Have you got a photo with a nice motive but a dull exposure? Don’t worry, with just a few adjustment in Photoshop you can transform any boring photo to look both stylish and arty.
Take this photo for example featuring some lovely looking walnuts just picked from the tree, despite the nice looking nuts the photo per say looks dull and in need of contrast. So this is what I did to enhance it:
- Open up your photograph in photoshop and duplicate the layer, this is done by right clicking on your background layer in the layer box and choose duplicate. (If you can’t see your layer palette go to Window – Layers.)
- Choose the top layer and go to Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur and write 25 pixels in the Radius box, this makes the whole image blurry, great for the background but not quite what we wanted for the objects so…
- While having the blurred layer selected, find the button looking like this
in the layers palette, this should bring up a white box next to the blurry layer. - Pick a soft brush with black as your color and start painting the objects you want to be clear, in this image one of the walnuts was kept white ie. blurry, for more depth.
- Now, find the button looking like this
in your layer palette. Choose the black and white adjustment layer and press OK, and then choose Soft Light as your Blending Option (you’ll find this above the layers where it says “Normal”.) - When this is done, click again on and this time choose Gradient Map, click on the gradient box to choose a different one, I used the “purple, yellow” found in Harmonize 2 (this is done by clicking on the arrow button next to the box saying Presets), this will have a funny result on the image, but if you just change the opacity on the Gradient Map layer to around 40 % you’ll end up with a nice and warm tone on the photo.
- Last thing is to crank up the contrast, the best thing to do this is to play around with Levels, found again by pressing , used for this example is: 7, 1.07, 241.
That’s how easy it could be to turn any boring still life photography into nice looking art.
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An important thing to remember when studing photography is that there are no rights or wrongs. You should always follow your own style of taking photographs. The rule says: Once you know all the photo rules, it’s time to break them. So these tips on how to improve a portrait is only suppose to be viewed as a guide until you know hot to break free.
Following is a few tips on how to create a good looking portrait:
-Set your camera on a wide aperture (small f number) this give the model all the focus and can at the same time make the background look nicer, imagine taking a photo of your model with a lot of clutter in the background, this will make the model disappear in all the mess, but with a wide aperture the clutter will turn into colorful blobs which works really well on a photo.
-Choose a time of the day that will fit your needs, midday sun can give hard shadows while evenings bring warm tones and soft shadows this time also make it easier for your model to keep her/his eyes wide open since the sun is not too strong.
- Use reflectors to fill in some unwanted shadows, if you don’t have a reflector it’s fine to use a big peace of paper with the wanted color on, white/ gold/ silver etc.
- Play around with the framing and the composition of your model and his/hers surroundings, you can for example
fill the frame completely by going real close to the subject
play with the rule of thirds by breaking them
focus your lens on something less common in a portrait like the shoes, hands etc..
- Play with the angles, you are the photographer so start moving around your model and see what gives the best effect, this might also be a interesting moment to bring out other types of lenses if you’ve got some. Using a wide angle sometimes will make a great effect.
Photo taken by Vincent von Schnauzer
Photographing water is a great way to learn how your camera function, it lets you work with the two most important settings on your camera, the shutterspeed and the aperture.
If you want to achieve this soft water effect all you have to do is:
- Find your great location (next to some streaming water)
- Use a tripod
- Set your camera on a slow shutterspeed (this has to be played around with), this might be tricky to do if your enviroment is too bright and could lead to an overexposed photo. To solve this problem you could choose between a few different solutions: Set your aperture on a high number (=small aperture), use a ND filter over your lens, or simply choose a cloudy afternoon to take your photos.
- Start experimenting…
To get this cool looking star effect in your photos without using star filters only demand from you to:
Wait until it gets dark and then set your camera on the highest aperture number possible. Since it’s dark and the aperture is small you’ll need a very long shutter speed. So it will be impossible taking a photo like this using only your hands, easiest help tool to use would be a tripod.
This effect creates lovely looking photos and is a useful tip for espesially city-landscape photography.