Essential techniques for unique silhouette photography

Why silhouette photography

In this post we would like to show you all the essential techniques for silhouette photography so you can create very unique and awesome images.

Now the first thing we hear from a lot of photographers is “silhouettes? I don’t do those tacky things!”

However did you know there are different degrees of silhouette not to mention so many ways to create them and incorporate them into your work? Maybe you’re looking for an ‘in your face’ silhouette or maybe you’re looking for something a lot more subtle. We would like to help you to take whatever silhouette photography knowledge you have on to a new and exciting level with our list of techniques ranging from the basic camera settings through to advanced Photoshop techniques.

Let us show you how to add the special interesting ingredients to your images.

Original ‘Donor’ image.

Original silhouette photographer image.

Select the photographer. I used a quick selection tool in Photoshop and then cleaned the image up with the Select and Mask tools.

Photographer cut out.

Photographer is on new layer. Position and scale cut-out so it looks correct.

Final composition.

Original image with white sky.

Original sky image.

Use Multiply to get the top layer to show darker areas of lower layers

The post All the Essential Techniques for Silhouette Photography to Create Unique Images appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Who is Steve McCurry. If you don’t know his name, you can be sure to know at the least one image by him. The National Geographic cover ‘Afghan girl’ is one of the most iconic magazine covers ever printed, however Steve McCurry has hundreds, if not thousands of portrait images that are just as hauntingly beautiful. So what is it about his images that is so engaging.

Analysing Steve McCurry’s work

• When you see any portrait of his, the first thing you notice is the eye contact. His subjects look directly into his lens with self assurance. No matter how torn the clothes they wear are, McCurry’s images allows their inner strength, uniqueness and most profoundly, their dignity to shine through.
• The next thing you notice is the lack of distractions. Any detail in the background supports the feel he is trying to convey in the image.

• Colours tend to be quite vibrant but with the skin tones very subtle.

• Shadows are very dark. There is limited detail to distract from the subject.

Why create photographs in a famous photographers style?

That is a stunning question, after all, the last thing you want is for people to say your work looks like …… Insert famous photographer name here …
The thing is that you can learn so much about photography by emulating the styles of the photographers you admire. Spend time analysing their work. Understand their vision. Learn how they edit their work. BUT… Don’t just do this for one photographer. Do it for many and then once you understand their processes you can mix, match and adapt their techniques with your own spin, to create something that is uniquely yours.

Have a look at our ‘How to photograph like‘ series to see other great photographers like Edward Weston, Michael Kenna, Ansel Adams and Arnold Newman.

So here is how to photograph like Steve McCurry

The image choice

I am using a photograph Ally made of a flower seller in the centre of Cape Town, South Africa and will try to “McCurryfy” it as much as possible. In McCurry’s images the subjects are usually looking directly into the lens, usually seriously. In Ally’s image the woman is looking directly into the camera. Like Steve, Ally has an amazing way of making her subjects feel comfortable in front of the lens so this image was an obvious choice as an example of how to photograph like Steve McCurry.

The first thing I will do is to crop the image down to a headshot. Most of Steve McCurry’s images are tight headshot images and although he usually crops to portrait format there are a few landscape (environmental) style in his portfolio of images.

I wanted to subtly keep the flowers in the image as the tell a story about the woman.

“What matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling” Steve McCurry

The Raw edit

As you can see the original image directly from the camera was totally flat so I set about adding contrast, clarity and vibrancy to the whole image just to get it looking acceptable.

Once the basic edit is done I went to the adjustment brush and lightened and darkened various areas (Dodge and Burn). To add more saturation to the clothing I increased the vibrancy. Once happy with the Raw edit I opened the file into Photoshop.

When looking at how to photograph like Steve McCurry, one of the main things one notices is the lack of inappropriate objects in the background. Now where he would normally change his viewpoint to adjust what he is seeing, we will use Photoshop’s tools to remove unwanted details. The Content-Aware Fill is a perfect tool for this. Just choose Fill from the Edit menu and then Content-Aware from the drop down menu. If you’re already an experienced Photoshop user you can use the Content-Aware Fill option directly from the Edit menu. This will open a new window allowing you to choose what areas you would like the software to use or ignore when doing the fill. It can also put the result on a new layer for you.

Lastly I noticed that all Steve McCurry portraits have one thing in common. There are large reflections in the eyes. When photographing I would normally use a large white reflector to add soft light into the face and it would also create beautiful reflections in the eyes. We couldn’t do that in Cape town as we only had a few minutes and as the area was deserted our guide was getting worried about us flashing expensive equipment around, so Ally had to work very fast.
To get around this problem I created a new layer in Photoshop and used a small paintbrush with white paint to paint in the reflections. After painting them in I reduced the opacity slightly to give a more realistic look.

