Tag: Adobe Photoshop

A little fun!

The Gray Bull on July 24, 2020

Most of us are starting to struggle with finding activities to keep us busy during our COVID-19 lockdown. I am no exception. Yesterday I was talking to one of my granddaughters about some old movies I enjoyed and King Kong came up. She had never seen it, so we talked about it for a few moments. Later, I looked on-line and found some old movie posters from the 1933 release of this film. In many ways, it was a shocking film for its time period! This gave me an idea to have some Photoshop fun to spend some time creating a fun photo. I decided to use the newest skyscraper symbol in New York, Freedom Tower, in place of the old symbol, the Empire State Building, as when the film was originally released. Here it is for your viewing pleasure. Now go on-line and view the movie. I know I will!

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Finger of Fate

The Gray Bull on May 31, 2020

All the discussion about how our lives will be different after Covid19 and how we should get ready for the new normal is on every news show! It seems all we hear about is the future and what will likely change. The item that most disturbs me is the potential loss of privacy with “contact tracing”. Currently, the government of China is already advancing more measures to track their citizens, but I would expect that from a totalitarian regime! But what about our democratic forms of government? It seems more people are getting comfortable with the idea of doing the same thing in the U.S.A. That sounds more like 1984 by George Orwell than I like to think about. Okay, enough of my political rant!

This did give me an idea for a photograph. Here is a view of my take on contact tracing. Every time we use our index finger, it will send a signal to the “cloud” to trace our every move. Just a little Adobe Photoshop fun, but it could come to pass……hmmm!

Future Fate

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Fading City

The Gray Bull on May 6, 2020

The COVID19 Pandemic is keeping most of us from going out to continue our photography hobby. This means we need to find some other activities or get creative with photography outside of our tried and true routines. As I was watching a television show, and there are very few worth watching, a clip was run showing how deserted New York and other major cities looked. It was a very surreal scene, but it did give me an idea.

I proceeded to open my Adobe Lightroom catalog to find some cityscape photos I had done in the past along with some photos with trees and a few with clouds. These photos were then composited with Adobe Photoshop to create my version of a Fading City. Hopefully, our urban areas will come back to their former vibrancy but there is guarantee of that! We may all get used to an unexpected difference in urban life after COVID19.

Fading City

Hopefully, you are finding some creative outlets for practicing your photographic hobby. Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see what shelter-in-place photography project I attempt next time. Stay healthy and keep shooting!

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Feathered Neighbors

The Gray Bull on March 24, 2020

Backyard photography can help us as we deal with Covid19 forced social distancing and the need to keep our minds occupied with something other than binge watching some streaming service. Many of you may not have a backyard or any yard at all, but you probably do have a window. Take your camera in hand and gaze into the yard or out of your apartment window and photograph something! If possible, go for a walk in your neighborhood for a little exercise and bring your camera along or just use your smartphone camera. Use your creativity and perhaps you may get lucky and photograph something interesting.

Being stuck at home can provide the opportunity to try photography techniques that are new to you, such as macro photography, using off camera flash, pet photography (if you have a handy animal), perhaps child photography is an option. Those of you living in urban areas might try some nighttime photography. The goal is to try something new and perhaps improve your photography skills. If nothing else remember “When you have lemons, make lemonade”!

Another opportunity that is available to you is that you can use these photos to improve your post-processing skills with Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop or other software programs. You can experiment with different techniques and tools.

I took my own advice a few days ago when my wife called me to see the two woodpeckers in the backyard. I am no wildlife photographer; I don’t even have a lens capable of photographing wildlife from a distance. The woodpeckers did get my attention as they furiously pecked away at a dead tree trunk on the ground, so I grabbed my camera. After firing off over 50 photos, my subjects decided to fly away. The photo below is the best one from this photo shoot.

Woodpeckers-0042

Now, the next challenge will be finding more backyard or indoor photography opportunities to keep me occupied. Please come back and visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see if I have found anything interesting. Now get off the couch and grab your camera and shoot!

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10 Adjustments or Less

The Gray Bull on November 4, 2019

The other day, I drove to my granddaughter’s high school theatre performance. Usually, when I go to this type of event, I take my camera. This day was no exception. Since I would be taking a few photographs after the performance, I did not bring anything other than the camera and its holster. As it happened, that evening a thunderstorm was forecasted to occur during the play. After parking my car, I looked at the sky and could see some threatening clouds beginning to appear. I got creative and placed my camera on the holster as a support base, set the aperture at f18 and the ISO at 100. This gave me a somewhat long exposure, but not nearly a slow enough one. I took a few photos and proceeded to go to the play.

The next day, I imported the photos into Adobe Lightroom and viewed them. Unfortunately, none were very good, which was not a surprise. I decided to have a little fun with post-processing attempting to process one of the photos with only 10 adjustments or less. The software I used was Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and DxO’s Silver Efex Pro 2. My goal was not to make all the versions look the same but to see what type of variety I would get with only a few adjustments. Here are the resulting photos processed with 10 or less adjustments to the original RAW file.

