Just thought I would start this thread going on a few questions from the Daily pictures thread. I know a lot of you would have questions on photography, Photoshop, and other general imaging questions. So feel free to post here any questions you have. Im not a pro, but I have many years of experience in the fields and a degree in graphic design and multimedia, so Im more than happy to help out and ask some questions myself. So, feel free to ask, no question is too stupid, we all have to start somewhere. Hopefully some of the other enthusiasts can chip in and help out too. Regards, Dave
Alright I have one, I have been using PS for a few years, no real training just working with tutorials and figuring it out on my own, I would consider myself intermediate. So what is the best way to separate a car from its background and what are some steps to make it look really professional, basically how to get a shot you took in the street to look like it was shot in a studio. As much as I have tried over the years I just could never get a result I was happy with. That should be a good start to this thread, and I love the idea.
ok, well you are probably best off masking around the car with a new layer. white or black, whichever colour you want. the biggest problems you will run into from taking a picture on the street and trying to make it look like a studio will be reflections and lighting. you can get rid of reflections, but it can take a bit of work and some "airbrushing". if you have a look at photos of cars taken in a proper studio (most magazine shoots have 1 or 2) take close attention to the reflections and outlines of the cars. one thing to remember which may or maynot help in this case, but remember, nothing in real life has an outline. (cartoon) blur edges, and soft brushes are your friend. change the hardness of the brushes to get closer lines. try and fade to the background colour, ie. airbrush some of the background colour to the edges of the car. the other thing is the almost perfect lighting in a studio. its all soft light and everything is lit up. in real world photos you will generally have more contrast. so essentially it can be done, but it can take some playing around. its probably not something i do often so i cant say i have many short cuts to do it. maybe someone else here does it more often than i do. did you have an example you would like me to play with?
I am new to Photoshop and would like to know, the thing about the curves, what´s the best to photoshop to motion pics, also what's best to photoshop to a still picture of a car... Thanks
Curves are just a way to map one tone to another. They're used to adjust the brightness and contrast of an image. It's a lot to explain, so I'd recommend looking at a tutorial, like this one: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/photoshop-curves.htm BTW - that site has a TON of great tutorials.
Im not sure I understand what you mean, do you want to know the best program, or best way to edit the pictures to bring out the depth etc ? As for curves, im sure there are more technical explanations on how it works etc like the link above, but to keep it simple here goes A picture has a histogram, its a bar graph of the amount of the range of colour or contrast in the picture. Using curves, or levels, we can clip the range and bring out more of one tone part of the range, for example if we move the extremities in towards the centre, we are clipping the range and increasing the contrast. the curve or straight line as it looks from the start, represents dark, medium and light. If we push the curve one way or the other, we can either increase the black in the picture, or increase the white. Providing either a darker or lighter image. Now if we move the lower half of the curve towards the black, and the top half towards the white, we can increase the contrast at the extremities. Not sure if all this makes sense. But look at the photos and hopefully they will make some sense Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Can someone go over the basics of the histogram? Like how to read it, especially for the in-camera ones.
The horizontal axis is exposure (dark to light left to right), and the vertical axis is essentially pixels. Looking at it tells you about the overall exposure of the picture. If the histogram touches the right side, at least some pixels are overexposed to the extent that they're white. If it touches the left, at least some pixels are underexposed to the extent that they're black. In general, a "properly exposed" photo will look like a lump in the middle, no over and no underexposure (of course, some situations make that impossible). So if you take a shot and look at your histogram and see everything over towards the right, you know without even seeing the photo that it's too bright and you should either stop down, decrease ISO, or increase the shutter speed. The opposite is also true. Digital photographers are often encouraged to "expose right." That's a histogram term meaning that you should try to overexpose slightly so that the histogram is shifted from center to right (but not all the way to the right). Theoretically, that will decrease the percentage of noisy pixels (from shadows) while preserving the bright portions of the shot. There are also RGB histograms which show the same thing but for each color channel. I don't find them very useful, but I always look at my 'standard' histogram when shooting in a challenging environment. Hopefully that helps.
Thanks a lot, definately, I have noticed the 40D's LCD isn't its strong point and with knowing how to read the histogram I can tell how if they are bad or not.
Here is a little tutorial I did for making a ride look like it is in motion. Hopefully it can help a few people. 1st pic is original and 3rd is the edited. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Yah, it's especially hard to see pictures (even on the D3/D300's glorious display) when it's bright out. But you can almost always see the histogram. It's possibly the single most useful feature on any digital camera. Well, maybe not. The built-in light meters are quite good.
Alright this one if for ItaliaF1, I remember seeing awhile ago, though I could not find an example now, of some B&Ws you did with an SLR and a couple other cars. I believe you used diffuse glow, but I tried and could not get anything close to what you had, excellent looking pictures, could you say or show how you did them?
I actually don't even use photoshop; photoshop Lightroom gets the job done for me. If I remember correctly, I think I just played around with the amount of black in the picture, contrast, and vignetting. Sorry about my lack of knowledge about photoshop.
Here's one. The rest are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnburrow/sets/72157606002781105/ Image Unavailable, Please Login
Not a problem, I love the look, I have started to use Lightroom pretty much exclusively over regular PS aswell.
how do you bring out the true colors of either the car or the backround. Such as if i have a car and the backdrop is a deep blue sky and that theres only so much a filter can do. can i adjust that in PS?
very nice mate, i love most of your photos. exelent work. one commment though, i would lay off the vingetting on ALL of the photos. otherwise great work
Thank you. Believe it or not, for the longest time, I would just keep my UV filter on all the time and then put on a CPL over that when I needed one, resulting in vignetting in almost all my pics, so I'd have to increase the vignetting a little in Lightroom so that the vignetting lines weren't so definate. Now I just switch the filters out when I need to to avoid the vignetting, which I should have started doing earlier.
What kind of filter are you using? If you aren't using a circular polarizer then I'd highly suggest picking one up and trying that out.
i have one, guess i may just be may be using wrong, gotta go back to drawing board, do some reading and go from there.