Finally

Throughout this whole How to photograph like Steve McCurry tutorial I have shown you how to emulate him but don’t just go out and copy a photographer’s style. They are the master of that style and you will never be any better than second best. Get to understand as many photographers’ shooting and editing styles as possible and then take the best feature and mix with your own style to create something that is totally uniquely you. There can never be anyone better at your own style than you.

Click here for special deals on Tim’s Udemy course for Photoshop on the iPad and Affinity Photo v2 on the iPad

The post How to photograph like Steve McCurry appeared first on ImageExplorers.

In this post I will show you the photography editing steps I went through to turn a mundane image into something that brings me a lot of joy and is the image I pre-visualised.

Let me show you how it was done

When you are out photographing do you ever find yourself looking at the scene but visualising a result that doesn’t quite tally with what you see in front of your eyes. This was my experience when my son and I went photographing along the Jurassic coast. If you haven’t read the post about our photographic mini adventure you can find it here. In this post I will go through the editing of the Jurassic Coast image and show you my workflow from RAW to finished file.

The photography process

It was a blue sky day with a few clouds on the horizon when we photographed this scene. Due to the lighting we decided to wait until late in the afternoon as the top down lighting is certain death to most moody landscapes and also, it is too bright for long exposures even with the ND (neutral density) filter on. As the sun went towards the horizon the clouds came up and we got to work.

I photographed various exposures of the scene with my camera on the tripod. The longest I was able to do was 4 seconds as even with the aperture at f22, ISO at 50 and an ND filter I couldn’t go slower. I timed the exposures to go when the small waves were breaking. This meant I could achieve a bit of the misty effect I was after.

I also did some other stopped-down images at the same time to expose the details in the clouds which were bright and would have been ‘blown out’ (overexposed) in the main exposure.

The Initial Photography Editing Process

I started by editing the raw files separately. The main misty image has some shadows lightened and clarity added all over.

After this I went to the adjustment brushes and brightened up and darkened down (burn and dodge) various rock surfaces to add a more 3 dimensional element to them. I dodged the water to lighten the mist and added texture with the clarity slider. To get the green “toxic water feel”, I increased the saturation on the already green water.

Combining the 2 Images

To get the dark sky into my final image I opened both images in Photoshop and dragged the dark sky image into the misty sea scene.

Pro Tip:

When you have finished editing in the RAW file converter hold down the Shift key while you click the open image button. This changes the button to open object. When your image open in Photoshop it will open as a RAW smart object. When you wish to change the image in Photoshop just double click the Smart Object layer and it will open the layer back in RAW. Total non-destructive editing.

If you photograph both images without moving the Tripod then they will be exactly the same composition and if you drag one image in Photoshop onto the other whilst holding the Shift button down they will align exactly. If however your camera moved between the images then all is not lost. Select both layers ( the misty image and the dark sky image, and go to the Edit menu in Photoshop and choose Auto-Align Layers. This will automatically align the layers for you.

I used a selection tool to select the sky area and then added a layer mask to the top layer. This hides the areas of the image that are not sky on the dark sky layer.

Final adjustments in photoshop

The last things I do are to add adjustment layers to bring the images together. My favourite is to either use a warming photo filter for a warm reddish tinge or use one of the LUTs. These are Colour Look Up Tables that can give a overall colour and contrast look. My favourite is the Crisp warm look LUT.

And there you have it. I finally saved the image as a PSD file so that all the editable items (layers, masks, Adjustment layers and Smart RAW layers) would remain editable.

I was rather pleased with the result. The final image was just as I had pre-visualised it, brooding and threatening as a Jurassic scene might be.

The post Jurassic Coast Photography Editing appeared first on ImageExplorers.

To photograph the Jurassic coast where dinosaurs used to prowl, incredible plant-life grew, and the steamy swamps took the life of many an unwary creature, you would think we would need to travel to an exotic Island. Maybe somewhere where people had never set foot? Possibly near the tropics as we need the heat for the steam? Err no. The image you see here was photographed at a south of England (UK) seaside holiday town in full summer school holiday swing.

Where to go

So a few weeks ago I (Tim) went down to the south of the UK to visit our son Jethro, who is not only a designer and illustrator in Bournemouth, but also an avid photographer with a beautiful minimalist and graphic style to his images. Jethro had a really good idea about going to a seaside town called Lulworth cove to photograph the Jurassic coast. Lulworth is in the county of Dorset which is on the south coast of England. About 2 hours drive south west of London. This UNESCO world heritage site coastline is known for its rich supply of fossils from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and is now called the Jurassic coast. I immediately had visions of moody dark brooding images.

Equipment

As I have mentioned in many of these posts, we like to travel really light as we feel the weight of your equipment is inversely proportionate to your creativity when adventuring. With this mantra in mind I put together a minimal but effective kit. 

Lenses

I envisaged a wide vista, with detail in the foreground, stretching to the horizon in total focus, so my main lens was a Voigtlander Super Wide-Heliar 15mm f/4.5 Aspherical III. This lens is super sharp, totally mechanical and quite small. I also put in a 28-70mm Sony kit zoom as a ‘just in case’ lens. 

