowing out highlights in your quest for a lighter/brighter image.

Now, back to Lightroom.

Take a look at the image shown here. If I leave Brightness at the default value – which for my camera is +50 but which may be different for yours, and if I crank up the Exposure to the maximum value, a lot of the lighter pixels in the image get blown out.

Of course I would never adjust an image to this value but it’s a useful exercise to see how Exposure works.

When I do the same thing in reverse and leave Exposure at its default value of 0 and crank Brightness up to its highest value only a small number of pixels are blown out.

Using the Brightness slider lightens the image while at the same time protecting the lightest pixels in the image from being blown out as a consequence.

So what does this knowledge mean to you in a typical Lightroom workflow? Well, my new Lightroom workflow for lightening and brightening an image involves using the Exposure slider first of all to adjust the overall exposure of the image but I stop short of where too many highlights get blown out.

Next I test the Recovery tool on the image. Hold the Alt key as you drag on the Recovery slider to check to see if there are blown out highlights (they show as varying colors on the black background). Drag to the right to see if they can be recovered . If they can’t be recovered ease off on the Exposure and check again.

If I have shadow areas in the image that are still overly dark I’ll adjust these using the Fill Light slider. This tool helps recover detail hidden in shadows, but it’s not a tool I’d use for an overall brightening effect.

Finally, I use the Brightness slider to increase the overall image brightness. Somewhere between the Exposure slider and the Brightness slider is the sweet spot for lightening an image.

From there, the rest of my workflow is pretty much as I detailed it in the earlier post.

While we’re on the topic of the Brightness slider, check out the default value on an unedited image so you know where your starting point is. For most raw images, Lightroom defaults to a Brightness of +50 and Contrast of +25 as its starting point.

Also take care when working with images you had processed in Lightroom 2 with Lightroom 2 settings. When you upgrade to Lightroom 3, you’ll have a choice of Updating your images to the new Lightroom 2010 Process. My experience is that this can result in a significant lightening of images which were processed in Lightroom 2 so I apply this update on an image by image basis so I can reverse it or adjust for it as I go if necessary.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Lightroom: Embracing Brightness

Almost any portrait subject over the age of 25 can use some under-eye cleanup, but many photographers struggle to make this common retouch look natural. I know I struggled with it, until I found this handy shortcut.

Most of us start out using the Clone Stamp tool as our all-purpose retouching sledgehammer. It’s great for removing blemishes, so we just keep going and going and try to fix everything with it. But using the Clone Stamp tool to retouch bags or dark circles under eyes can require patience and artistic skill that many of us lack.

Not to worry. There’s an easy “instant fix” solution.

1. Open the photo that you need to retouch in Photoshop.

2. Select the Patch Tool, which lives on the same Toolbar square as the Healing Brush. You can right-click on that square to select the Patch Tool from the fly-out menu.   

3. Using the patch tool, draw a closed loop around the area under the eye that you want to retouch. Be careful not to chop off the eyelashes.

4. Now that the loop is selected and surrounded by a dashed line, click inside it, and with the mouse button held down, drag that loop down onto the cheek of your subject. Drag it to an area of smooth, clean skin with good texture. This will be your sample area.

5. After dragging to a clean sample area, release the mouse button. Bang! Instantly the texture of the sampled area will be remapped onto the target area under the eye, smoothing out any bags and correcting the color of dark circles!

Somehow the wizards at Photoshop have programmed this thing to blend the texture of the sample area and the color of the target area in a way that looks totally natural (most of the time). Occasionally, you’ll find a face where it doesn’t work so well, but 90% of the time, this fix is all I need.

6. Deselect it by pressing Command-D (PC: Control-D) and check the results.

7. If there is a visible edge along the border of the patch, you can zoom in and do a little cleanup. Now is the time for the Clone Stamp tool. Adjust the opacity to about 30%, take a sample (Alt:Click) from clean skin near the edge of the patch, and then lightly clone along the borderline to smooth away any visible edge.

With practice, you’ll get skilled at drawing and sampling with the Patch tool so that edge touch-up is rarely necessary.

Then you’ll enjoy this as a fast, easy, one-step solution to most of your under-eye portrait problems!

About the Author : Phil Steele is the founder of SteeleTraining.com where you’ll find free photo tutorials and training on a variety of topics ranging from basic photography tips to advanced off-camera flash techniques.

The photo used in this tutorial came from his popular course, “How to Shoot Professional-Looking Headshots and Portraits on a Budget with Small Flashes.”

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

The Fast Way to Remove Dark Circles Under Eyes in Photoshop

1. To create this composite, open the images to use. We’ll assemble the composite in the image of the plaster hand. Start by dragging the background layer from the photograph into the hand image. It will appear on its own layer and you can now close that image as it is no longer needed.

2. Size the imported image to fit where it needs to go. In this case the border will be added inside the image so I’ll make the image almost as large as the cardboard it will be ‘attached’ to.

Size the image in proportion so you don’t skew it. To get it to fit on in dimension it will probably be either too tall or too wide in the other dimension and that’s fine.

3. Once you’ve applied the transformation, select the rectangular marquee tool and drag over the area of the photo that you want to retain. Choose Select > Inverse to invert the section and press Delete to delete the excess image.

4. To warp the image to fit the shape of the card, select the image and choose Edit > Transform > Warp. This adds a series of warp handles to the image. Drag on these to bend the image so it fits over the area you want to cover.

When you’re done, confirm the transformation.

5. To add a white border around the image as if it were a photo stuck to the card, select the image layer, click the Add a Layer Style button at the foot of the Layers palette and choose Stroke.

Set the color to white and the size to a size appropriate for your image. Set the position to Inside so you get square corners on the image (if you choose Center or Outside the corners will be rounded).

When you are done, click Ok.

6. With this image layer still selected, click the Add Layer Mask icon at the foot of the Layers palette.

Select a medium hard brush, set the foreground color to black and paint on the mask to reveal the finger on the underlying layer. This makes the finger look like it is above the image and not behind it.

One simple way to do this is to hide the photo layer and use a tool like the Quick Selection tool to select over the finger on the background layer. Then, with the selection in place, display the top layer and select its mask. With black as the foreground color, press Alt + Backspace (Option + Delete on the Mac), to fill the selected area on the mask with black.

You’ll see that we have some problems with the mask because it distorts the stroke around the picture. We want the stroke applied to the image and we don’t want the mask to have any effect on it – right now it is having an unwanted effect.

7. To solve the problem, double click the Effects entry in the Layers palette to open the Layer Styles dialog. In the Blending Options area of the dialog, select the check box for Layer Mask Hides Effects.

This configures the mask on the layer to hide not only the image content on that layer but also a style applied to that layer.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

How to Create A Simple Composite: Photoshop Creative

Pro photographer Chase Jarvis has created a fantastic video showing how he and his team keep their data safe. It’s pretty high level stuff in terms of scale but it’s a great overview which can be scaled down to smaller systems and setups.

Get a fuller run down of their system as well as some other great tips in this post on the Chase Jarvis blog.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

Pro Photographer Chase Jarvis Shares His Complete Workflow, Storage and BackUp System