All posts by Passy

How to Lightroom Sunsets

March 29, 2016 Passy Leave a comment

In this lesson we look at how to use Adobe Lightroom CC to improve Sunset Photos.

Getting great sunset images is a combination of manually setting your camera exposure for the sky (and then holding down the AEL Auto Exposure Lock button on the camera while framing and taking the shot, especially on Panoramic shots). Well this is what applies when using a Sony DSLR, which has a brilliant in camera Panoramic function setting, as well as an AEL button.

The next step is to take your photos into Adobe Lightroom (even if they are JPG images), and do the adjustments and touch ups outlined in this “How To” lesson.

Camera Settings for Sunsets

We do not discuss in detail Camera settings for Sunsets in this lesson, as the main focus is on using Adobe Lightroom.

But the number one rule is that the camera dial “Sunset Mode” needs to be avoided, and shooting done in full Manual Mode.

Recommended Manual Mode Settings:

– Exposure Mode: Manual
– Focus Mode: Manual
– Shutter speed: 1/30th sec or longer.
– Aperture: f/16
– ISO: 100 or lower
– Lens: wide at 18-24mm
– Drive Mode: Single-shot
– White Balance: Daylight

Perhaps use a Tripod with a remote control for shutter release if you can (but we have not done this with our photos).

If you need to know more about how to set your camera for Sunset Photos, then read these articles:

12 Tips for Sunset Photography

30 Tips for Sunset Photography

Lightroom and Sunsets

We could probably get even better results by shooting in Raw format and using Lightroom, however most of the photos we have processed in Lightroom in this lesson have been JPG images.

We have been using the Creative Cloud Lightroom CC, but from what we have seen in YouTube videos it seems pretty much the same as Adobe Lightroom 5.

Here is one example of what can be done using Lightroom.

First of all is the Original Image (Click on it to view full size)

and here is the same Sunset Photo after applying Lightroom settings to it (Click Image to view full size)

The above changes were made by following along with the following YouTube Video, which is a great Video for complete beginners to Lightroom.

(Later in this lesson, there is a second video which covers some more advanced techniques).

Keep in mind that the changes we make in Lightroom are always small and subtle, and simply restore back in some of the Sunset splendour that the camera has lost by exposing a bright sky and then making a very dark foreground.

Lightroom Video One

This video has over 300,000 views on YouTube and first thing this guy does is setup a folder on his external hard drive
for output pictures to go to. This is very handy if you are using Lightroom on a Laptop, and also on a second main PC.

Another thing he stresses is to shoot raw to capture more colours and dynamic range, which we have not tried out yet.

We have shot Jpegs and will see how Lightroom goes on them, but in future we should shoot in raw + jpeg mode, as we have the
option on the camera to do this, and easily enough room on the SD card.

Basically we watched this video, pausing and following along and trying out the things he does in Lightroom.

This is how we made the before and after image effects shown previously.

Here is a summary of what Lightroom functions are carried out in the Video.

Importing Pictures

For the Importing process, LR at first could not find individual folders on the C drive, so it seemed you have to do something like copy your pictures into “My Pictures” Windows folder, but then we clicked somewhere near our C drive in the left hand panel and it did find all our own custom made Windows folders. A bit strange, but at least it works.

On the Import options, we chose “Add” to add photos to catalog without moving them.

We then change at the top from the Library Module to the Develop Module on the top of screen menu items.

Cropping Photos

In Develop Mode, the Crop Tool is the first tool. It has a great feature for straightening the horizon: just go to the corner of the photo
until the rotator arrow appears, then push down the mouse and rotate. A detailed grid temporarily appears while you do this.

There is also a Spirit Level that can be used in the Crop Tool options, but we had no luck with this level method.

Basic Adjustments

When we open this panel in the right hand column, the first thing to adjust is the white balance.

There is an eye dropper to dip into something in your photo that is white. On our sunset photo, the colour was too blue (cold) overall, and we had nothing white to dip into. So we moved the slider to the right, to warm up the photo, and remove the blue cast.