Filters

I added ND filters for both these lenses so I could do long exposures to create the misty water look, and polariser filters to take off the reflections from the water and the wet rocks. Naturally I had UV filters on the lens to protect it from the sea spray.

Pro Tip: Take spare UV filters when you’re in an area with dust or spray as it’s much easier and faster to put on a clean filter than it is to clean the dirty one

Camera

Sony A7r body. I normally use a vertical handgrip as it takes 2 batteries, but I take it off when using a tripod as it is more stable without it. Jethro shoots with a Sony A6000.

Tripod

We have more tripods at home than is healthy, from a 4×5 large format camera studio Gitzo through to a tiny ultra-light travel tripod that is really only good for a Kodak Instamatic. (You will know what these are if you are either over 50 years old or a hipster.) I chose the Manfrotto BeFree carbon fibre travel tripod as it’s ultra light, 1kg but very stable.

Bag

Both Ally and I love our camera bags but for this trip I choose to take the Domke backpack. Very light, small but with enough room for everything and I can even attach the tripod to it.

“Your creativity is inversely proportionate to the weight of your gear.”

So that was all. Super light but everything I needed for the image I had “pre-visualised” (as the late, great Ansel Adams would have said).

The problem with photography during holiday seasons

Ally and I had been to Lulworth Cove before during Christmas a few years ago, and spent a few evenings photographing the deserted coastline at sunset and early morning. So very peaceful. I really shouldn’t have been surprised though, when Jethro and I arrived to a jam-packed car park and kids and dogs running around as it was a beautiful summer holiday. My first reaction to this was to think that we were never going to get a good image. Still… We were there and we would make the most of it. 

Recce the area

Rather than jumping right in and shooting immediately we spent a good amount of time looking at various areas and deciding which area would be best to invest our efforts in. We started with the top of the hill where we could view most of the area and found the area we wanted to shoot. Unfortunately, the sun was too high, so we needed to kill about 2 hours, so some exploring and snacking were in order. The chips from the local Fish and Chip shop were excellent and well worth the wait.

Composition

I chose the scene I did for various reasons. 
The water had came up to the rocks and I knew it would work well for a misty Neutral Density filter long exposure.

The composition meant that the horizon was on the horizontal third and the point of entry into the bay was on the vertical third. Very classical composition method.

The sky is a V=shape and funnels you down to the bay entry point there. Your eye then goes about exploring the bay water until finally resting on the foreground misty effect.

The photography

The easiest part of the whole process. With the camera on the tripod and the ND filter on, I was able to get an exposure of 3.2 seconds at F22 with an ISO of 50. Just enough time to get the misty feeling, without losing the texture of the water. In these situations, it is normally wise to make several exposures as it is so easy to get camera movement during the long exposures that can ruin your image.

Timing is so important during these shoots. I waited until the small waves were about a second from breaking on the rocks to take my exposure. This gives the misty effect.
Doing some extra exposures at faster shutter speeds, stopped down, meant there were dark sky images to use too.

One last composition

I tried a second composition and froze the splashing waves, but it didn’t have the brooding Jurassic photography feel I was looking for.

Did it work?

Whilst I judge the success of a shoot on the final results that is only one aspect of photography. Yes, I was really happy with my photographs of the Jurassic coast, but more importantly I had an amazing time sharing a photographic adventure with our son.

The post Best techniques to photograph the Jurassic coast appeared first on ImageExplorers.

“TOAST! Tim and Ally…. Really?” “Erm yes…It really does help with Dodge and Burn tools. We’ll get to that later but first things first.”

Dodge and burn tools have become a bit old hat to many photographers. With so many quick and easy digital ‘fixes’ it’s easy to see why, but these tools, although going back to traditional printing times, are some of the best ways to make your black and white images (and colour too) look amazing. We can safely say that there is not an image on our blog that doesn’t use at least one of these in some way or other. See our tips and geeky explanations for what makes a good black and white image.

Dodge and burn in traditional printing

In traditional printing, you have an enlarger which projects your negative onto paper. The more light you expose the paper to through the negative, the darker the print will be. After you’ve done a test strip, which helps you work out the required exposure, you would then expose the light from the enlarger onto your paper. Depending on the exposure, there can often be areas of the image that would be too dark or too light. You would then do another test strip over those areas to work out that exposure time. Dabbling or jumping into film photography – see our post on the best film for travel photography and filters for black and white photography.

Dodging

When it comes to the final exposure of the print, you would expose for the final image with adjustments, but for the area that was too dark and needed less time, you would use a piece of card, normally attached to a piece of wire to wave madly over that area to prevent light getting to it – well maybe not madly, but moving enough to prevent a hard edge being projected onto the paper. This lightening technique is called dodging.

Dodging the print with cardboard ellipses on sticks

The further away from the paper you manipulate the light, the softer the dodged or burnt area edges will be.

