Class Week 4: several new tools (part 1)

Unlike the previous two weeks, we learned a lot in Week 4. It is kind of funny -- I really took this class hoping to learn more about Adobe Camera Raw as well as general Photoshop Elements tips. I am not going to learn Raw at all from this class, but I am definitely learning some Photoshop tips -- but it turns out that now I am working in CS4. Despite my disappointment with week 3, I think overall the class is a pretty good deal for me, at this point in my life: meaning, really just starting out with my digital camera as well as having such limited time with little kids.

We learned so much in our Week 4 class that I had to write it down to make sure I didn't forget:

Edit-Transform-Distort -- used to straighten perspective when needed, e.g. a leaning window
Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur -- used to mimic the in-camera results with DoF (Depth of Field)
Select-Modify-Expand/Contract -- used to slightly adjust your selection, as needed. This is an alternative to feathering if you have a "halo"
The Crop Tool (really, we didn't need to cover this as a topic in class as far as I'm concerned, but I don't know that the other students felt this way. Shouldn't it be all about me?)

The most interesting to me was the Gaussian Blur. I can see that being pretty useful for me. I practiced on one photo that I took quite recently, of Elise during our little family egg hunt for Easter. She's standing in front of some bark chips, horribly ugly weed cloth, and our new wood fence. It's a photo I'd like to print for our family photo wall, actually, because it just seems a little different (in a good way) from the typical "look at my happy smile" portrait type photos that I usually take. I thought maybe adding some blur might make me happier with the overall photo.

Well, I am happier with the after photo, but this is far from final as far as my eventual printing is concerned. Not sure if "final" will be good enough to print. I need to be more judicious with the blur, and do a bit of some lightening/darkening work too. Perhaps a tiny bit of vignetting. I was definitely heavy handed with the background blurring in this photo because I think it's good to go heavy -- to really understand what you're getting -- and then ease up to where you actually want it. I didn't ease up enough, however, with the blurring. It's especially glaring (to me) around the Easter basket handle.

Before:


After:


If I have time, I will add more posts on Week 4 to address the other new tools I learned.

Class Week 3: more of week 1&2, emphasis on specular highlights

I was rather disenchanted (to put it nicely) with Week 3 of my "Digital Darkroom" class. We did not learn any new tools and a certain snobby little student (... me) felt that this particular class was basically wasting time. All we did in class was more selections, more cloning, more brightening/darkening and contrasting. Sigh. Practice is good, yes. But, I need SOMETHING new to keep me interested.

I also had Words at one point with the teacher. He started to talk to us about Layers (to manage our cloning and selections that we adjusted) and I eagerly latched onto this. I am ALL about organizing my work. Well, I am working in CS4, and he is in CS3. The directions he gave about cloning from our layers were not working for me. I was getting very frustrated with the directions not working. He, on the other hand, was getting very frustrated that I was so focused on LAYERS, and wanted me to "just forget about the layers" and do the actual exercise. At any rate, after a couple rounds of frustrated conversation, he said I was being "too left brained, just try to use your right brain and work with the photo and not the layers." That made me mad.

I do like the instructor, and feel I can learn a lot from him. There is definitely a clash of philosophies, though. The instructor is teaching us how to view imperfections and then enhance photos using an available tool, whereas I am looking to learn how to use Elements or Photoshop. Both are worthy goals and not necessarily at odds with each other, but they are very different approaches.

At any rate, I did walk away from the class feeling like I had a valuable takeaway. He is definitely teaching me to see a photo from the perspective of printing, and more so, from the perspective of enlargement printing. One of our exercises was to remove "specular highlights" from a photograph. Specular highlights are the bright points of light that reflect back from the curve of an object. In this particular example, the subject was standing in front of a bush in the sunlight. Many of the leaves had a tiny point of bright white light in the middle, where the sun reflected to the camera.

The teacher pointed out that this is nothing, really, in a 4"x6" print. It is, however, a severe flaw in a larger print, such as 20"x30". Each tiny point of light can be the size of a dime when enlarged, and that is very distracting. I had never thought of that. It is good for me to develop this eye, as I would like to start enlarging and printing some photos to decorate our house.

So, here is a picture of Elise at the Jamison fountain last summer. I didn't have the patience to remove all of the "specks", but made a good faith effort to improve the photo overall. I removed most of the specular highlights, as well as darkened the greenery some, and lightened Elise (where she was in the shadows) just a tad. In the class, we spent about 5-10 minutes removing specular highlights from the exercise photo. He said when he actually removed the specular highlights from that photo for 20x30 printing, it took a whole HOUR. Wow.

Before:


After:


Note: the removal of specular highlights is MUCH easier to see if you click on the first photograph, which takes you to flickr. Then click the "<-- Newer" link to switch to the "After" photo.

