PShizzy: The Blog

Living in Arizona, we get just about the greatest amount of sunlight I’ve ever seen. It’s so good in fact, that it can be a challenge, especially when you’re shooting colors that fall all across the spectrum from bright white stripes to full black uni’s. Couple that with faces under the shadow of helmets, and the dynamic range of your camera just can’t cover it all.

Everyone has different ways of dealing with this. For some it’s a matter of exposing properly, and then bringing up the shadows in post process, either with something like the Fill Light tool in ACR, or Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop. Using these tools have their problems, as bringing up shadows also brings up image noise. It can also look unnatural if used improperly.

Another method is to expose for the face of the subject, letting the chips fall where they may on the rest of the exposure. Caveats here include nuclearizing your subject’s white uniform, or radiating the entire field if it’s a bright color. Fun fun.

Over the weekend I was shooting the Arizona USSSA Independence Day Classic, a fastpitch softball tournament held over in Pinetop, AZ. With start times of noon, though, getting the entire range of an image captured was difficult. Read on to find out what I did to combat this, from steps I took in the camera, to an action I made in Photoshop that helped with post process. Oh and it’s a downloadable action. =) [Read more →]

Tags: photography, photoshop by PShizzy
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So I got up early, and decided to put together a Flash presentation on curves. To be honest, it’s one of those things that I always sorta understood, but explaining it can be very difficult. I should have tried something easier, like dunking a basketball (I’m 5′5) or finding a cure for some disease.

But it’s there. And in order to explain it, I used Lightroom. Yes, I used Lightroom to explain Photoshop curves. It makes sense if you watch the presentation. I also had to make this more like a video, with full motion captures in order to show the effect of curves on an image.

So, continue on to read about the making of the curves presentation, as well as the link to the presentation. [Read more →]

Tags: photoshop by PShizzy
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Processing your images is only half the battle. Once your done with the images, you need to get them in front of people. Whether it’s a client who wants proofs, an editor who wants to see your work, or just your mom wanting to see pictures of the kids, there’s a lot of good reasons to put up a web gallery.

To me a gallery is a vehicle for your images. If the images are good, and the pages are easily navigable, you don’t need to bling it out to make it work. So in this video, we create a web gallery in a matter of minutes. It’s so easy, even I was surprised at how quickly I finished the video. Click through to check it out!

[Read more →]

Tags: photoshop by PShizzy
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This is an oldie but a goodie. It requires no plugins, just Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw. I’ve edited it to work better in the form of a blog. For now it will be a simple how to in the post, but if it’s popular, I may make a video of it. Here it is:

I’ve received quite a few comments on my black and white conversion, and I finally decided it would be best to post my own personal workflow on the process. My method by no means tries to be scientific nor accurate, only pleasing to my own eyes. I did not invent anything here, I picked up some info from various books and over time, found the following method to give me the most pleasing results. Hopefully you will find some use in the following. [Read more →]

Tags: photoshop by PShizzy
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So in my first video on actions, I walked us through the creation of a simple b/w action. We even tested it and it ran perfectly on the next file we opened. But if anyone actually created an action like the one in the video, you would know that it wouldn’t work on folders. So how do we get it to run on a batch folder?

By reading the rest of this post! [Read more →]

Tags: photoshop by PShizzy
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Lawrence Lightner recently offered me eternal gratitude for a walk through on actions. So I made a flash video. I figure he now owes me his eternal soul. The rest of you have no such burden. Well, not really. . .

[Read more →]

Tags: photoshop by PShizzy
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I have a pet peeve: I hate doing small tasks repetitively. I’ll spend an hour figuring out how to automate something rather than just sit down and do it, even if it would have only taken half an hour to do it the long way. Even knowing this, I’ll still spend the hour to figure out the most efficient way to do something. Why?

Because the very next time I have to do a similar task, I can automate it! We all do this, though in different aspects of our lives, and for different reasons. A good example of this is Bill Pay. We all have the same bills to pay each month, so rather than sit down once or twice a month to write out checks, and plan a visit to the post office, we automate it through our bank accounts, saving us time. So why not apply this thinking to Photoshop? [Read more →]

Tags: photoshop by PShizzy
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