Burning

For the area that needs more light, you would expose the image with the normal exposure, then you would give the area the needs more light, the extra light that it needs. How do you do that? Well, depending on the size and shape of the area, you can use your hands cupped together to block out the light and only allow certain areas to get extra light, or you could also use a piece of card with a hole cut in it to give that area more light … directing (or burning) the light. Again you wave it gently between the enlarger and the paper (to prevent getting a hard edge).

Burning in areas by giving them extra exposure through the cardboard hole

Pro tip:

Now one of the advanced traditional techniques used by traditional film printers is to dodge or burn with a different contrast. This is done by using multi-grade paper and changing the grade filter on the enlarger lens before dodging or burning. This technique allows you to have a combination of high and low contrast so for example in your scene you might need more contrast in the sky to get awesome looking clouds but the foreground needs sensitive shadow and highlight detail so a lower contrast.

Dodge and burn in Photoshop or Affinity photo

Now digitally, the darkroom effect can be applied in Photoshop. In your toolbar, normally down the left-hand side, you should see what at first glance looks like a lollipop. This is in fact a version of the round piece of card on a piece of wire or stick, used in dodging. Click and hold that and you’ll see 2 other icons and the text. We’re not going to look at the Sponge tool but the Burn tool has a hand with a hole made with the fingers and the thumb. This is depicting one of the options you can use when burning in!

When you choose any of these you will see your options along the top menu change to something like this.

This means that you can control how much dodging / burning you will do to your image with the exposure, and what tones you will affect, such as Highlight, Midtones or Shadows.

Most of the time you will need midtones, but if the area you wish to adjust is in the highlights or shadows, you then choose the appropriate Range from here. Choose a brush size and click and drag around the area you wish to lighten / darken. Be careful not to overdo it and use a brush bigger than you think. Undo is your friend here!

So where on earth does toast come in?

Well a lot of people get confused with which one darkens and which lightens.

The easiest way to remember this is:

If you burn the toast it will go darker – hence Burn darkens – easy to remember now.

Dodge and Burn in Raw (adjustment brushes)

There are a number of reasons to dodge and burn using adjustment brushes in the Raw file converter but the 2 main ones ore these.

• This is a non-destructive technique so you can always come back and re -edit the image at a later stage.
• You can use the dodge and burn with contrast adjustments like the advanced traditional film technique mentioned above.

In Adobe Photoshop (CS6 or CC) Open your Raw image in the Raw file converter and navigate to the adjustment brushes. It’s along the top.

Paint the area you wish to dodge and burn and then adjust the settings on the right hand side. We usually use the clarity slider to add contrast when needed and the contrast slider to reduce contrast.

Do a new adjustment for each area you wish to work on. (Not sure about Photoshop or Affinity – see our post which gives the lowdown on them). See also our Top Photoshop shortcuts.

Putting it into practice

We photographed the tower on the City wall in Dubrovnik, Croatia, but the original looks so uninspiring that a bit of Dodging and Burning was required.

• The sky was quite tricky as while the whole area needed darkening, some parts needed less contrast and some more. We did this with 2 large burning in areas with adjustment brushes. Both darkened with the Exposure slider but one added contrast with the Clarity slider while the other reduced contrast with the Contrast slider. See our post about dramatic skies.
• The sea was burned in and had added clarity
• The tower was dodged to lighten it but with added clarity to show detail in the texture.

Original image

Areas we adjusted with the brush

Final result

Revolutionise your new images and give new life to old ones

Dodging and burning has been used by film photographers since photography was invented and it’s still one of the best ways to get what you want from an image. Give your new images that exquisitely beautiful look you have admired in the masters printers work or add new life to old photographs.

Mostly, enjoy what you do.

If you are in the London / Essex / Suffolk area, we run training at your office / premises in Photoshop. Want to buy Photoshop – click the Adobe image at the bottom of this page from this link.

The post How toast can help you to create awesome B&W images with Dodge and Burn tools appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Occasionally, in your photographic life, you will find that creativity comes to a grinding halt. A bit like writers’ block! You are bored of looking at super sharp, over-saturated, perfectly grainless travel images and your creative soul longs for something more. As amazing as digital is, it can be too perfect and our humanity likes imperfections. Of course, maybe you just want to try something different. Possibly you yearn for analogue film days but have a digital camera, or sometimes a specific subject just cries out for the vintage look. Whatever the case, we would like to show you how to reinvigorate your photography with 5 professional techniques to make a photo look old.

Here are the techniques we will cover so grab your software and follow along.

1 – Sepia or blue tone (cyanotype) using black and white Adjustment layers
2 – Split toning using raw files or raw filters
3 – More accurate tone types using Gradient Maps
4 – Adding grain
5 – Adding a photo border

What software can you use?

Although for these techniques to make a photo look old are done in Photoshop Creative Cloud, you can do most of them in any other software. We recommend either Photoshop, Lightroom or Affinity Photo, but there are so many different image editors available to you at different price points. Most tend to work in a similar way and use the same terminology.

