Photoshop Actions

On October 12, 2013, in Florida, Photography Tips, by admin
Fort Jefferson Moat

Fort Jefferson Moat

Photoshop Actions make your workflow so much easier.  If you shoot RAW images, you know that they need at least some tweaking when they come out of the camera.  Instead of manually adding layers and tweaking each image every time, I have an action that adds a standard set of layers with a single mouse click.  Running the Action adds the following layers, each of which is preset to my preferred setting:

Curves
Levels
Brightness/Contrast
Vibrance
Exposure
Hue/Saturation

 

The preferred settings serve as a starting point.  I can delete the Adjustment Layer if I want, or make additional tweaks to the layers.  Better yet, I have this Action set-up on a Droplet so that I can add my presets to many files at once.  Click on the files, drag them to the droplet, and presto, each file has the new Adjustment Layers all ready for the finishing touch.

The image on the left is the RAW file without any tweaks.  The image on the right is after I run the Action with all of the preset tweaks.  All with a single click of the mouse.

Location: N24 37 43.99  W082 52 28.32

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Arches

On October 1, 2013, in Florida, Photography Tips, by admin
Fort Jefferson Arches

Fort Jefferson Arches

Everyone has to have at an “arches” image in their portfolio.  Repetition of shapes is a classic composition technique and a series of arches fits that description.  Here in DC the most common arch image comes from the front entrance to Union Station near the Capital building.

My arches come from the second floor of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas (Funny story.  I wanted to link to the National Park Fort Jefferson web page but received the following:  “Because of the federal government shutdown, all national parks are closed and National Park Service webpages are not operating. For more information, go to www.doi.gov.”  Who knew a government shutdown would cause them to close websites).

Several judges at the Northern Virginia Photographic Society have commented that if color is not integral to the image, make it black and white.  The original image consisted of reddish tones (bricks) and grays (the gravel floor).  In the original image color just did not contribute to the composition.  Converting to black and white accentuates the texture of the bricks which contribute more to the image than the red bricks and gray floor.

Location: N43 04 13.68 E001 38 03.40

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