Family, Photography and other misc news
With some images to finish off and a new version of Photoshop, I thought it was a good time to practice my selection editing and testing some of the improved features.
With the black dress and dark shadows this was a difficult selection. I sometimes wonder if instead of trying to get it right in camera it would be better to produce a flatter less contrasting image and do all of the effect in post production.
It was another weekend of tidying up the garden. Now that Lincolnshire County Council has closed the local tip to save money (wonder how much extra they have to spend on cleaning up fly tipping) its A bit of a fight now to get in and across Lincoln to the other tip.
On the Sunday we rested and had the parents round for the day.
Its been a little warmer recently as well so the Chickens have started to lay again after a short break, hope they do not think its summer or there in for a shock.
So a quiet weekend which was nice after the hectic and busy last few weeks.
After installing my Creative Cloud updates on Thursday, today it was time to have a little play.
It was the new reference view that interested me the most.
Trying to edit two photographs to look the same style and lighting can be difficult, even when you sync the develop settings from one image to the next you can often still get differences which are difficult to correct for.
While you can use loupe view for selected images (N shortcut key) or compare two images (C shortcut key) you can just view them, not edit them.
Now in the development mode you can access (if you have the toolbar showing) the reference mode by clicking on icon marked RA. Your selected photo appears on the right and you can drag and drop a photo from the film strip at the bottom to the left hand pane to act as your reference photo. You can then access the developer settings as normal with them only acting on the righthand photo, to make it look like your reference photograph.
While catching up on a few music tutorials on YouTube, look what popped up! A new update from Adobe, I updated the laptop and also my mobile devices. Not had chance to see whats new but I’ll try and find some time tomorrow to dig into the updates and see whats improved. The mobile on the phones like a major improvement.
I am not updating my desktop computer yet as I have some work to do and need to know I can rely on the Lightroom that is currently installed.
This months photo of the month I tried to pull off in camera, but did not quiet get the lighting on the models face right. It was close and I was sure that a bit of photoshop could bring it back.
I did the majority of the editing in Lightroom, then applied some skin softening via negative clarity; then I took it into Photoshop to sculpt the light. This turned out to be a mistake.
Its not a bad image but if you look at the models right arm on the left hand side of the photograph the transition from light to shadow just looks wrong and broken.
I was fairly sure it was because I softened the skin in the wrong order so I needed to process the image again. Lucky I had preserved the layers and it was a lot easier then I expected.
First I took the processed Lightroom image and cloned it, then found the skin softening control point and deleted it, this left all the other Lightroom processing but removed the skin softening. I then opened this into Photoshop and also opened the previous Photoshop image which still had the skin softening and looked broken.
It was fairly easy to duplicate my work, you can Command-Click on the selection layer and copy the selection over to the other document. You can also drag and drop the Curves layer and the masks, thus with just a few clicks I had recreated my Photoshop document but without the skin softening.
Saved then back to Lightroom for a touch of skin softening and a little sharpening plus vignette and you have the picture below and the picture of the month.
This weekend we spent a lot of time in the garden tidying up the east border which we have hardly touched since we moved into the property. A few weeks a go we did the majority of it but still had a couple of troublesome areas to sort.
It was cold but pleasant; we did invite Timmy the Greyhound out to help but even with his coat on he did not want to stay out and soon searched out his bed. With Timmy safely in the house it did mean we could let the chickens out of their run and give them the free run of the garden.
Last weekend was very busy with visits from all my brothers, meals out and we also went out to our local church where we heard a recital from the Lincoln Male Voice Choir.
They were very good and in the poor light of the church I took a quick panorama. Its amazing how good modern phones are at this kind of thing. The basic sub £200 compact camera is now quite outclassed and when you add to this the social media aspects of being able to edit and share direct from the phone, you can see why compact camera sales are falling.
The Leica M 28mm f/5.6 is now out and while its a beautiful lens if your after just one 28mm lens the f/2.8 is possibly the one to pick, the f/2 is faster but also a challenging lens and it does not play nice on none M cameras. If your interested in this as a second 28mm, or if 28mm is not a lens you usually use but fancy something a bit different then it may be worth considering.
The lens does not just vignette but the resolution changes giving an interesting feel to the images. A fun lens and I can see why people like it.