1 – Sepia or Cyanotype tone using Black and White Adjustment layers

What is it?

A Black and White Adjustment layer allows you to non-destructively colourise your image to a tone approximating a Sepia or Cyanotype photograph.

How to do it

• Open your image in Photoshop. It doesn’t matter if it is a colour, black and white or even a scan. You will need to then apply an Adjustment layer so go to the Layers panel and click the new Adjustment layer at the bottom. From the list chose Black and White.
• Click the tint button and choose a suitable colour.
• If you are adding this adjustment layer to a colour image then adjust the sliders to lighten or darken various colours in the image to taste.

Choose Black & White from the Adjustment drop-down menu

Click the small tint button above the sliders to choose a toning colour

Why are we using an Adjustment layer rather than doing this from the image and adjustments menu? If you use Adjustment layers and save as a PSD file you can always come back and adjust your settings later, as nothing is set in stone. You can also delete or hide the Adjustment layer to get back to your original image.

This black and white tint process enables you to do a very rough approximation of a Cyanotype or a Sepia image. Later in this post we will do a more accurate version of toned images. See our previous post on how to make a digital cyanotype including making the background! 

2 – Split toning using raw files or raw filters

What is it?

Split toning is a technique that allows you to tone the highlights of the image with one colour and the shadows with another.

How to do it

• If you have a Raw file then open the image in the Raw file converter and switch on the Black and White convert button.

Convert colour to black and white in Raw by choosing button in basic tab

• Open the tone tab and lighten the colours to taste.

Adjust sliders to lighten and darken original colours for authentic old vintage photo feel

• Open the split tone tab and choose a colour for the highlights and for the shadows. You can then dial in the saturation and even change the balance so you get more shadow colour or more highlight colour.

Yellow highlights

Blue shadows

Mix of yellow highlights and blue shadows for a greenish look

Mix of yellow and cyan for old photo look of vintage traction engine

A mix of yellow highlights and a reddish  shadow can give a very beautiful warm sepia feel.

To do the same to a non-Raw image, open it in Photoshop and then go to the filter menu and down to Camera Raw. Follow the instructions as above. If you are using this technique to make a photo look old you might wish to convert the image to a smart object first. This means that you can double click the filter on the smart object layer and go into the filter to change any settings.

3 – More accurate tone types using Gradient Maps

What is it?

A Gradient Map allows you to map colours to various tones (light to dark) in an image by applying a gradient with the new colours in. If this last sentence sounded like Geek Speak then just look at the examples to see what we mean.

How to do it

• Open the image in Photoshop and find your layers panel.
• Click the Adjustment layer button at the bottom and choose Gradient Map.
• In the Gradient Maps panel go to the gradient map and choose the drop-down menu and add in the Photographic toning maps.
• Choose a tone to apply to your images.

Choose Photographic Toning from the Gradient Map option menu

Cyanotype gradient colours mapped to image

Gradient map with a heavy sepia so the highlights go orange/brown

Of course you can just go wild

Our favourite tone is the Selenium no 2 tone. See more on Gradient Maps in our how to photograph like Michael Kenna tutorial.

4 – Adding Grain

Why do it

Adding grain can cover a multitude of bad-retouching ‘sins’. It can also augment an image. What it cannot do is to make a bad image better.
We like to add a bit of grain to some digital images to give them a more analogue feel.

How to do it

Grain can be added either in Raw (from the effects tab), from the Raw filter (in Photoshop) or from the add noise option (in the noise filter in Photoshop).

5 – Adding a photo border

A scanned border can make all the difference to the authenticity of your old photo technique. Scan in and old image, put it above your image in the layers panel.

The first thing to do once you have both images open in Photoshop is to drag your toned image into the border image as a layer. (We flattened the toned image before dragging it onto the border image to keep things simple.) We used ‘overlay’ from the Modes drop-down menu in the layers panel to mix the toned image with the border image below.

Here are 2 before and after examples

Original tractor before ageing process

Tractor with old photo look – Zante Greece

Original books before old vintage photo treatment

Original books after old vintage photo treatment

Your own look

These are just a few of the many techniques you can use to age a photo and give it that old treasured image look. We use the Gradient map with Selenium tone on most of our Black and White images to give them a warm feel.
Experiment with these techniques and come up with your own unique look.

The post 5 Professional techniques to make a photo look old appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Have you ever seen a scene that is so expansive and beautiful and thought to yourself something like “A single image with my wide angle lens just can’t do this beautiful vista justice”? On the other hand, maybe when you’re out creating images, you just don’t have a lens that is wide enough. Whatever the problem we would like to show you how to photograph a panorama and get pro results.

Our scene

We were is Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt and had spent the afternoon on camels, riding to an area of the Sinai desert. As this trip was to go stargazing through the large telescopes they set up in the desert and we were on camels (not the most comfortable experience!), we were travelling very light.

Just before sunset we got to the amazing scene you can see in our Panoramic images. Obviously it was too wide for our widest lenses we were carrying but this was where the multi image stitched panorama came into play.