Note 2: I do not actually think this is a good candidate photo for enlargement. It just serves the purpose of the specular highlight removal exercise.

Class Week 2: more of week 1, plus the clone tool

I was uninspired by Week 2's class.  We spent the majority of class doing what we had already done in Week 1: selecting, lightening, brightening.  I am hot-to-trot to learn new stuff.  I do see the value in practice, but we can practice on our own time.  The situations were each new, of course, but I felt like I didn't need to be walked through those situations in a classroom setting.  Oh well, the class is not just about me, I know.  At the end of the class, we did (finally) move onto a new tool, the Clone tool.  We used it primarily to erase errant items from photos (clearly it could have many other uses, too).  I was a bit surprised, as I have always heard about other people using the Spot Healing Brush to remove things from images.  Of course, I guess it depends on the nature of what you want to erase -- the object to be erased and the adjacent parts in the photo.

Despite my disappointment with the actual hard content of the class, we passed the time pleasantly and heard lots of good photography stories.

Some notes:

• There is no class syllabus.  He tailors each class to the participants of that class. pfft.
• I asked specifically about camera RAW content in the class and he said "no camera raw."  Major boo!  He said that is usually covered in his Advanced Photoshop class.  I felt like he was a tad annoyed that I asked the question -- as if somehow I am the difficult, over-eager student.  It is probably my imagination.
• In editing all of our practice images, he mentioned the year that he worked with Ansel Adams... I had known about that going in the class, so it was not a huge surprise.  At any rate, they would go on photography jaunts and sit in front of a scene and ask the other: "what do you see?"  He and Ansel never saw the same stuff.  For example, he would be enchanted with the way that the mountain tops disappeared into the clouds in the sky.  Ansel would be enchanted with some part of the field/lake underneath.  The instructor said he learned a lot in those discussions, seeing through the eyes of another photographer.  It sounded like an interesting exercise.
• At one point in the class, he asked what color light is cast on a sunny day.  I was so embarrassed that I did not know.  I guessed "a warm light?" (because hey, it's a warm day) and the correct answer was a blueish light.  It makes sense when you think about it -- the sky is so blue (from the ocean), with light bouncing all around, that it's like a giant blue lamp over the world.
• We talked about how the eye naturally travels to the lightest/whitest parts of a photo.  When I heard this, my response was "of course", but he then showed us a few samples that were enlightening (punny).  There were background areas (sky, buildings, etc) where the whiteness really distracted and thus impacted the overall composition of the photo.  In one of the photos, none of us could initially pick out what was wrong with the photo.  When he told us, none of us could see anything but a glaringly white small building in the background.  We did some exercises on these photos to lighten/darken various parts, directing the viewer's eye to what he (the photographer) remembered from the scene.
• He talked about "keeping the histogram in the camera" meaning, you generally want to expose your picture to retain definition in your lightest areas. You can always go back to lighten the dark areas, or darken the light areas, but if there is no detail at all in the area, then it's hard to do anything with it.  Interestingly, he said it is better to get to know your camera through practice, versus relying on your LCD to indicate the blown out areas.  The LCD's indication of blowouts isn't always right.  I have never been overly sensitive to blow outs (though I should), so this will take a lot of work to learn the realistic blowout thresholds of my camera.
• I realized that different monitors really do look so VERY different.  All four of us would open the same unedited photo and see such vastly different colors and contrasts.  It was hard to say which screens were "better" than the others -- they were all just so different.  It's startling to see, with such clarity, that you edit photos to look good on your screen and it could look so very different on another screen.
• I did get cs4 from the other student for $50.  I have yet to install it, however.  I should have installed it and used it for this class' homework.
• I asked the instructor if he photoshops all of his photos.  I expected him to answer something poetic about how the best photos do not need photoshop.  Instead, he answered, he photoshops almost everything!  He said when you get to be an expert in the tool, it is rare to look at a photo and feel that it perfectly captures what you saw.  
• He said even in real life, you start to really see differences in hues of light, and to understand the adjustments that your brain is making on the fly.  He apparently filters his real life through photoshop, in much the same way that my friends and I joke about how we view life as what would make for good blog material.  He can detach enough to view the actual light temperature of a situation, and turn off the natural adjustments made by his brain.
• He rode the bus into town one day and said he spent the time by watching the people on the bus, looking at their actual skin tone versus how it would appear through a camera, and he thought about what colors he would add to them to bring them into normal ranges.  For example, one lady was standing next to a huge backlit blue sign which completely affected her skin tone.  He passed his time thinking "hmm, I think adding a little magenta would make you just right."  Before he knew it, he had arrived at his destination. :)

Technically for this class, I felt like I should do three things for homework: more lightening/darkening with more selection tools; the clone tool; and get to know my camera's histogram better [and see how well my camera really knows what highlights are getting blown out].

