Category Archives: PhotoShop

It turns out that one of the greatest things about my new camera is the way it integrates with PhotoShop CS2. The RAW (NEF) file import tool is loaded with goodies. Below are just a few…

Starting on the left above, you can see that CS2′s NEF import tool includes the usual white balance adjustments.

The second screen shot shows the Detail tab. All of the adjustments here work as expected. Sharpening applied here seems to work better than unsharp mask and Luminance Smoothing is very nice indeed. Also note that I have changed the Size setting on the bottom of the screen to a whopping 6144 x 4081. Again, upscaling the image at this step seems to give much better results than upscaling with PhotoShop’s Image Size tools.

The third screen shot on the right above shows tools designed to correct for imperfections in camera lenses. These tools allow you to correct for Chromatic Aberrations and Vignetting. I use the Vignetting tool to ADD a subtle vignette more often that I use it to correct for fall-off. Fabulous!

My dear friend Kalvin sent a scan of this lovely photograph of his parents. Shot in 1941, the original hand-tinted black and white photo had lost a bit of its original color over the years.

The restoration turned out to be a bit harder than I originally thought it would be. After the usual dust-spotting, I had a tough time deciding when I was actually done. I did not want to overdo it and cause it to look worse than it did all those years ago. I had to avoid the temptation to pump up the colors and contrast. Most of the work was done with PhotoShop’s Levels, Dodge and Color Replacement Tools.

I think it’s an improvement. I hope the results will satisfy Kalvin. That’s the main thing.

How often does this happen to you? You shoot 100 photos at an important event and discover that the very best shot of the day is useless for one reason or another. It’s way out of focus or 2 stops overexposed or – as in this case – something totally unexpected has happened. Something like… a light leak? What the…?

Certainly not caused by the camera, this leak must have occurred when I pulled the film OUT of the camera. Unbelievable! Fortunately I had taken two shots of this scene, and with the help of PhotoShop, was able to create a perfect image from an otherwise unusable one.

Geeky stuff follows…

The original image with both layers is 986,342,974 bytes in size – just shy of one gigabyte. Manipulating an image this size – dust-spotting, color-correcting, and merging the new forground over the old – took about four hours on my lowly 2.4 gigahertz machine with one gigabyte of RAM. Just saving the image took about 10 minutes. On the plus side, PhotoShop 7.0 performed flawlessly, and my friends now have an image that they can print at least 4 feet wide with amazing clarity. On the down side, I think it may be time to upgrade my hardware. I have my eye on a G5 with a 30″ monitor, but who am I kidding? It’ll never happen. Wait, I know! I’ll add it to my wish-list… :-)

Looking at my blog, you might think I like shooting wedding photos. Well, I don’t, really. It’s a lot of nerve-racking work. It involves lugging camera gear around for hours trying to stay cool while worrying about the zillions of things things could go wrong! For me, most of the challenges are related to lighting and focus. Weddings tend to move along quickly these days, and direct sun or portable flash units can produce really ugly lighting. And, to top it off, I don’t care much for “traditional” wedding photos. I want mine to be “different” – somehow “better”. And then there’s the 12-15 hours of post-processing in PhotoShop. :-)

All things considered, the day went quite well. I tried to make sure that I’d get a few decent pictures by shooting a lot of images. I actually filled my 4 gigabyte Microdrive for the first time. I also shot a couple rolls of 220 film with Steve’s Mamiya 7. There’s saftey in numbers.

If you’d like to see all 285 images on the Ofoto web site, click here.

My fans are demanding that I do some blogging. I have 80 pictures of a recent camping trip – four of which might make it to these pages. Sorry I-’ve been really busy and really lazy lately. It’s just so much work to get my images ready for:

1. Printing
2. Uploading to Ofoto
3. E-mailing
4. Blogging

Each has very different requirements, and it often takes hours to get to to step four. However, I can do a Photo of the Day relatively quickly – just scan through a kajillion images with Adobe Album – a pretty cool program, but that’s another blog entry.

So, here it is. I must tell you that a shot shot like this is not easy to get. You see, it’s daylight, the digital camera shutter will stay open no more than 1/15 of a second, (even with the nuetral density filter enabled) I have no tripod, and it’s starting to rain. To get this shot, I had to stand motionless and press the shutter release over and over and over – more then seventy times, actually.