Had a great day this Saturday at the Brighton Zombie Walk – a Beach of the Dead event. When I take photographs at events I try and take images that are unique, many of the photos you see look like record shots to me. It’s good as a photographer to try and stand out form the crowd. This year I decided to try some creative back lit images, using star-bursts and lens flare. Some of them worked and some of them didn’t! I’ve looked at the results and I’ll share what I have learned.

Incidentally we are running a street photography competition to win OnOne Perfect Sudio6, something that I use on a regular basis. Definitely worth entering.

Many purists totally condemn “burned out highlights”. I’ve lost count of the times that great images at my Camera Club have been marked down for “burn out”, however, I’m increasingly going for the burn! Sod the traditionalists, when you take images for pleasure I’d encourage breaking the rules knowingly and creatively as much as you like. Just have fun.

Brighton Zombie Walk 2011 - click to buy this image

Firstly, my lens flare images were the least successful, so much so that I’m not going to publish any! I do intend to perfect the technique and I’ll publish a post on this when I’ve got it! The problem is to get great lens flare you need a really wide aperture (small numbers f2.8 for example though f4 would be more useful in this instance). When you are out and about shooting really fast, focusing can be difficult and I have a lot of “so nearly there” images I almost want to cry! The eyes must be in focus the wider the aperture the harder this is. If you have a model and some time it’s much easier to get this right, but for events where everything and everybody is moving it’s much harder.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Lightroom Training, Photography, Photoshop Training on October 25th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

HDR (High Dynamic Rage) Images have become rather popular of late, with the latest iPhones using the feature in their camera technology. I’ve found that not everything looks great with the exposure spread throughout and it can make the image look weird and unnatural. Trouble with exposure bracketing is you need to take at least three pictures at different exposures, and it’s best done with a tripod. Not that useful for street photography so here’s a little cheat that gets great results.

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to get more drama from an image by using bracketed exposures. This technique is very useful when you are in difficult light/ exposure conditions, it allows you to be in control of how much detail you want, or don’t want, in your image.

For more great tutorials check our our Photoshop Free Resources for tips on How to Remove Red Eye, How to Create Photoshop Actions and more…

What is Exposure Bracketing?

Exposure Bracketing is when you take a normal photo and then take two more, but under-expose one (normally -1 or -2 stops) and over-expose the other (usually +1 or +2 stops). You can take more and you can change the amount of stops depending on how much detail you want, but 3 images is normally sufficient.

How to cheat at Exposure Bracketing in Photoshop

There are two ways of putting an HDR image together, you can import your chosen images into Photoshop and use the ‘Merge to HDR’ tool (I admit I have used it before, but I don’t really like it) or you can use masks to retrieve the details from the highlights and lowlights.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Lightroom Training, Photography, Photoshop Training on August 12th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Most photographers will store their images on one or more  external devices, and may switch between computers. This can cause problems when the Lightroom catalog does cannot recognise the current drive letter assigned to your portable drive.When this happens it is common for all the folders in your Lightroom collection are “missing” requiring you to  locate each folder individually in turn on the disk so that Lightroom can relocate your  images.

If, like me,you have hundreds of folders in Lightroom this can become frustrating and time consuming.

BTW I posted another great Lightroom top tip yesterday in the Blog section – my favourite tip of the year! Silicon Beach Training provide Photoshop Courses, Advanced Photoshop Training and Lightroom Training here in Brighton, Sussex.

Solve the Problem of Missing Images and Folders in Lightroom

The solution;

1. Create one major directory or folder in which all your other folders on your external storage device are located.
2. Add this folder to your Lightroom catalogue so that it becomes your root folder.
3. Then if the folders are ever reported as being missing you can quickly locate this root folder and Lightroom will automatically find all the other missing folders that are contained within this one.