The first photo is the original file with only the camera calibration adjusted.

Original Capture-0006

The next photo is a color version done in Adobe Lightroom and with 10 adjustments.

Color Version-0006

I then decided to convert the photo to Black & White versions with Lightroom, Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro 2. The photo below is the Lightroom conversion in less than 10 adjustments.

Lightroom Version-0006

The adjusted color version was exported to Photoshop and in 10 adjustments I obtained the photo shown below.

Photoshop Version-2

The last version is the adjusted color version edited in Silver Efex Pro 2 with less than 10 adjustments.

Silver Efex Pro 2 Version-

None of these versions would win any awards but it was an interesting exercise in post-processing. Please come back and visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey takes me next time.

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The Washington Monument

The Gray Bull on August 15, 2019

If you view any YouTube Videos about photography, you occasionally hear the term “working a photo” or taking many photos of the same subject. This is something that I have been trying to do recently as a method to hopefully improve as a photographer. A few days ago, I spent an evening in Washington, D.C. photographing the Washington Monument.

First, I decided to do my photography in the evening to employ the lighting from prior to sunset and through the blue hour. I checked the Photographer’s Ephemeris App for the sunset time and location. The plan was to have the monument backlit and hopefully a colorful sky behind it. This worked out well in helping me position where to set up my camera and tripod. Whether or not there would be a colorful sky was up to Mother Nature!

I was shooting from around 7:00pm until 9:15pm. I stayed in the same location the entire time to have nothing change but the lighting in the sky. The photos below were all processed differently, some in Adobe Lightroom, some in Adobe Photoshop and some in both. Only one photo was cropped. The evening was enjoyable both from a photography perspective and from a people watching perspective. The world is full of interesting characters and some tourists are at the top of the list! I hope you enjoy viewing these photos and perhaps you will go out and try something similar yourself.

Washington Monument in Evening-7298-Edit

Washington Monument in Evening-7311

Washington Monument in Evening-7326

Washington Monument in Evening-7351-Edit

Washington Monument in Evening-7393-Edit

Washington Monument in Evening-7411-Edit

Washington Monument in Evening-7407

Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where I go with my photography in the future.

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Sunflower Fun

The Gray Bull on July 25, 2019

The other day I was at a farm with my daughter and we were picking peaches, blackberries, green beans and sunflowers. This is a farm that sells family memberships and they deliver fresh vegetables to your home once a week. Each week you can also visit the farm and pick some items for yourself.

I recently purchased a new smartphone, not one of the expensive ones, that is against my budget religion! The camera has taken some good photos of people, but I had not used it for anything else. This was my opportunity to see how well it would perform in taking a closeup photo, not a macro, just arm’s length type photos. I decided to use one of the sunflowers I had picked and to shoot it with the sun lighting it from several positions. After returning home I did some fun edits with Photoshop to practice some techniques. These are not fine art photos, just some fun photos that I decided to share with you. All these photos were edited to push some Photoshop features farther than I would normally go as you can plainly see.

The first photo is one taken with the sun directly behind it. You can just see the sun at the top of the photo. IMG_20190721_100505576

The next photo is almost the same shot with the sun clearly visible at the top of the frame. IMG_20190721_100836564

The following shot is front lit with the sun slightly to the photos right side.

IMG_20190721_100612482

This photo was taken with the sun facing the flower but it was held closer to the camera.

IMG_20190721_100619852

Now it was time to take a photo with the sun directly facing the flower or at least a close approximation of that position. IMG_20190721_100732012

The last shot is just a selection of the sunflower that was directly facing the sun. IMG_20190721_100800715

This was a fun exercise and I got to practice with Photoshop. This is probably the only way I will ever learn how to use this powerful tool. By the way, the smartphone does seem to have a pretty good camera considering it is not a high-end device.

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Springtime Play with Photoshop

The Gray Bull on April 1, 2019

It seems that we had a very long winter this past year. Perhaps because I am not a winter fan it just seemed long. In any case, as I walked around my neighborhood, I see the trees budding out, flowers beginning to bloom, and the birds and squirrels are all over the trees in my yard. It must be springtime!

The other day I happened to notice a beautiful tree in my neighborhood, and I decided to come back and photograph it. The location itself is not very picturesque, because, as I mentioned it is in a residential neighborhood with houses, cars and kids toys all over the place. This gave me the idea to take advantage of the opportunity and try to learn something about using Channels in Photoshop to create masks. This technique has proven to be very difficult for me to master. After looking at multiple YouTube videos I thought that was a chance to use channels when editing the photograph of this tree. As you can see in the photograph below the sky is devoid of color and there are many distractions behind and in front of the tree.

Original Lone Tree-5671

Upon completing making the selection for a mask in Photoshop, I could see that I had not done a very good job! So, I decided rather than to delete it what I would use the Paint feature in Photoshop to somewhat attempt to hide the poor editing. I also used the Picture Frame feature to see if that helped the image.