The next thing is to go to the adjustment sliders. First try clicking “Auto” like in the video, but this did not work well at all on Sunsets, and so we used Ctrl-Z to undo. If you use the bottom right hand corner “Reset” button like in his video, it will undo everything and take your picture right back to the start. If this happens, just go to the very top left hand buttons, and do Edit > Undo Reset.

Note in the video, around the twelve minute mark, he also shows the left hand side “History” panel, where you can click on each history item, and see what the image looked like at that stage of your editing.

In Basic adjustments, when you have exposed for the sky, (like in a sunset shot), we take the highlights all the way to the left, and the
shadows most of the way to the right. This seems to turn the sunset photo into daylight, which is kind of weird.

Too much of shadows set too far to the right seemed to introduce a lot of noise grain into our photos.
Perhaps we need to originally shoot them at ISO 100 or 200 with a longer exposure and use a tripod, to have clearer starting shots.

Next, we put the Clarity up which adjusts midtones, and adds a sharpness type effect to the image.

The video suggests not taking Clarity up past the 40% level as a maximum, and this seems to be a good idea.

Clarity does introduce some noise grain onto the image, and apparently also distorts peoples skin tone colours.
(Noise is adjusted later on, when we do the “Detail” panel settings).

Next we adjust Whites and Blacks.

We can hold down Shift where it says “Whites” and double click to get an automatic adjustment done by lightroom.
We can do the same with Blacks. To undo and set the sliders back to the middle, we hold down no keys, and just double click on “Whites”.
We do the same and double click on “Blacks” to reset them.

I guess using the standard Ctrl-Z undo process would do the same thing.

We found that the Shift Double Click let Lightroom do the settings method did not work well on Sunsets, and the Hold down Alt key method described below did a much better job.

The other method is to hold down Alt, and the whites screen goes black, then we add whites until only the first set of highlights show through.

We can also use Alt to adjust the blacks, and go a little stronger to the left on these.

The last two Basic settings are Vibrance and Saturation.

Vibrance adjusts every colour that is not already saturated, while Saturation will adjust every colour, even if it already saturated.
Vibrance is more subtle than Saturation, and so we often add a little Vibrance, but do not add any saturation.

Once all the Basic Adjustments are done, you can press the “Y” key to see the Before and After side by side, and press Y again to turn it off.

The back slash \ key performs a similar before and after function, (on most but not all keyboards).

HSL Adjustments

With the HSL panel, we can intensify the saturation of certain colours; specifically we can adjust Hue, Saturation, and Luminance (HSL).

First we do Saturation and then we do Liminance to adjust the brightness and contrast of the colour.

Detail Adjustments

The next panel we use it the Detail Panel for doing Sharpening and Noise Reduction.

It is suggested in the video to simply do Sharpening to 70, and Noise Reduction to 40.

Effects Adjustments

Using this panel we can create vignettes. A slight black vignette can draw attention to the middle of the photo.

A Black vignette (slider to the left -10 to -20) seems to work well on a Sunset Photo.

Exporting the Image

If your image is a raw image (or a Jpeg) we need to export it to put it onto FB or Instagram.

We do File > Export and then have an extensive panel to do settings on.

To find out what to do, watch the 23 minute mark of the video, Export to a specific folder, and do not add to the catalog.

Note that you can export to a PSD Photoshop file and then take it into Photoshop later on, but we are doing a JPG, SJPG, Quality 100,
and do not limit the size.

Resolution is 72 for FB and online, and 300 for Printing.

When you export, a status bar goes on the top left hand corner until it is finished.

The resize option is strange, because if you use Width and Height, it does not adjust height automatically when you change the width.
So we used the “Long Edge” option, and then set it to 2048, or 2200 to 2800 for Panoramic images, to make a suitably sized JPG for Facebook.

Another slightly annoying feature, it that unlike Photoshop, it does not show you the estimated size in Megapixels for the final image when you resize or change the quality.

When we used full quality and around 2048 to 2800 wide, we ended up with a 1.45 MB image which is quite large to load up to the Web.

When we exported to 85 percent quality the file size went down to only 1.11 MB with no difference in quality visible.

However we did find on other photos we resized using the “Long Edge” option, that the file size came down to between 700K and 1.4MB which was fine for uploading online to Flickr and Facebook.

