Selective Focus Post Process

Want a blurred background in your portrait but don't have a fast lens? Many post processing programs have a sharp/blur tool. Play around with the settings to get the most natural looking effect.

BEFORE

AFTER

 

Two Kid's Backpacks - Transformer Material

Set of two kid's backpacks made with Transformers material.

Small backpack approx 10" high, larger one, 14"

$50.00 for the set, $10 S/H or free local pickup (OKC)

Use this button to buy with shipping

Use this button to buy with local pickup only (OKC, OK)

One Exposure - Three Images

From our recent trip to a local lake. 

This branch composition intrigued me. As I exposed it, I was using exposure settings to enhance a B&W rendering. I also wanted a good subject for the Infrared processing feature of Photoshop CC. 

Here it is:

In Living Colour

 

 

B&W with all the right contrasts

IR - Infrared

Enjoy!

 

A Fun Image Manipulation

Gradient Color to Black & White of an old building.

Caption: "Turn a corner and go back in time."

Fun With Old Buildings

Took a little daytrip out on small state highways and found some neat old buildings to photograph.

Here are the sooc versions:

To process them, I first enhanced exposure. Opened up shadows and closed down highlights. Then, I desaturated certain colors and enhanced others. Lastly, I adjusted contrast.

Here are the image processed versions:

Fun!

Boathouse District

Panoramic views of the Boathouse District on the Oklahoma River and the Oklahoma City skyline viewed from the river.

 

Voted #1!

Thumb Tack voted Steve's Fine Finish as a 2015 Top Ten in Oklahoma photography company and ranked us #1 in Product Photography!

Thanks! We hope to continue to provide quality images and services for a long time.

More Special EFX Fun

Remember all the fun we used to have in darkrooms? Besides getting everything just right for a great final print, sometimes we wanted to play around.

We could solarize or posterize our images. We could print an interneg and reprint a negative print. We could shoot infrared film and develop for either a positive or negative. All were very fun things to do. Also very labor intensive and time consuming.

In the Digital Age, we can do those same things. And we even seem to have some more real control of the process. Many imaging programs allow conversion to B&W, B&W Infrared, and other special effects.

I took a few images I've posted before and played around with the Special Effects tools in a couple of different programs. 

Here are the originals:

And here are some special effects versions:

NEGATIVE

B+W INFRARED

POSTERIZATION

SOLARIZATION

What images do you have that you want to play with? Don't hold back, get them up on your computer and try it out! Be bold or be subtle. Any way you do it, it's all simply one more fun thing you can do in digital photography.

Fun With Scans

If you're like me, some of your favorite pics from "way back" are in albums. Cool, but, where are the negs?

A lot of my 'serious' stuff, and most of my non portrait pro work through the years is as chromes or slides. But, a lot of good photos came about as I was just playing or on vacation, loaded with colour neg film. 

Films such as Kodacolor and Fujicolor had excellent colour rendition and quite a lot of exposure latitude. So, I could leave my camera on an auto setting, or just use the Sunny 16 Rule and concentrate on having fun. I knew I would still get some nice pics from that approach.

But, after 30 years, where are those old negatives? I had been storing mine but a flood (and the mold later) took away a lot of those old film negatives. I still have some high quality prints, tho, so I scanned them.

Scan them yourself using your all-in-one from HP or Canon or whatever, and you're likely to get an editable jpeg file of about 2 to 5 MP to work with. Clean up the dust, either in a PS type program or using the scanner's dust settings. Of course, a high end scanner, a photo specific scanner, or a scanning service will give even better results, but any of us with an scanner of any kind can still play.

I found an old pic from 1979 of the Brooklyn Bridge that I did, so I started with that:

raw scan

This is from a low price Canon all-in-one. The original photo was shot on a Kodak Pony from the 1950s.

So, now we clean it up a bit. Straighten, adjust the faded print colours, etc... Since it's a jpeg of a print, I don't have a whole lot of info to work with (as I would with a RAW file or large/fine jpeg), but I had enough. Here is the retouched pic:

retouched

Have some old pics you want to share on Facebook? Feel like playing around to tweak your PhotoShop skills? Just like your old stuff and want to look at it on your computer/tablet/phone? Then, scan your old prints!

Here is some playing I did with this file, converting it to B & W:

Black & White

Enjoy!

I'm Married To A Model

I got to shoot for a banner highlighting the joys of dairy products, esp MILK!

They wanted a generic female getting milk. Yeay! I'm married to a female. Tho she's not generic, she still counts.

So, yes, we had to provide a Model Release and everything.

Yep, I'm married to a model.

Gamma!

One of my favorite technical exercises with film photography was reading the film's (or paper's) gamma and replotting how certain exposure and developing systems could adjust it.

Similar control is available to digital imagers. In your camera's tech specs is the dynamic range of the sensor at different ISOs. Raw and JPEG. You may have to go onto a tech support web site (fan based or manufacturer) to get some of the info. As many variables exist in digital as in film. Just different ways to express them.

 An understanding of what your camera equipment is doing is essential to being able to  craft the specifics of your photographic vision. Thankfully, today's processes make it pretty easy to accomplish this.

Here are some nice resources: 

Kodak download,

Adobe PDF

PetaPixel article

 

 

Photographic Services at Reasonable Prices

Marnie's Coupon-a-rama is partnered with Steve's Fine Finish Photography and SweetHark Crafts.

We do Portraits, Real Estate Photography, and Small Product Photography.

We have bags, greeting cards, and photo art available for sale.

Amazon Cloud Drive

Get ready for this. Amazon is offering a very low priced Cloud Drive service. And the limit is, are you sitting down? No Limit.

No Limit! 

My High ISO Test

I've been using a couple of Nikon APS-C format cameras for several years now. 

My newest is the consumer level model D3200. It's 18x24mm sensor has a pixel count of 24.1 meg. At regular ISO levels and in a variety of situations, it delivers some of the sharpest images I have ever seen in my own work. 

One of the things I had yet to try out, tho, was the high ISO mode. 

Old School and Digital Photography, These Things Are the Same

I grew up with cameras. Even before I could ride my bike without the training wheels on, I was already taking photos with my own camera.

Color, Fake Color, B&W with Color

Ever see those images that have most of the image as B&W with one or key elements in color? Or an image with almost unbelievable colors?

There was a technique back in film days, where we printed B&W and then hand colored certain elements. Now, we can do this digitally.

Some image manipulation programs programs allow you to paint in a color on a layer or an outlined area. Other programs allow you to desaturate all the colors except for what you want to be color. Check your programs help section or a tutorial to find out how to do this in your own program, several are very different from each other.

Even with the neat effect, the subject matter still has to fit the technique. Maybe lips and eyes for a portrait, rays of sunshine in a landscape, or a flower popping out from the background. Or even an old car in a cityscape. Get creative!

Using many of the same controls, we can enhance, or even change, colors selectively with a color image. Trees not yellow or red enough? Change it. Need a bluer sky, or even a different color sky? Change that, too.

How much depends on your vision for that image. You can keep it fairly realistic, or "interpret" it as you see fit.