How it was done – The Photography

The video we took – the vista was incredible however far too wide and also very “flat” contrast-wise.

We photographed the scene using the standard focal length on our cameras so as not to get any distortion on the images. The standard focal length is about 45mm to 55mm on a full frame camera and 28mm to 34mm on an APS-C camera. (This is known as standard focal length as it gives the similar field of view as the human eye).

When you photograph a panorama, ideally you should have your camera on a tripod so that when you take each image the horizon stays in the same place. We didn’t have that luxury so we just did the best we could by putting the horizon at about the top third of the image.  When you photograph a panorama scene make sure you overlap each image or you will end up with gaps in your final image. It’s really easy to miss a bit out so do be careful at the photography stage. We always do 2 or 3 sets just in case.

As you can see from the un-retouched raw images below we underexposed the images to get a bit of sky detail. We always prefer this method as it’s easier to lighten dark shadow areas than it is to get back blown-out highlights in Raw. We expose digital like we used to expose transparency film. For more ideas on how to make the sky dark in a photo, see our post. You can also use filters to help darken down the sky.

Un-retouched Raw images  

How it was done – Preparing the original images

The next stage is to correct all your images in Raw. We do them all at once in the Raw file converter from Adobe bridge but you can do the same in Lightroom. The most important thing is consistency.

Images in Raw ready for processing for panorama

Contact sheet of images once processed in Raw

How it was done – Creating the Panorama

Using Adobe Bridge in Creative Cloud, we  went to the tools menu and found Photoshop and chose Photomerge.

This can also be done from the File menu in Photoshop (any version) and choose automate and then Photomerge.

We used the Auto setting as it seems to give a good stitch result for most scenes.

The stitched Panorama photograph is made up of masked layers. Each original image is a separate layer. Once I have checked the image for any issues, I flatten it down by merging the layers.

Pro Tip: You can create your Panaroma as a raw file, so the original Raw images are editable within the pan. When you open the Raw files in Camera Raw, select them all and then choose Merge to Panorama in the drop down menu by the film strip.

Initial stitched image in Photoshop

Next stage is to crop the image to size. We still do some more editing at this stage. In our scene there were some temporary dwellings created by the nomadic Bedouin people. We removed them from the scene as they are not permanent features of the landscape. We do the same with rubbish as it’s not part of the scene and might not be there on a different visit a few weeks later. Removing permanent structures is changing the scene totally and requires a totally different conversation for another time, about how far your own manipulation can go.

This is the un-retouched final Panorama

Here are the temporary structures that we removed

We used the Spot Healing tool to very quickly remove the unwanted details.

Initial images after removing temporary dwellings

The final resulting Panorama

An alternative version of the same scene

There are some great textures in this scene which could also be incorporated into other images.

To sum up the workflow:

• Photograph with a standard lens or lens setting on your zoom
• Overlap the images
• Watch your horizon line
• Let Adobe Photoshop do all the hard work for you. (See our favourite shortcuts)
• Print it large and wait for the flood of compliments!

So there you have it. Never worry about not having a wide enough lens ever again.

The post How to photograph a panorama – a tutorial appeared first on ImageExplorers.

So you’re out travelling and all prepared to go out to photograph that amazing landscape you noticed on the drive to the hotel yesterday. Unfortunately, the weather has other ideas and it’s pouring with rain. What can you do? How about creating your own beautiful images from items you find around your apartment? In this post, I’d like to show you how to photograph like Edward Weston. Edward Weston was an American photographer born in 1886, and was regarded as one of the masters of 20^th Century photography. He photographed primarily using an 8×10 large format camera, and was known primarily for his black and white “landscape like” still lives.

Edward Weston’s most famous red pepper – photograph from Wikipedia. Find out more about him here

Learn from the great masters

Have a look at our other  ‘How to photograph like…’ series that includes Michael Kenna and Ansel Adams to see how to create images like they have.

Why remove the colour?

One of the important features of Edward Weston’s work was the beautiful shapes that he created. When we photograph the pepper in this tutorial, look at the original in colour. Yes, it’s very striking, the red on the black, but that’s all you notice – red and black. We really want to show the form and texture of the vegetable, so black and white does this beautifully.

The Setup

The photographic setup, is incredibly simple. I put the pepper onto one of my black t-shirts on the table. I set up the camera on a tripod and the whole scene was photographed next to a window. The only other lighting, apart from the window lighting, was from a large white reflector. You can use anything white to reflect light back into the image.

Camera set up for how to photograph like Edward Weston

The Photography

When trying to photograph like Edward Weston, the more gnarly and quirky the fruit or veg, the better. Unfortunately, my peppers from the local supermarket were neither, so I moved it into a position where it would at least look interesting. As it kept falling over, I propped it up with my lens cap.

Move your scene and your reflector around until you get some interesting highights on the subjects. I photographed with quite a small aperture, therefore the shutter speeds were quite long; so, a tripod was essential as I needed to ensure the camera was steady.