Using Lightroom for Sunsets

We found another great video for beginners about doing Sunset Photos in Lightroom.

This Video includes using FILTERS and the PAINT BRUSH, as well as the SPOT HEALING TOOL for removing any spots caused by dust on your lens.

The YouTube video shows how to use filters to mask off areas like the sky and work on them, as well as using colored gradient type paint brushing. Although he does it a little bit quickly, it is easy enough to follow along with and figure out the techniques.

He also shows some other great tricks for getting a really good sunset photo out of a very drab grey sky photo to start off with.

On the video the guy goes on and on a bit about a few other things at the start, and does not really start on the lightroom processing until the 5 minute mark or so.

Here is a Before and After Panoramic Photo we made by appying the effects shown in the video, (particularly the Paint Brush).

Click each Photo to View it Full Size.

The effect I was going after was to make the sun look like a nuclear bomb explosion, as its energy does come from Nuclear reactions on its surface. It is perhaps not to everyone’s liking, but I like it, and it was exactly the look that I wanted.

Lightroom allows for all types of artistic creativity with its range of awesome tools!

Using the Brush Tool on Sunset Areas

When you use the brush tool, always have feather at 100, then adjust the Density and Flow starting at 50 each with a big brush, and some red or yellow colours.

Then click New for a new brush, and make it smaller, and set Flow and Density to 80 and go over the area where the sun is again.

Then click New, double click each of the sliders to set them back to zero, then up the exposure to the right and brush with that to lighten up areas like whites on wave caps, green bushes and trees, etc.

The whole time you do this, little white round movable adjustment dots start appearing, and the “H” key is a toggle to make these dots visible and not visible.

See the previous YouTube video around the 10 to 12 mins part to see the Paint Brush in action.

Using Lightroom Filters

Filters can be tricky to manipulate when using Lightroom for the first time as a complete beginner.

It is not immediately obvious how to move the three lines and the dot on the graduated (gradient) filter, or how to adjust them.

The thing to remember is that the Filter is making a dark to light see through gradient on your image, and the set of three lines are the graduated (or fade in and fade out) edges of the dark to light change. (Light to Dark happens when you move the Exposure slider).

The filter does not have to be a dark to light change, as there are sliders to make all sorts of Gradients in the Lightroom Options. For example a Filter on the sky portion can make a Saturation change to make the faint and whispy top parts of sunset clouds far more intensely coloured.

The other great thing is that once the filter is placed onto the image, the sliders can be adjusted to create all sorts of graduated effects, including sharpness and blurring using clarity.

The following Video gives a great demonstration of how to use the Rectangular shaped Graduated Filter:

We have not used the Radial Filter on sunsets at all, but probably could do so around the sun perhaps, and here is a video about how it works:

And finally another interesting video about using Radial and Graduated Filters:

The H and Y Keys

The letter H is the Hide and Unhide key in Lightroom.

Pressing the letter H on the keyboard toggles between hiding Paint Brush or Filter settings on the image and unhiding them.

However we found that if you hide settings on a filter, then the next time you set another filter, you cannot see any settings to adjust this latest filter. It seems that the H key hide stays turned on forever, until you hit “H” again.

so when working with Filters or paint brush, you may need to press the H key to make the settings appear.

This is kind of annoying, because any new filter should really have the settings lines shown immediately so they can be adjusted.

Other useful keys are the “Y” key to show before and after images, (Y to see them, Y again not to see them), as well as the backslash key \ which does a similar before and after view of the image.

Lightroom Sunsets Summary

The basic workflow when doing a Sunset Photo in Lightroom is as follows:

1) White Balance – just usually give it a slight Temperature Change to the right, from blueish cold to a bit warmer.

2) Highlights all the way to the left, and Shadows most of the way to the right

3) Clarity up to around 40% as a maximum, which adjusts midtones, and adds a sharpness type effect to the image

4) Whites and Blacks – Hold down Alt, and the whites screen goes black, then we add whites until only the first set of highlights show through.

Also hold down Alt to adjust the blacks on its all white screen, and go a little stronger to the left on these.

5) Saturation and Vibrance – Saturation does all the colours, Vibrance only adjusts the colours that are not already saturated.

