Iceland Aurora Photographic

This tutorial looks at ways to convert your image to black and white using the tools available in Photoshop CS3. There may be work-arounds for other versions of photoshop or other image editors, but the work horse in this tutorial is the powerful ‘Black and White Tool’ in CS3 which has a great selection of filter pre-sets. To emulate this without the tool, you could try blending channel levels.

This is a quick and simple technique for correcting the colour of an image in photoshop. It is not always successful and will not give you the desired results 100% of the time. But as it is quick and easy it is definitely one to try first.

This tutorial offers an alternative to the saturation option when you wish to dramatically boost the colours in an image. We will make a photoshop action for this colour boosting technique so that it  can be applied easily to any image in the future. More information about creating an action can be found here.

This articles looks at a lengthy and complicated procedure to render every part of a scene with perfect focus. the aim is to achieve a high depth of field (DOF) whilst maintaining the high quality of your lens’ sweet-spot. The main challenge is, maybe, deciding what situations exactly would require this sort of treatment. This technique is popular for macro work, where the DOF is usually too shallow to capture all the sharp detail in a subject. Landscape could benefit as there is a requirement for sharpness throughout the scene. Usually an f/16 and careful hyper-focal calculations will achieve this. For my first attempt, I chose a landscape scene with a huge focal challenge. In this scene the immediate foreground is just a few inches from the front of the lens.

HDR4 – Photoshop enhancements

1) The first tutorial shows you how to fix strange HDR artefacts by using an original exposure as a selection aid and then using the clone tool to correct problems.

Layers and Masks 2 – Adjustment Layers

Like layers, curve adjustments is a way of adjusting the brightness/ darkness levels in an image. The emphasis is put more on contrast and adjusting curves is a very smooth and sophisticated way of adjusting contrast.

Basic Adjustments – Levels

When you adjust levels, you are adjusting the range of the brightness/ darkness levels in an image.  This is determined through a histogram. The histogram displays the distribution of the different light value in an image. For example, a dark image would have a lot of value at the dark end of the spectrum (left hand side of the histogram), a bright image would have a lot of values at the bright end (right hand side).

Layers and Masks 1 – The Layers Palette

For this guide you need to have Photoshop open with an image and be able to see the ‘Layers’ palette.