Tim tries a green pepper for how to photograph like Edward Weston

The Photoshop process

To get the final photograph like Edward Weston has done, we need a bit of post production.

I first opened the image in Camera Raw but you can do the same in Lightroom or Affinity Photo Raw

Original image opened in Adobe Camera Raw

Convert colour into black and white

There are many ways to convert colour to black and white and this is just one of them. See our article on converting colour to black and white with tips and techy-geeky explanations.

Darken shadows to get the Edward Weston contrast style

I darkened the black and increased the contrast and highlights so the feeling of my image was a photograph like Edward Weston although I went for a much darker overall look than he used to create.

Darken large areas with the adjustment brushes using Exposure or Blacks

Lighten highlights for authentic Edward Weston contrast

Still in the adjustment brushes, click on the New radio button at the top to create a new brush and paint in the highlights. In the highlights increase Exposure, Contrast and possibly Clarity. If you go too far you can click the Erase radio button at the top to remove any over-painting. Click New again and do the same but on the shadows, darkening them down to taste.

We’re now going to take this into Photoshop, but before we do, click on the information underneath the photograph which will then allow you to use sRGB rather than Greyscale as the Colour Mode. This will give you the ability to put colour into your image in Photoshop when you start to add the toning. If you open the image as a Greyscale image in Photoshop, you would then have to convert to RGB colour before adding any colour back in.

Techy-Geeky stuff!: Whilst you are in this area, you could also choose the 16-bit channel option, over the 8-bit channel option. This will give you thousands of shades of grey per RGB channel, rather than the 256 shades you get from 8-bit.

The first stage of toning your image in Photoshop for that authentic Edward Weston like photograph

In Photoshop, go to your Layers panel, and click the black and white circular icon at the bottom to add an adjustment layer. The adjustment layer you need is called Gradient Map.

In the Gradient Map, click on the drop down next to the gradient. In here you will see your basic gradients. But then now click the little cog to the right. This opens up some more options and you need to choose the Photographic Toning option. This will give you a lot of gradients, that replicate traditional photographic print toning. I chose Selenium 2 to get a beautiful subtle selenium tone to my final image. (If you go back to the cog, you can choose to view the gradients options in different ways, and by choosing the Text Only option, you’ll see what the gradients are called).

Experiment with various gradient map photographic tones

Using the master photographers as a base inspiration, you can go on to create all kinds of photographic styles. You can then experiment and tweak them to make them your own. This particular how-to-photograph like Edward Weston technique, works beautifully on vegetables and still lives. However, it’s also a really interesting technique on faces and real-world landscapes.

Most importantly, enjoy every part of the process!

See our convert colour to black and white in 30 seconds video.

The post How to photograph like Edward Weston appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Everyone has seen the images of scenes where the sky looks really dark and the clouds stand out and look awesome. From a slightly darkened down adjustment to an almost black sky these skies just bring out the cloud formations beautifully. We’d like to show you how you can also make the sky dark in a photo, whether it’s black and white film, black and white digital, colour film a or colour digital. Each requires a slightly different technique but by the end of this post you will be a “dark sky photo-ninja”!

Black and white film

Black and white film uses a full range of colour to create a full range of tones on your black and white negative. What we need to do, is to stop some or most of the blue in the scene from reaching and exposing the film. To do this we use a filter. The filter we need to stop blue is the opposite to blue on the colour spectrum, so a filter that is yellow, orange or red will do the trick. Try out different colours to achieve different amounts of darkness. See our post on what makes a good black and white image. New to film photography? See our guide on best film cameras for beginners.

To make the sky dark in a black and white film image use a yellow filter – Hoya make really good quality filters

A few things to note:

• Anything blue in the scene will also go darker.
• A filter stops light from getting to the film so if you are using a hand held meter you might need to compensate for the exposure. A through the lens meter should give you an accurate reading.
• (You can also use a polarizing filter like in colour film. See below.)
• Experiment with other colour filters. A colour filter in black and white photography will lighten the same colour and darken the opposite one.
• If you are printing your own photographs you can also ‘burn’ in the sky in the darkroom.

Colour Film

You can’t use a red, yellow or orange filter to make the sky dark in a colour film photo, as it will just give you a colour cast. So how do we do it? We use a polarizing filter.

Here is the techy-geek explanation first, and then I’ll do the normal human one after that.

Light reflected from a non-metallic surface becomes polarized. A polarizer allows light to pass in only one direction. This allows us to reduce reflections on non-metallic objects.

Light from the sky is also polarized, so a polarizing filter will polarize the light and reduce how much light enters the camera. As a result this will make the sky dark in a photo.

The normal persons explanation!

A polarizer will darken down blue sky but not affect clouds. (The effect is most prevalent on the area of sky that is at 90 degrees from the sun – Look at the sun and then the darkest sky will be at 90 degrees.). It will also reduce reflections which can make trees etc seem rather vivid in colour. To use the polarizer just turn the filter until the sky goes dark or the reflections disappear.