6) The HSL Adjustments

With the HSL panel, we can intensify the saturation of certain colours.

We can do Hue, Saturation, and Luminance.
First we do Saturation and then we do Luminance to adjust the brightness and contrast of particular colours.

These need to be subtle for each colour, try to only go within plus or minus 20% on the sliders.

Some colours do not require any adjustment, usually we are doing Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue and Green.

7) Detail Panel for doing Sharpening and Noise Reduction.

Whatever we do the Noise reduction for, do 100-this for the Sharpness.
Eg. NR = 20 then Sharpening = 80.

8) Paintbrush Tool – make sure feathering is 100 and add yellows and reds as well as exposure changes. Do New button for new brush each time.

9) Filters – the vertical rectangle symbol between crop and paintbrush on the top row of the right hand column.
We can move the filter up and down, change its width, and tilt it using the middle line in it.

Filters are great for laying diagonally across the Sunset and brightening it up.

10) Effects Adjustments – A Black vignette (slider to the left -10 to -20) seems to work well on a Sunset Photo.

There you have it, the ten steps for processing a sunset image in Lightroom.

That’s it for now, we will add some more to this lesson, as we work more with Sunset Photos in Adobe Lightroom.

A Flickr Gallery of our Sunset Photos can be viewed by clicking the following link:

Note that only the first nine or so images (at the time of writing) have been adjusted in Lightroom.

The other images are all either straight out of the camera, or adjusted in Photoshop which does not work nearly as well as Lightroom.

Flickr Gallery of Sunset Photos

Enjoy,
Passy

How To, Videos

Video Intros Outros

January 2, 2016 Passy Leave a comment

Videos look a lot more professional with a short Introduction segment and a set of Rolling Credits at the end.

In this article we show how we do Introductions and Rolling Credits for our Music Videos.

All of our work is done using the Adobe Creative Cloud, and so we will be talking about using Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and Fireworks.

Video Introductions

Some video makers really “go to town” with over the top animated 3D looking introductions made using Adobe After Effects.

Certainly if you take the time and effort to make a fantastic introduction to your video production company, then it is the gift that keeps giving, and you can use it over and over again on every video you produce.

If you want to do this sort of thing, then see the links in the “Further Reading” section at the end of this article.

For our live music videos we are determined to make it all about the Client, rather than us, and so we focus the brief introduction based entirely on them.

We also like to keep it simple, and so we use either a still slide we have made in Photoshop or Fireworks, or a simple animated graphic or text of the Band’s Name and/or Members.

If the Band already has a great logo on their FB Page or Website, then as shown above, as simple intro can be made over the top of the intro bars of the first song, and then this can fade out to reveal the musicians.

We do this by making a new 1920 x 1080 black background slide in Adobe Fireworks, importing the Band Logo image (captured off their site using the Snipping Tool if we cannot save the image).

We then flatten the layers and save it as a high quality JPG file about 150k to 250k in size.

It then goes into Adobe Premiere as a layer above the video, with a fade out reveal type effect on it.

The second type of Introduction we do is basically the same as the Band Logo one above, but instead we make a 1920 x 1080 sized Band Poster to use. (Play the first few seconds of the video below to see this in action).

In the opening slide for the above video, we took a band photo and made our own text (using dafont.com to get the right style) and also made the 3D winding grid pattern in the background.

This was all done using Adobe Fireworks, but could have also been done in Photoshop.

The third and final type of Introduction we like to do is a simple rapid grow text type introduction, as in the following video.

This type of animated intro can be easily made entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro, and does not require the use of Adobe After Effects at all.

We worked out how to do this frame by frame type resize tool on a basic graphic we made first in Fireworks by watching the following “How To” video.

This video explains how to put in key frames and animate intro text:

We first made a cropped image of the Size Matters Logo in Fireworks, and saved it into our video project folder.

Then we put it into media browser preview and moved it down onto the timeline as the top layer.

Then we clicked the top of screen “Effects” in the left media preview browser and changed its size from small, and using keyframes made it bigger and bigger by dragging its corners each keyframe.

In the How To video he says to click the clock to make a new keyframe, but in Adobe Premiere Pro CC we had to instead click the diamond keyframe symbol each time to make a new keyframe.