Another issue was the substitute sky photo that I was using to composite into this photo was not very good for this image. The perspective does not fit the image as you can clearly see. So now I have another project which is to make a folder full of different sky shots to use in similar situations in the future. I’m sure some of the readers of this blog have had to do this also.

This blog was started to allow me to track the progress of my journey as a photographer and not as a how-to blog by any stretch of imagination. First, I don’t have the skill to teach anybody anything about photography and second, I don’t think that it would be much fun for me to do so. In keeping with tracking my photographic skills progress below you’ll find the fully edited photo. You can judge for yourself what grade you might give it. Again, it was an opportunity for me to play with Photoshop and learn about using channels. I fully expect that I will be back viewing videos on YouTube to continue my education using this technique.

Lone Tree-

Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey takes me next. I will give you a hint my wife and I are traveling overseas in the next couple of weeks, so I expect there will be several photos that I will share with you when we return. Now go out and shoot something and please use your camera!

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ISO Practice

The Gray Bull on January 27, 2019

A couple of days ago my local library hosted an event from a nearby Chinese Arts Group. The program was to feature a Lion Dance in preparation for the upcoming Chinese New Year Celebration. I decided to go and take some photographs to see how high ISO shots would look. The primary reason for this was to help in my planning for an upcoming trip where there will be some photos that will be taken in low light and no flash or tripod is allowed. I also wanted to just use the 50mm length on my 24-70mm zoom. Interestingly, as I have looked back on several photos, it seems that many are taken between 24 and 40mm. I just wanted to see how 50mm looked by comparison.

When I arrived at the library, the group was beginning to set up, so I took a front row seat. Just before the show started, the group decided to parade through the library to gather more people for the performance. They were very successful in getting all the children and their parents who were in the library into the room for the Lion Dance. The only problem was they had all the children sit on the floor in front of me. That ended my obstruction free viewing area. As usual Adobe Photoshop came to the rescue in post-processing as you will see.

I took many photos but decided to only use one in this blogpost. It was taken at 1/50 shutter speed, f4.0 aperture and 53mm focal length. I set the ISO at 1600 and when I checked a test shot’s histogram, I was getting a good exposure “to the right”. The motion blur was intentional because the subjects were dancing, and I wanted to show movement. The drummer and cymbal player are acceptably sharp. Here is the photo that has been edited in Adobe Lightroom.

lion dance-10

There are several distractions in the above photo, heads of children, a clock and the flipchart cabinet behind one of the dancers. I edited the photo in Adobe Photoshop and used the patch tool on the heads and clock. No problem with those edits. The big job was removing the flipchart cabinet. I decided to use Layers and Selections along with the patch tool and managed to do a reasonable removal of the unwanted object. This blog is not a how-to do it blog, you can check some videos on YouTube as I did to see how this technique works. Here is the edited photo.

lion dance-10-edit

The conclusion I have made is ISO 1600 worked well enough: however, there is some noise in the photo, and I learned a new technique in Photoshop. The 53mm focal length does narrow the field of view, yet it still retains a pleasing amount of image. I will consciously try to use that focal length more in the future, it may help prevent some of the cropping I have done in the past and eliminate the loss of any photographic data. Please come back and visit www.Cestlavie4me.com to see how my progress in photography is doing.

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A Composite Attempt

The Gray Bull on December 16, 2018

Thanks for coming back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey has brought me. The last few days have been damp, rainy and cold and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I decided to do a little photography experiment. My wife had a floral bouquet that she was about to throw out and I decided to use that as a photographic subject before the trash can received the flowers!

After taking a few photos, I thought it would help if I added some fresh flowers to the base. I took a few more photos and then decided that maybe it was time to try using a flash to see what type of effect that would create. The result was that all the flowers were equally illuminated, and this was not the effect I was interested in achieving. After trying a few more shots and not getting what I was looking for I decided the best way to approach this would be to use Photoshop to make some edits.

In Photoshop I made selections of the base and tabletop of both a photo with and without flash. And using a mask on both photos I edited out some of the oppositely illuminated flowers. And then merge the resulting two photos and the result was a photo with the dead flowers being somewhat dark in the fresh flowers being somewhat bright. This was close to the photo I was trying to achieve. My next step was to change the background of the photo to eliminate my kitchen wall! I found a photo that I’ve taken of some plywood and so I use that as the background by first lightning the photo by using a blend mode and then adding a very light orange adjustment layer; the net result is background that looks something like wallpaper.

Since the right side of the photo look like that was the direction of light I decided to try and use a drop shadow to create a shadow. This attempt did not turn out as well as I would like but it is a first attempt and this blog is about documenting my attempts at learning photography and using post-processing software. Here’s a somewhat finished photograph. I say somewhat because I save the file as layers and hopefully in the future as I gain more skill I can go back and re-edit this photo in a manner that is more artistic.

Fluers mortes-Edit