- Huge Pixel Poster – via Digg where there are more comments about this sort of thing. “Pixel Art is form of digital art, created on the computer through the use of raster graphics software, where images are edited on the pixel level. Graphics in most old computer and video games or even in Game Boy games are considered pixel art.”
- How to dodge & burn like a pro? – I use the soft light layer approach myself.
- Stripping Raw Naked – interview with the Apple Aperture product manager, Joe Schorr. Of course he’d tell you that it’s aimed at professionals! Meanwhile, Paul says that Aperture will not pose a challenge to Photoshop as it’s missing too many features. I’m sticking with the GIMP for the time being.
- Lumilux – nice photoblog, I really like his “shape” photos. Big expanses of single colours broken up by one or two objects.
- Has everything already had its picture taken? No, but does it matter? To the Lazy Photographer yes, “The idea that you don’t need to take photographs anymore because someone will take the picture for you and put it on flickr.”
- 2 Minute Photoshop Tricks
- Shooting Great Pictures of the Fall Foliage – look for detail, look for light. The colours of the trees around now are amazing!
- How to Get Traffic to Your Photoblog – a lot of the advice applies to regular blogs and websites too!
- Ideal ISO setting for the 20D? – ISO200 was suggested by numerous posters to this forum but it’s not as simple as that…
- Do you make your photos lie?
Links
Beer!
Top of Patricks Street, go across the bridge and look between the traffic lights.. Takes me bloody ages to walk around town! 🙂
English Market Panorama
We were going to have lunch in the upper-level restaurant but it was jammed tight with people already. There were queues of people 5 or 6 deep waiting on tables or a high stool. It might be worth waiting sometime and spending an hour eating and snapping shots..
This is 4 horizontal shots stitched together I think.
City Rainbow
At the top of Patricks Street I noticed a rainbow over the city.
Today’s Links
- Tips for Portrait Photography
- Headshot portfolio
- Polar Panoramics
- Framing Lessons
- Photo Tips – covers lots of topics!
- Sports Illustrated Canon 20D settings
- Rob Galbraith’s forums were recently recommended by Paul.
- Ron Bigelow Articles cover a wide range of topics. Great read too!
- UFRaw forum is worth a read if you use UFRaw to convert your RAW images in the GIMP.
- Pixel Impact – great photos and posts
- Framed and Exposed: It’s a Frame-Up – making the most of a bad situation where light is bad and dark.
- Laptop Digital Photo Frame – I have a very old laptop that needs a new drive. Maybe this is something I can put on it..
- Tell a story in 5 frames – that’s a challenge!
- How to turn a digital camera into an infra red camera – looks easy enough. He uses an old Fuji Finepix 1300 which I already have! I’m sure I can find some dark negatives too!
- Review of the new Canon 70-300mm IS lens.
Travel Photography, what to do
I love to travel, to see new sights, meet new people, and have new experiences! If you bring your camera here’s some lengthy advice from a fellow traveller including bits on saving money, taking photos of people and safety issues.
The English Market
The English Market in Cork is a popular market and meeting area for people.
Early Morning Bus
Early morning, catch the bus to work or school. You know exactly how she feels.
Except it’s the weekend! Woo! No going to school or work!
Self Portrait
Pictured in the elevator of the new Ballincollig shopping center.
Bird on Ground
What kind of bird is this? Around a dozen congregate around our bird feeders, dive to the ground and bath in the bowl of water below, and even fight over how gets to have a bath or a feed sometimes!
| Aperture | ƒ/6.3 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 300mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/25s |
Simple steps to photo touch-up
In this post I’m going to show you how to go post-process this image:
By the end, we’ll have an image that looks like this:
This tutorial was created using the GIMP, but it’s equally applicable to your favourite editing software as long as it has the same tools. Photoshop, and other editing software should work equally well.
The steps described here are worth practising, and will apply equally well to any portrait!
First of all, I came across this photo on Flickr through my contacts page. Here’s the original photo, and Ayhtnic kindly let me use her image.
After you load the image, the first thing to do is use Auto Levels from the Layer->Colors menu. This tool alone does wonders for most photos, especially if they’ve been captured as Jpeg straight from the camera.
The image is a little noisy so let’s clean it up a bit. Use Selective Gaussian Blur from the Filters->Blur menu. Use small values as we just want to smudge the noise away without losing too much detail. A radius of 3, and delta of 10 worked fairly well here.
Let’s brighten it a bit and add contrast. Use the Curves tool from Layers->Colors for this. The classic “S” shape always adds life to a photo.
Open the Layers dialog and duplicate the background layer.
Select the new layer (called “background copy” here) and use the Curves tool again to brighten this layer a lot.
With the same layer selected (the top one, the “background copy”), we’ll apply some blur. Open up the Gaussian Blur tool, it’s in Filters->Blur. Apply a blur of 5 pixels to the top layer. Don’t worry, we’re not finished!
We’re going to change the “mode” of the top layer now. With the top layer selected, click on the dropdown box that says “Normal” and scroll down to “Soft Light”. You can also try other modes, they’ll make for interesting photos!
Notice how the image suddenly changed?
Even with the nice glowing effect, the image looks indistinct. Let’s sharpen the bottom layer. Select that layer in the Layers dialogue and load the “Unsharp Mask” filter. This is in Filters->Enhance->Unsharp Mask.
Don’t apply too much sharpening. Make it subtle. The settings in the screenshot work well.
All that’s left is to save the image, save it with a quality setting of 92%. Don’t bother with higher, as it’s practically impossible to see any difference in quality.