It was very easy after watching this video, and you can make a back background image in Fireworks or Photoshop like we did as our starting point , rather than enter text with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Basic Video Outro

If the video is a basic production that does not require a minute of rolling credits at the end, then we tend to simply use a closing slide like the one shown above.

Rolling Credits

Making a Rolling Credits Ending or “Outro” for a Video is a bit more work than making an Introduction and involves using Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and creating a “Black Video” in Adobe Premiere.

The great thing is that once you have made your first one, you can easily do Save As on the Photoshop .PSD file and then edit it in Photoshop to make another one for another video.

We also find that it works well to use a suitable soundtrack from the live band to run behind the rolling credits, rather than have complete silence.

If you go to the 13:50 minute mark in the following video, you can see an example of our standard Rolling Credits:

After watching several YouTube “How To” videos about Rolling Credits, we found the following “Gem”, which we refer to everytime we make rolling credits:

One very important thing we found out (by trial and error) is that to get the smoothest rolling credits it is important to make the After Effects animation have a total duration that is a multiple of the frame rate of your video.

Eg. If your video is running at 25fps, then the Credits duration needs to be 25, 50, 75, or 100 seconds to get the smoothest animation in the final rendered video.

Free Collage Makers

January 1, 2016 Passy Leave a comment

Late last year Instagram introduced the free collage maker “Instagram Layout” which has resparked interest in making Photo Collages and sharing them on Social Media.

However, if you are at School or Work where Instagram is blocked by the Network Security, then you need to use one of the many other free web based Collage Applications instead.

In this article we look at some Free Photo Collage makers that can be used on a laptop or desktop computing device that runs Windows.

We used Google Chrome as our laptop browser while making our Photo Collages with these free online Internet/Cloud Applications.

These apps are easy to use and produce quite satisfactory results.

Once you have made your collage, the apps allow you to save it onto your computer as a JPG file and/or share it online to Social Media.

At the end of the article we have included some web lists of Collage Applications for Apple Mac and Mobile Phones.

Fotor Collage Maker

This free collage maker requires no online registration, and is very simple to use.

Note that the above example collage probably would have been better made with yellow borders for this article’s white page background. There is actually a white border frame that goes all the way around the outside of the collage, but it cannot be seen against the white page is it sitting on.

It loads up in edit mode and you can start work straight away.

First you choose a layout design, and then you can upload photos from your computer and move them around just like making a Facebook Header.

Text can be added, and the text editing tools and fonts available are a good selection of styles and designs.

Finally, you can save the collage to your computer or share it online.

Defualt collage size is 1366×768 which results in a fairly large 500k file, but sizes can be changed to suit different phone screen sizes.

Several Design features for borders and backgrounds are not available unless you upgrade to the paid premium version, but the free version has all of the basic features that you need.

The link to the Fotor Free Collage maker is as follows:

Fotor Collage Maker Website

Pic Monkey Collage Maker

This maker has a great two minute video on the home page which shows you what is available and how to use the application.

Like Fotor Collage there is no email registration and you can go straight into making a Collage from the home page.

The first step is to open up all the photos you want to use from your computer. Note that you can hold down the Ctrl key and select multiple photos to import all at once.

Then comes the drawback…… a lot of the good layout designs are “Royal” ones marked with a crown which means they are only available in the Paid Version.

So we tried a create your own layout, but it only lets you add photos horizontally in a one row horizontal strip that is locked at 2000 x 469 in size. HOWEVER when you save the Collage to your computer you can adjust this size to whatever you like.

You cannot add a second row, but the single row layout is good for what it is, as in our example above.

There are multiple row preset collages that are free, but it seems like these presets are not modifiable in any way.

Once you have made your Collage you need to save it and then proceed to the “Edit” button where text and effects can be added. A warning is given that once you proceed to this step you cannot go back and modify the collage at all.

To get a color dipper for the text, it is necessary to go to the color intensity vertical bar at the far right and click which then brings up the dropper symbol.

The filters are good and nicely enhance a completed collage, although several of them are not available in the free version: you can try them and see they look great, but you cannot apply and save them.

You can then save the the final collage image, at various sizes, to your computer as a Jpeg file.