Adode Lightroom find missing folders and images

To create your main directory or root folder

1. Make sure that you locate all the folders of images in your Lightroom catalogue in a single folder on your external drive.
2. Make sure that there is at least one image in your root folder
3. Return to Lightroom and import the root folder you have just created into Lightroom.
4. Once imported you can remove the image from Lightroom and from the disk if desired. Once the folder has appeared in the Lightroom catalogue it will stay there even if it’s empty.

When you move your external drive to another computer, if it is not recognized by your Lightroom catalogue you can simply select the root folder in Lightroom and locate it on the disk. All the other folders below this in the hierarchy will then be automatically found.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Lightroom Training, Photography, Photoshop Training on November 10th, 2010 | No Comments »

by sisqo a16 on Flickr

Here is a general list of some of the great new features of Adobe Photoshop CS5, some of these will blow your mind!

If you would like to learn more about Photoshop then try our Photoshop Training, or if you would like to learn more then try our Advanced Photoshop Training in Brighton, Sussex.

Better Selections –

Use quick selection on any object, for example a person. Normally you would loose edge definition and hair would end up looking very jagged. The quick selection tool was never designed for both hard and soft edges, but now we have a solution. Refine Edge command is the new god. It has Edge Detection which has better definition and goes out further than before. It also includes a new Refine tool which allows you to go over the extra bits that you have missed in your selection and Photoshop does the rest!

Content Aware –

If you lasso an object, for example a person in a field, then hit delete you don’t just automatically delete the person and get the standard white background. Now when you hit the delete button Photoshop brings up a new option asking if you want to just delete or whether you want Photoshop to fill in the background with what would have been there if the person wasn’t there.

Healing Brush Content Aware –

When you would usually use the healing brush on your photos sometimes you still get blurred parts when old Photoshop couldn’t handle the different tones and textures. Now when you use the Healing Brush Tool you have the added option of selecting Content Aware which does a much better job of replacing parts that you wanted to remove over all textures and contrasts.

Puppet Warp –

Select an object, for example a person again, using the same process as before and select them and place them on a new layer. Now if you select Puppet Warp from the menu and your person will have a set grid on them. Select a certain part of a person, for example if they have their arms down by their side, select the hand, elbow and shoulder. You can now pivot those points so that the person now is waving or pointing, or just generally going in a different direction.

Noise Reduction –

The new noise reduction capabilities are superb. If you have taken a photo with a lot of grain and noise in it then try out the new Noise Reduction. Changing the sliders on the Luminescence and Colour Detail selection can reduce the amount of noise substantially without loosing detail in the actual image.

HDR Pro –

If you select some images you have taken of the same thing, with different exposures, then you can put them into the new HDR Pro Tool. Once selected and the tool has composed them all together you can then play with various adjustment sliders. You can also set your own Custom Presets which you can use over and over again, for example you like them to be saturated or with higher contrast, you can set it all to whatever you desire. You can also put an HDR effect on a single photo, playing with all the different effects and sharpness. I know this isn’t real HDR, but it allow you to simulate the great properties of the HDR style with shots you wish you’d taken in HDR.

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Posted by Andy Trainer in Photoshop Training on October 15th, 2010 | No Comments »

Science Fiction become Science Fact – Picture the scene:

The future has arrived!  A plenoptic lens is composed of loads of tiny “sub-lenses,” which allow you to record an image from multiple focus planes all at the same time. The result is that you get so much data in your image that can all add up to and create an “infinite” depth of field. With an image taken with a  Plenoptic Lens you can choose the distance at which you want your image to be focused after you have taken it! These plenoptic lenses fit between your camera’s usual lens and its sensor.

As if that wasn’t enough This technology will let users create 3D images on the fly as well.

The cost unfortunately is prohibitive to it being available on the market at the moment, but here is a sneak preview of the future.

Now for all you techy peeps!

How Plenoptic Lenses Work

A Plenoptic lens consists of hundreds of tiny lenses, these are put between a camera’s lens and the image sensor.

It looks like this – The lens is on the left; that large round object is a pin head:

plenoptic lens

Using the  Plenoptic lens  the camera’s sensor records what looks like a loads of fragmented images, but each fragment contains more information about individual light rays entering the camera.

