Confessions of a Keytarist

Recently, I’ve been taking quite a few car photographs, and although I was pleased with the overall quality of the shots, they didn’t seem to “blast” of the page like those in the glossy mags.
After a bit of studying perhaps the most famous of them all, Top Gear, I decided to see if I could replicate the processing done on their images with mine.

I played around in Photoshop for quite a bit before settling on the process I describe below. I’m pretty pleased with the outcome, so I thought it worthy of inclusion on this blog. Hopefully some of you will find it useful too!

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Following on nicely from the last post, I have another quick trick I often use to give some of my more “meh” photos a bit more “yeh”.

We’ll start with the same photo as before:

As before, the image appears quite “flat” and lifeless. We can try and fix this with a very quick and (usually) efficient contrast tweak using a “soft light” layer.

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Time for another Photoshop trick; this time it’s a very quick and easy one that can add that little bit extra to a photo.

So, first of all we need an image to work with. Here’s one of my little cousin:

As you can see, the image appears very “flat”.  I know it’s not exactly a fantastic photo to begin with, especially as it’s from a 1mp camera phone, but it’s good enough to demonstrate this trick! Continue reading

This post is a continuation of the second histogram post entitled “The Highs and lows”.

Another important thing a histogram does is describe contrast within your images. According to Wikipedia:

Contrast is the difference in visual properties that makes an object (or its representation in an image) distinguishable from other objects and the background.

Or, in more simplistic terms, Contrast is a measure of the difference in brightness between the light and dark areas of your photographs.
Images with histograms that have broad tonal ranges have a significant, or “high” contrast, whereas images with histograms that have narrow tonal ranges may appear dull or flat and are known as “low” contrast.

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This post is a continuation of the first histogram post entitled “Getting Toned”.

In the last article, we discussed the basics of what a histogram is, what it represents and how it is generated. What we didn’t cover is why they’re important to us digital photographers. That’s where this post comes in!

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A colleague of mine has been taking digital photographs for a while, and whilst his images are usually of a high standard to begin with, he’s beginning to use Adobe Photoshop to help bring out the absolute best in his photography.

The only crux is he’s never really used it and has asked for a bit of help.
To that end, I’ve decided to include a few tutorials in my blog to give him a bit of a head start into learning the dark art that is Photoshop!

The first tutorial I was planning to write up was how to use the level’s tool to make those little tweaks to the image brightness values that can really improve an image. However, as my colleague didn’t quite understand what we were doing and what the histogram represented, I thought it best to actually start with explaining what the histogram actually is…

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