What we liked most about this Collage maker was the easily adjustable rounded rectangles and the backgrounds available to put the text onto. The filters are also good.

Pic Monkey Photo Collage Website

Photo Collage

This is free with no sign up just like the other internet collage makers.

This one is very much do it yourself, where you load in your photos and resize and rearrange them onto the work area with total control.

The downside is that the text fonts and colors are very limited, and once you have set the text color and font once, you cannot go back and change it; all you can do is resize it.

When you save it to your computer, it goes to the downloads folder which is also a bit of a pain, as you then need to copy it manually to another folder.

It does not seem like you can change from having a plain white border dividers, and the photos came out a bit washed out once they were imported and collaged.

This meant that we needed to take our saved Jpeg file into Adobe Photoshop and tweak the Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness, and Saturation, to get our collage looking bright and crisp.

But if you want total control of the layout to make a customised white bordered collage, then this one is a simple and great tool to do it.

Photo Collage can be accessed at the following link:

Photo Collage Website

Be Funky Collage Maker

This is like the other Collage Makers and is free with no sign up, and has a great layout that is very easy to use.

If you change collage designs though, you lose photos, and then might change again and have empty gaps.

These are easily refilled by going back to the Upload symbol icon and dragging photos back in.

The default size for a collage is 2400 x 1333 pixels but this can be changed in settings.

One particularly great feature in this application is that you can click and edit an individual photo in the collage and change its colour, sharpness, etc and even add a vignette around it and then return to the Collage.

There is a strange looking double bubble icon symbol in the top right hand corner of a photo when you click it in the collage maker, and clicking this takes you into basic photo edit mode. If you then click the “Open Image in Editor” button you get taken into the full photo editor.

Being able to apply vignetting (a dark oval shape shadow around the edges of a photo) to the people shots in this collage was really helpful.

The text fonts seem to be all the normal ones from Windows, but several of them like Bauhaus93 do not seem to work, and just produce some type of times new roman default font instead.

Another nice feature of this collage maker is that you can mouse over borders and resize them in a collage.

The Collage Maker also suggests an initial layout to use based on the Photos that you have uploaded to use.

Overall this is a great collage maker for a collage of people shots.

Be Funky Collage Maker can be accessed at the following link:

Be Funky Collage Maker Website

Other Photo Collage Applications

A Quick search of the web found the following Free Photo Collage Apps; there are literally hundreds of them out there.

Several of these are for Mac/OS, iPhone, and Android.

Fifteen Free Collage Makers

Twenty Five Free Collage Makers For Windows

Thirteen Free Photo Collage Makers

Ten Free Photo Collage Makers

Ten Free Collage Makers for Android

Ten Free Collage Makers for iPhone

Photo Collages the next old again new again thing for grouping together your happy snaps.

Enjoy,
Paul at Photos By Passy

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“PBP Photos By Passy” Facebook Page a Like.

Photos By Passy Facebook Page

How To, Nature, Sports Photos

How To Do Beach Photos

December 31, 2015 Passy Leave a comment

I am still a beginner when it comes to Beach Photography, but I thought I would share with you what I have learned so far.

The Beach is a great place, but often we take photos that end up as vast open vistas dominated by water and sky that are very big and boring.

There is also lots of sunlight and glare, and so in sunny conditions an adjustable Polariser Filter is essential.

See our previous article on Polariser Filters at the following link:

How to use Polariser Filters

Camera Settings

To get as much detail as possible it is important to use a very narrow aperture of f16, f22, or higher, and a low ISO like 100, 200 or 400.

Shutter speed of 1/50 or higher should freeze any wave action, but as per some of the linked items at the end of this article, very slow shutter speeds and a tripod can be deliberately used to create blurred milky effects on the waves.

If it is very sunny and the water is sparkling, then it might be a good idea to use a high shutter speed like 1/500 or 1/1000 to freeze wave motion, and also not allow the water sparkles to over expose into complete whiteness.

If your camera has a Landscape Scene setting, (usually the Mountains Icon), then use this and it should give the right type of settings for everything to be in focus.

Panorama Photos at the beach also look great, but I have not tried this out on my camera yet, as I did not have a tripod with me on my recent beach trips.

