post processing
Lightroom Quickie: Soften Skin
This tip is actually specific to Lightroom 2 – as it uses the Adjustment Brush, which of course wasn’t present in Lightroom 1. If you’ve yet to upgrade from 1 to 2, I personally think the Adjustment Brush alone is reason to do so – it’s such a versatile, easy-to-use and yet powerful tool!
Soften Skin in action with overlay
Soften Skin is one of the presets on the Adjustment Brush – and it’s quite well hidden, which is a shame as it’s a great feature!
Open a shot to work on, and go to the Develop pane, then click on the Adjustment Brush tool (the far right one of the five icons under the histogram – looks kind of like a thermometer on its side).
Once selected, a new set of menu options appear below – click on the arrows next to the current Effect to get a drop down list of effects and presets. Select Soften Skin from the list.
Now you could just go ahead and paint over the areas of skin you want to soften – but it can be difficult to see which areas you’ve selected. So instead I recommend that you press O before you start painting, as this will turn on the Overlay option, which makes everything MUCH easier! Now go ahead and paint the areas you want to soften – obviously just select skin, not hair, eyes or lips – if you go over the edge and want to delete a small area of selection, just press and hold the Alt key and paint over the area you want to delete.
Once you’ve finished your selection press O again to turn off the overlay and see the effect applied. The default full Amount of 100 can be a little obvious at times, so try lowering it until you get the desired combination of softened and natural (I find a figure of around 60 to 80 looks natural, but flattering).
What Software Do YOU Use?
Well love it or hate the birth of digital photography means that using software as a post-processing tool has become more common than tap water even for the average joe (or julie) in the street. People either use their choice of software for simple tweaks like cropping and colour correction or they unleash the beast and use it to take a image to new levels, compositing various images into one masterpiece and letting their imagination run wild with the available tools.
Since taking up photography as a major hobby (obsession?) I’ve switched over time from mad and crazy post processing experiments to something of a lighter touch. I now try and make better use of my subjects, camera, environment, and accessories and strive to get the image I want straight out of the camera but it’s still common for me to tweak images and apply colour treatments and crops. For this reason my main post processing tool of choice is adobe lightroom. I do still have photoshop installed for those moments when I want to let my imagination run wild! So what is your software of choice when is comes to post-processing?
We are interested in what tools you use the most. There are lots of choices out on the market these days from free online tools like picnik all the way through to fully loaded costly applications such as photoshop. I’ve tried to list what I expect will be common answers to this question for you to vote on below but please leave a comment with a bit more detail of how and why you use your choice of software and also let me know if I’ve left any out.
Loading ...5 Great Places to Find Textures
(photo: S Mackenzie, texture courtesy: Urban Dirty Free)
I thought I’d post some links to some great online resources for finding interesting and good quality textures to use with your photographs. Most of these can be used royalty-free or under an appropriate creative commons license but I would advise you check the license on each texture before you use them. If you’re not sure how to add and use textures with your photographs then I suggest this tutorial as a simple starting point, but there are lots of methods out there and lots of great way to use textures…maybe google yourself some more options =)
1. Urban DirtyFree – texture stock photography for your artwork, designs and desktops
2. TextureKing – Free stock textures
3. Grunge Textures -Free High Resolution Textures with Creative Commons Licensing
4. Texture Warehouse -Free High Resolution Textures for Designers and 3D Artist
5. Flickr of course! – Yes there are lots and lots of people offering their own textures for use on flickr, up until recently an individual called ghostbones was top on my visit list but sadly he seems to have departed!?!? So another good place to start would be the textures for layers group.
bonus number six – shoot your own!! If your at a loss of what to shoot on any particular day grab your camera and go and take some texture shots and start building up your own library, you won’t have to travel far to find 100’s of different surfaces and materials to make up great layers for future photo projects.
Here are more examples of textures in action. › Continue reading