Traditional cameras record a rays of light entering the lens and this information gets recorded on a specific spot, see below:

how a traditional lens records light

With a Plenoptic lens the same light ray passes through several lenses before being recorded by the sensor, so the image is getting recorded from several different perspectives.

Because of the tiny little lenses in front of the sensor, the resulting image looks like a pixelated image with several 1000s of tiny images.

plenoptica camera rays

When post-processed it is possible to choose to render an image with any element in focus.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Photoshop Training on September 27th, 2010 | No Comments »

Learn how to use Photoshop to remove blemishes from your photographs.

So you have taken the best photograph EVER, but there is a tiny bird in the background, dust on the lens or a spot on your face that just wouldn’t go away that day. With Photoshop you can remove these small blemishes with a few simple steps…

This, and other extremely clever Photoshop editing techniques are covered on our Photoshop Training and Advanced Photoshop Training courses in Brighton, Sussex.

Step 1- Find and locate the spots you want to remove from your photograph. Must be a fairly small blemish, as this tool doesn’t work on larger spots.

Step 2- Click on the Spot Healing Brush tool on your Tools bar and select Patch Tool.

Step 3- Circle the small area that you want to remove and then move the circled area to a similar part of the photograph.

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Posted by Aaron Charlie in Photoshop Training on July 23rd, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Would you like a good looking Twitter Background for your business? Would you like a Twitter Background that lets you show more information than the mini profile, like the URL of  your website, Linkedin and Facebook details, maybe your Flickr account and your email and telephone number?

Well you can!

Download our free Twitter background template PSD file, fill in the blanks and you will have a twitter background just like ours @SBTtraining. Incidentally if you are just starting out using Social Networking for your business you would benefit from attending our Social Networking Training course.

How to create your Free Twitter Background

If you are good with Photoshop you can fiddle with the colours by creating your own styles for the box and line at top. I have made them grey to go with most colour schemes. I think that patterned backgrounds can be quite distracting, so I chose black and white for ours. Desaturating and fading images can also work if your design is looking too garish. You can find ideas for your free Twitter background by looking for free desktop wallpaper.

To improve your Photoshop skills you could try our Photoshop training courses for beginners and advanced Photoshop users.

Download your free twitter background template here.

Download free twitter backgound

1. Open and unzip the PSD file called twitterbackground.zip
2. Find or create a backgound image and paste it into the layer called “put your backgound image here”
3. Find an image, portrait, logo or whatever you like and paste it into the layer called “Put an  image or your logo here”
4. Fill in your contact details
5. Save as jpg around 75% quality
6. Log into Twitter
7. Click on Settings from the top menu
8. Click on Design from the submenu
9. Click on Change Background Image ( bottom left of page) and a browse for files dialog box will appear
10. Find and select your new twitter backgound jpg
11. Save

Once you have created your background don’t forget to mention it in our comments below with a link to your new Twitter page, you may even get a few followers as a result.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Photoshop Training, Social Media Training on February 8th, 2010 | 13 Comments »

Welcome to our Free Photoshop Resources Section.

We also offer hands on Photoshop Courses in Brighton, Sussex, led by experienced photographers, graphic designers and web-designers. However these tutorials, how-tos and tips will help you to get started!

You can work through these sections one by one, or just dip in to individual sections for a reminder.

Let’s kick off with a look at the Photoshop CS4 workspace:

When you first open Adobe Photoshop the work area below is revealed.

It contains:

• The Menu bar at the top of the desktop
• The Tool options bar immediately below the Menu bar
• The Toolbox floats on the lef
• Any open document appears in its own window
• Any open palettes float on the right.

You will not use all of the palettes often, when you know which ones you need the most often you can close the rest and save your workspace the way you like it. From the Menu choose:

• Window> Workspace> Save Workspace.

To return to the Photoshop default layout. From the Menu choose:

• Window>Workspace>Reset Palette Locations.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Photoshop Training on February 21st, 2007 | No Comments »