It is definitely something I need to work on, as Panaorama can substitute for not having dedicated 12mm, 14mm, etc wide angle lenses.

At the moment I am mainly using a Sony 18 to 50mm Zoom lens, and you can see when it is wide at 18mm, that a fisheye type curvature of the horizon occurs.

No doubt proper wide angle lenses would perform a lot better, but these are not available within most people’s photography budget, including mine!

Beach Photo Composition

First of all use the “Thirds Rule”. In the photo above you can see we have placed the people and the rock pool in the middle third of the image.

It is also very effective to have some foreground detail in the photo, or frame the image using trees and bushes which are nearby.

The following shot uses the Thirds Rule, as well as including some grasses and plants in the foreground:

In Photoshop adding a bit of “Saturation” to really bring up the blue sea, as well as a small amount of “Smart Sharpen” to preserve detail seems to work well.

Shots of Plants and Wood

To create some variety in a photo album of a day at the beach, we suggest including some shots of the interesting plants, rocks, rock pools, and driftwood.

Detail shots of plants are difficult to get right, and we are still learning how to do this better.

One thing we have found, is that is often NOT a good idea to sharpen pictures of grasses in Photoshop, as they tend to come out too rough and thinned out. You can see this in the fence post and grasses photo above.

Surf Photography

In our opinion the key part of Surf Photography is to capture surfers charging down waves with pure commitment and determination, as well as capturing maneuvers.

This can be best done by shooting in continuous multishot with your camera set on Sports mode.

There will be lots of photos to sort through, but this is the best way to capture those perfect moments.

The other major challenge is that if you want to stay safely on dry land, then the Surfers out at sea will be a long way from you and so a powerful Telephoto lens is needed.

The major problem here is that a fast focusing 70-400mm or higher powered zoom lens costs anywhere from $2,500 to over $10,000 here in Australia !

So instead, get a cheap zoom that goes up to around 250mm lens like a Sony, Tamron, or Sigma one, and put it onto a good image stabilised APC cropped frame DSLR sports camera like the Sony A77ii.

Then find surf breaks that are Beach Breaks close to the shoreline, or Photograph Point Breaks from a good cliff top viewpoint.

Meanwhile see how you go, and save up for a big heavy bazooka high powered zoom lens, and a suitable fluid ball head tripod to use.

We have started a Pinterest Board of what we think makes a great Surfing Photo here:

Photos By Passy Pinterest Surfing Photos

Beach Sunsets

Photo Credit: Gary Bradshaw

Gary Bradshaw Photography Facebook Page

Beach Sunsets are classic photos, but take a lot of planning, practice, and repetition to get just right.

The above photo has all of the right elements, the tide is out making the beach sand wet to capture sky reflections, there are foreground rocks and land included, and the colours of the clouds are gorgeous.

We have not fully explored doing Sunset photos, but have them on our Definite To Do List.

Sunset Images are best processed using Adobe Lightroom.

Eg. See our “How To” article dedicated to Lightroom and sunsets at the link below:

How to use Adobe Lightroom for Sunsets

Photos By Passy Beach Photos

Check out some of our Beach Photos in the following Flickr Albums:

Sorrento Back Beach

Sunset at Gunnamatta Beach

Paradise Beach at St Andrews

Millionaires Walk Sorrento

Bridgewater Beach Walk

How to Simply Photo Edit Pictures of Animals

December 2, 2015 Passy Leave a comment

In this “How To” article we look at some basic Photoshopping which can be used to improve photos of animals taken outdoors
in bright sunlight. We also look at enhancing Photos that have been taken of Animals in Glass Cages.

If you do not have Photoshop, then the same enhancements can easily be made in either Photoshop Elements, or the great
free image editor called “GIMP” which is available for download here:

Click to Download Free GIMP Photo Editor

Recently we did a day trip to the Melbourne Zoo in Australia, and not wanting to lug around a lot of camera equipment, we took
along a small powerful pocket camera made by Sony: the RX100 Mark 2.

The Sony RX100 series is currently up to the RX100 M4 for around $1000 in Australia, but the camera we used for our Zoo photos
was the RX100 M2 which can be purchased new off eBay for around $500.

