Iceland Aurora Photographic » photoshop

Advanced Photoshop – Dramatic Mono Conversion

Tony — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:31:16 +0000

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.

Photoshop basics – simple colour correction

Tony — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:36:28 +0000

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.

Create a photoshop action – Colour boost

Tony — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:35:22 +0000

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.

Northern lights hotspots

Tony — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:59:16 +0000

The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights is a light phenomenon that occurs as a result of solar winds reaching earth’s outer atmosphere and burning different gases to give a range of different colours. The best place to see them would surely be from a very high viewpoint just outside earth’s atmosphere. Here on earth however, we need to travel to cold countries near the point where you would see the midnight sun in the summer and very short days in the winter. Iceland is one of those places. It is just touched by the Arctic circle on its very north isle of Grimsey, but most of Iceland is good for northern lights.

Photography techniques – focus stacking

Tony — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:21:30 +0000

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.

Photoshop Basics – noise reduction

Tony — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:41:09 +0000

No camera is perfect. If we push it to the limits of iso and low-light scenes, we are going to experience the number one weakness of a digital camera – NOISE.

HDR4 – Photoshop enhancements

Tony — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:56:05 +0000

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.

Creating a photoshop action – sharpening

Tony — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:14:08 +0000

Creating a photoshop action will enhance your productivity. You could use a photoshop action to perform a processing task that would be applied to many photos without going through the whole procedure each time. Simply put, an ‘Action’ is a set of automatic commands. Actions can be downloaded for free, bought online or you can create your own.

Basic adjustments – Sharpen and save for the web

Tony — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:08:19 +0000

Basic adjustments – Sharpen and save for the web

Layers and Masks 2 – Adjustment Layers

Tony — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:57:48 +0000

Layers and Masks 2 – Adjustment Layers