To make the sky dark in a colour film image use a polarising filter

A few things to note:

• This polarizing filter technique will work with both film and digital, colour and black and white.
• There are 2 types of polarizer. A linear and a circular. A circular CPL polarizer is best for modern cameras as linear polarizers can affect exposure meters and autofocus adversely.
• In case of a photographic emergency you can even use your polarized sunglasses in front of the lens to achieve a dark sky.

Black and white as well as colour digital

Lightroom or Camera Raw converter to the rescue. Find the HSL / HSB (Hue, Saturation and Lightness/ Brightness) tab in either software package. Choose the Lightness or Brightness tab and move the blue slider over to the left to darken down the blue of the sky. (This technique will also darken down any other blues in the image.) Not sure whether you want to colour or black and white? See our video on how to change colour to black and white in just 30 seconds.

Using Photoshop? See our Top 10 favourite shortcuts.

Use camera Raw to make the sky dark in a photo like this one of the Vatican statues

Anything else?

Do remember that a dark sky, whilst looking awesome, can also give the post–apocalyptic feel to some images that you might not be looking for. Photograph the same image with and without filters to give yourself more final options. If your sky exposures are a little out with the highlights and shadows, check out how you can rescue them with Camera Raw.

There you have it. A few ways to make the sky dark in a photo. Most of all – have fun doing it.

The post How to make the sky dark in a photo appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Have you ever seen beautiful old photographs with a blue tone and wondered how you could create the same? A romantic cyanotype photo can look so stunning yet is so easy to do digitally. Let me take you through the process and have you creating an amazing cyanotype photo in minutes. It’s a bit messy but oh so worth it.

Traditionally, a cyanotype photo print is usually created using ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide chemicals. The original process was invented by an astronomer, Sir John Herschel, around 1839. Of course, this was and still is a very messy process requiring coating paper with chemicals. This paper is then allowed to dry and then contact-printed (using your negative) onto the paper using a UV lamp or sunlight. It is washed and then dried. Lots of trial and error and not to mention cost. I want to show you how to get the same result digitally. It would be a shame however not to get your hands a little dirty so the first part of the cyanotype photo in digital will still require a bit of mess.

Some totally useless geeky info

Copies of architectural plans were named ‘blueprints’ because they originally used the Cyanotype process resulting in blue prints – now you too can impress your friends…

The preparation process or, as I like to call it, “Woo-hoo – I’m 5 again”

Ink, heavy duty paper and a brush is all you really need. I poured some ink onto the paper and painted it, making sure not to be too neat with the edges. When it had dried, I scanned the painted page in at a high resolution. I use 600 ppi at A4 as this translates into 300 ppi at A3 size. You can always photograph the paper if you don’t have a scanner. (Just make sure the camera is parallel to the inked paper.)

Cyanotype photo process – preparing the paper

Let’s get toning

While traditionally a cyanotype is Prussian blue and white, you can also achieve a slight yellow in the highlights by bleaching and toning. This split tone look is the one I am going for here.

Open your chosen image in either Adobe Photoshop Raw, Lightroom or Affinity Photo. I will be demonstrating in Photoshop Raw.

Original Image

After you have got your settings for lightness, darkness and shadow detail correct, you will need to click on the black and white photo button. Of course you can then still lighten and darken certain areas with the Black and White control sliders.

Converted to Black and White

Next step is to choose the toning tab. I added a small amount of yellow in the highlights, and more blue in the shadows.

Split tone sliders in raw for cyanotype colour

With Cyanotype photo colour tone

Creating the digital painted frame look

Open up the scanned image in Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Bring in your toned image. Drag or copy/paste the scanned inked paper onto the toned image.

Paste Painted paper scan onto cyanotype photo

Now for the magic … set the paper layer mode to Screen. Ta-da. A beautiful cyanotype photo with a hand painted paper edge replicating hand-made sensitised paper.

Set layer to screen for Cyanotype photo emulsion look

Useful Geeky Info about Modes

Simply put, the Screen mode hides the black on the layer. It is the opposite of Multiply which hides the whites.

Cyanotype photo with emulsion paint effect

A Reversed Background

The reversed background is nothing like a Cyanotype photo but still quite cool. If you wished to have the image look like it was painted onto a black background you could invert the paper layer and then set the paper layer mode to Multiply.

Original paper layer as used in cyanotype print

Paper layer as used in cyanotype print inverted

Convert mode to multiply for cyanotype on black paper

Variations on the theme

This Cyanotype photo technique has so many variations when it is done digitally. Why not try painting on various surfaces to get interesting textures on you photographs. Create other interesting split tones or even use it on full colour images. As always remember. A Black and White toned image will not rescue a boring photograph but a good photograph can be made even better with sympathetic tones. Mostly, have fun.

The post Create a Digital Cyanotype photo without too much mess appeared first on ImageExplorers.