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
Campanile di Mazzorbo, Island of Mazzorbo in Venice Lagoon
This is the Campanile di Mazzorbo on the island of Mazzorbo in Venice Lagoon. I really wanted to get the flowers in the foreground and the campanile in the back to be in focus. Given how close the flowers were to the lens and the distance to the campanile, there was just no amount of depth-of-field that would do the trick. Instead, I used a technique called “stacked focus”. In this case I took two images. The first focused on the flowers in the foreground. The second, without moving my camera (use a tripod) focused on the campanile. In both cases I used manual focus on my lens to be sure the proper element was in focus.
I used Photoshop to do the stacked focus. Put both images on the same pallet as separate layers and then use the Edit -> Auto-Align Layers command to properly align the images. Then use the Edit -> Auto-Blend Layers command to blend them. Hocus, pocus, stacked focus!
Stacked focus works very well in macro photography. When you use your macro lens on flowers, take several images while focusing along the flower from front to rear. After you stack them the flower will be sharp throughout.
By the way, is it just me or do all towers in Venice lean to one side? This was at least the fourth one we saw during our stay.
Location: N45 29 19.63 E012 12 42.76
Hay Bales With and Without Telephone Poles
So how great is Photoshops Content-Aware fill feature? (Edit -> Fill -> Content-Aware). The two images above are identical, except for the use of Content-Aware on the right image. Notice the three telephone poles in the left image. On the right image they have magically disappeared. Total time less than 1 minute.
I took the above image somewhere in the Tuscan countryside. My wife was driving and pulled over to the side of the road and told me to get out and shoot this scenic vista. I told her the telephone poles would ruin the image but she insisted. Once I started working with the images I was very impressed with the way Photoshop makes things “go away”.
Some might say that it is cheating to delete such major parts of an image. Obviously I disagree. At the last competition at the Northern Virginia Photographic Society the judge commented numerous times that the photographer should have deleted some distracting item in their image. I guess I am not alone.
I ended up with a very nice panorama after stitching together several images from this spot. That is a story for the next post.
