Pale skies are usually much brighter than the land, so if the ground is correctly exposed the sky will wash out. You can use an ND grad filter, but they’re quite fiddly.
Another workaround is your SLR’s facility for compressing tonal range, such as Nikon’s Active D-Lighting or Canon’s Auto Lighting Optimizer. A better solution, though, is to use a tripod and take two shots; one exposed for the sky, the other for the ground.
You can then merge them together using an image-editing program such as Photoshop Elements to get detail back in your skies. Even then, branches and leaves that move between shots can cause problems. The answer is to take a single shot in raw and ensure the exposure is sufficiently dark. You can then process this raw file twice to create two images to merge together. Here’s how to do it…
A zoom burst is a great way of adding dramatic impact to your images. Zooming out with your lens during an exposure can give your shots a real sense of energy. All you need to do is choose a shutter speed slow enough to record the blur of the zooming action during the exposure. This can also be enhanced by adding a burst of flash to freeze and highlight your main subject within the frame.
Doing this in-camera with a static subject takes a little time and patience, but add some movement into the equation and it can take hundreds of attempts to get the zoom burst effect spot-on. Use Photoshop, however, and you can get the zoom burst look you want in a matter of minutes.
We’ve listed these essential adjustments in the order in which you should make them for the most efficient work process, or ‘workflow’. For example, it’s sensible to crop first – there’s no point spending time removing dust or adjusting exposure on areas of the picture a new crop will get rid of anyway.
You don’t necessarily need to apply every step to all of your images, either. For example, there are times the exposure is perfect, so you won’t need to adjust the Levels. Simply check whether each step is needed on each image as you go through them.
Despite all the fuss over the recent announcements of Photoshop CS6 and its new features, it’s worth remembering that Photoshop Elements is also quite a powerful piece of software. And a fraction of the CS6 price tag!
In the short video tutorial below, we show you how you can use some of Photoshop Elements’ new sharing options to post photos on Flickr and Facebook and start doing more with your photos.
Despite all the fuss over the recent announcements of Photoshop CS6 and its new features, it’s worth remembering that Photoshop Elements is also quite a powerful piece of software. And a fraction of the CS6 price tag!
In the video tutorial below we show you how you can make a photo book in Photoshop Elements that looks just as slick and professional as some of the templates you find on many photo printing websites.
Previously we showed you some of the common errors of night photography and how to fix them, and specifically within that tutorial we talked about making star trails. Now that you’ve had some time to try and achieve the effect in-camera using a long exposure, we thought we would show you how you can fake it and make star trails with a lot less hassle.
Capturing the movement of the stars across the night sky would normally involve exposures of several minutes, but on a digital camera this can result in unwanted noise. The easiest way to overcome this problem is to take a sequence of shorter exposures (of around 30 seconds each) and combine them into a single image in Photoshop.
One of the great joys of Photoshop is the ability it gives you to take a person from one scene and put them somewhere entirely different. This enables you to make fantastical composite images. But while it’s a fairly simple matter to cut someone out and drop them on a different background, it’s slightly trickier to make the scene look convincing.
Success depends on two main factors. First, photograph the images that make up your composite under similar lighting conditions. Our books were lit from the left to emphasise their shape and texture. The girl was also lit from the left and the camera was positioned above her to mimic the perspective of the book scene.
Stripping away detail from images so that you’re left with pure black and white is a great way to add a pop art feel to your shots and will quickly become one of your favourite Photoshop effects to use. If you then duplicate the image for repetitive effect and introduce blocks of bright colour, you’ll create dazzling images that’ll look great on any wall or even a T-shirt.
To get our desired Photoshop effects, we’re going to show you how to strip away all the midtones using the Photoshop Stamp filter, so you’re left with just a black and white shape. After cleaning up distracting blobs from the tarmac background, we’ll duplicate the shot four times and render each version in a different colour for a cool graphic art look.
Do you often find leaning buildings in your architectural photos? This is called barrel distortion.
The most likely cause of barrel distortion is shooting a building from too close a distance. When shooting too close, you’ll need to zoom out to a wide-angle focal length, which can result in noticeable barrel distortion, making the top, bottom and sides of a building appear to bow outwards. For those instances when you just can’t shoot it any other way, here is how you can correct distortion on the computer using Photoshop.
Panoramic photos are a great way to showcase sweeping landscapes. By shooting a series of overlapping images and combining them on your computer, you can take in a much wider angle of view. This technique also means you don’t need an expensive wide-angle lens – your 18-55mm standard lens is fine.
This photo stitching technique is much better than taking a wide-angle shot and simply cropping it because it produces a picture with a much higher resolution. Stitching photos together in this way might sound complicated, but it’s not. All you need is a tripod and Photoshop Elements or higher. We’ve used Elements because it has a Photomerge Panorama tool that makes stitching photos really easy.