It was a cloudy day, with the sun occassionally breaking through very brightly, and so we had issues with over exposure
where the pictures came out too bright, with a white snow effect on grass and animals backs.

Also many of the photos were taken from a distance using the superb Carl Zeiss zoom lens, and due to this great lens, and because we have 20.2 Megapixels to play with on the RX100, we could easily crop the photos to make them look a lot closer, and still have plenty of quality pixels remaining when we resized the pictures to 2048 pixels wide for Facebook.

In this article we look at using Basic Photo Editing Techniques to enhance Photos of Animals.

It is basically a beginner’s lesson in Photoshop.

Photos can always greatly benefit from some simple Photoshopping.

Advanced Methods

If you want to try something a bit more advanced to enhance the example photos, then use “Colour Curves” to reduce the
high tones as shown in the following tutorial for Gimp, (but works equally well in Photoshop):

Basic Colour Curves Tutorial

Download Photos for Practice

If you want to download the starting versions of the Photos shown in this article, then bring up the following folder in a web browser, click to display the images, and then Save each photo using your Browser right click on photo Mouse options.

You can then try out the techniques we show in this article.

Click Here to Download Practice Images

Fixing Bright Pictures

Over Exposure can easily be dealt with using basic photo editing tools.

If we had used a full size DSLR camera, we could have fitted an Adjustable Polariser Filter, which works like a pair of sunglasses,
and reduces glare and brightness.

See our previous “How To” article about Polariser Filters at this link:

How To Use Polariser Filters

The first thing we do is crop our Photo to better frame the action, and make the animals appear closer.

Next we adjust the Exposure down a small amount to darken the picture slightly:

Note that if you have Used Photoshop CS5 or earlier, the “Offset” adjustment used to be brilliant for fixing overexposed bright and washed out Photos.

However in CS6 and the Creative Cloud versions of Photoshop, “Offset” has been changed to be very harsh, and appears to be virtually unusable:

So do NOT use Image > Adjustments > Exposure and Offset.

We now use Brightness/Contrast to introduce some “punch” into the photo:

The next thing is to make the colours more intense using Saturation:

The last thing to do is to “Sharpen” the picture, to make the fur look its very best.

Note that Sharpening should always be done as the last step when enhancing photos.

Note that the settings used on the above Sharpening are percent values between 90% and 98%, and a Radius Value between 0.2 and 0.7 (we used 0.5).

Our Photo is now finished and ready to Resize and Save.

Advanced Technique – Curves

A Quicker way to fix our Original overexposed Photo with “white snow” on the green grass, is to use “Curves”.

Using Curves we can fix our Photo in one go, without having to do Exposure then Contrast then Saturation.

We need to understand that the brightest parts and the whites form part of the top section of our colour line.

If we click to make a dot on this top part of the line, and hold our mouse button and pull the line down to make a curve, we can remove the bright whites.

Find out more about using Curves in the following Web Tutorial:

Learning to use Colour Curves

Photos Taken Through Glass

For taking photos through glass, hold the camera as close as possible to the glass, and check there are not any people reflections visible and take the photo.

The resulting photo might look too bright, grey and a little foggy, but we can easily fix this in Photoshop as follows:

This produces the final photoshooped image, which is crisp and clear with nice colour.

Here is a photo taken of a green jungle snake in a glass cage that now looks like a photo taken in the Amazon Jungle.

Finally here is a photo we took of a bear through Glass in vertical Portrait mode.

But because we have 20.2 Megapixels to work with we can easily crop it to be a Landscape Horizontal image.

Working through the usual steps, we can transform the photo into the final enhanced image.

Summary

Animal Photos and Photos through glass can be greatly enhanced using a photo editor like Photoshop or Gimp.

Our Zoo Photos

You can check out all of our photoshopped Zoo Animal pictures at the following link:

Photos By Passy Zoo Pictures

Download Photos for Practice

You can then try out the techniques we show in this article.

Click Here to Download Practice Images

We hope you have enjoyed this article about Basic Photoshopping Techniques for Photos of Animals.

We have plenty more “How To” articles on our Website at the following link, and constantly add new ones.

Photos By Passy How To Articles

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