Photoshop.com September 30, 2008

Check out Photoshop.com. It’s a great way to store, share, and edit your photos. You don’t pay a dime to register and you get 2G of free space to store your photos and videos. Here’s a screen shot of the home page, showing My Library of photos and what albums I’ve created.

You can also perform simple, yet very useful edits. Obviously you don’t have the same amount of control as you would in Photoshop, but it’s a very easy way to do basic editing, such as cropping, red eye reduction, and tinting. I recommend this especially for beginners not comfortable with Photoshop but still want to manipulate their photos. Below is another screen shot of the editing window. It’s very simple to navigate and you can custom create album slideshows – you can even pick a song to go with your photo slideshow, though the music on the site is pretty hokey. You can share your albums through email, giving access to your photos only to whom you want to see them. You can also log into your other photosharing accounts, such as Facebook or Flickr and upload your photos from those accounts into Photoshop.com. Because of it’s editing capabilities and classy slideshows, it’s a great alternative to those sites.

Photography: Using Reflectors September 30, 2008

Wouldn’t be so nice and easy if everywhere you went to shoot had absolute perfect light? Unfortunately, good lighting can sometimes be a challenge – but not impossible to find. If you’re doing a formal shoot, a portrait for instance, take the time to find a place with good lighting. Lighting kits are nice, but not always necessary. Sometimes a simple reflector will do the trick.

You can buy a reflector (I have a reversible one that is silver one side and gold on the other and folds up nicely into a little bag), or you can just buy a piece of white poster board. Reflectors simply bounce light. If you’re taking a photo of someone or something outside in the sunlight, you might face heavy shadows in places you don’t want them.  You can angle a reflector to bounce light into those dark areas. It’s much better to have all your lighting and coloring right when you take the picture, rather than trying to correct it in Photoshop.

Here is an example of a portrait taken with available (or ambient) lighting and a reflector. I looked for a room with good natural light. In this case, a glass door. The subject is sitting on the floor of her master bedroom, maybe a foot away from the door. I leaned a gold reflector at about a 45 degree angle slightly behind her to catch the light strongest through the glass and bounce back to her to light the dark side of her face and hair. The gold reflector gives a warm feeling and almost looks like a light is there, rather than a shiny piece of plastic.

In this case, an assistant would have been helpful. I leaned the reflector against a bed post, and hoped it did what I needed it to as the subject moved. This picture could be improved by having the light directed from behind her to give some separation between her hair and the background. An assistant is good to have to adjust the direction of the light without you, the photographer, missing a shot (especially important when photographing little ones!)

Notice the background is almost black. I adjusted my light meter only to my subject, leaving the dark background slightly underexposed and not a distraction. There were some small objects visible towards the bottom, which I got rid of by using the burn tool in Photoshop – totally ligit for something like this.

The burn tool is found in the PS tools palet. You can adjust the brush size simply by pressing [ for smaller and ] to make it bigger. At the top of the screen you can also adjust the intensity of the burn tool and the range it adjusts; shadows, highlights or midtones. But that’s for another lesson…