I'm starting with the clone tool, then if I have time this week, I'm interested to understand my camera's histogram better.  I don't know that I'd use it regularly, but I feel ill-equipped in being, at best, only vaguely familiar with it.  I should also use the selection tools more, because I'm far from being skilled with them, but I'm just not too motivated to work on that again.

Here's my practice with clone tool.  I took a picture of this church in Loreto Bay, Mexico, getting the crisp outline of the top against the sky.  When I got home, I was so surprised to see a big thick black flagpole in the picture.  There's also a power line in the picture -- but that sudden appearance did not surprise me (partly because it's really outside the important part of the photo, partly because I know that my mind really filters out power lines a little too well).  The flagpole is HUGE, however -- how did I ever miss that??  

So again, on the "photoshop is supposed to make the picture look like what you actually saw" approach, I present my first exercise with the Clone Tool:

Before:

After:

Portland Waterfront, Cherry Blossoms

Portland Waterfront, Cherry Blossoms, a set on Flickr.

All the people I know who read this blog, will have already seen these pictures via facebook or flickr. That said, I'm blogging this set because I like putting things on my rhgphoto blog, sparse as it is.

Class Week 1: selecting, brightness, contrast

The primary lesson of week 1 in my "Digital Darkroom" class was to learn how to select just a portion of a picture. We used all the different selection tools, including the various lassos and the quick select. This took the bulk of the class time. In the last half hour, we moved onto actually doing something with our selected portions. In this case, we went into the Layers palette and adjusted brightness and contrast. I practiced this on two different photos from our recent vacation. The first photo is of my cousin Nga, walking my son Nolan, along the edge of Laguna Beach.

 
Before

After: I lightened her face and hands, and Nolan's entire body.
(Funny, the edit seemed a lot more obvious when I was doing it, but now it's hard to tell the difference.)

One of the points that my instructor has made: Photoshop is used to make the photos look like what you actually saw. In other words, the way the camera sees a scene versus the way the human eye + brain sees the same scene, can be entirely different. Colors can be different, even objects can be different (how many times are we surprised to see a power line running across our picture? Our brain has filtered it out.)

With that perspective, I chose to edit this next photo, of Nolan chasing a spry little bird on the beach...

Before

After: I lightened the bird

Digital Darkroom Class: Intro

I started a "Digital Darkroom" class last night. It runs for 10 weeks and is held at a local arts center. It is taught by a local photographer, Peter Schutte, a Dutchman who makes his daily living from selling his photography, as well as the teaching of photography.

Each week we bring our laptops to class and learn more new tools in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. He wants us to "do homework" each week by practicing what we learned. I hope to do one blog post a week with a brief recap of the material covered in the class, showing one example of the lesson using my own personal stock of photos. I don't know if I can follow through with that every week, but it's the goal. I have a lot that I want to get done in the next four months before baby#3 arrives, and two nights per week allocated to photography seems like too much (one night for the class, one night to practice and then blog the results). I have resolved that I will not beat myself up if it just doesn't happen for a given week. :)

Other random thoughts:

• I think $185 for a ten-week class, where each class is 2.5h, is a fantastic value.  He teaches this same class out of his own home in NE Portland for $220 tuition.
• There are only three students in the class, and the other two are not "dumb."  They know how to use a mouse and other basics.  One of them even borders on "savvy."
• The class moves a little slowly for me, but these types of classes ALWAYS move way too slowly for me.
• The teacher didn't give us a syllabus or any type of overview for what the ten weeks of class will cover. I would like to know that, just to wrap my head around it.
• Mostly, I want to know if we are going to get down and dirty with RAW processing.  I guess I could just ask him!
• He is very patient.  I don't necessarily need a patient teacher (see bullet point #3).
• That said, he is very experienced, a good communicator, and garners my attention for a good 85-90% of the class (what can I say, I'm a daydreamer), so I'm happy with the teacher.
• Each week, we bring our laptops to class, to practice everything hands-on.  He has a CD of prepared practice images that he handed out to us.  The class is 85% hands on, 5% lecture, 10% story telling. It's a good mix, for me.
• We have two people using Macs (teacher, student A) and two using Windows (me, student B).  We have two people using Photoshop CS (teacher, student B) and two using Elements (me, student A).
• That said, student B is able to download 3 extra copies of Photoshop CS (version 4), and offered to sell it each to me and student A for $50 each.  So, we will all be using the same software, and score, I get a cheap copy of CS!  (even if it's not the latest version).  The teacher says the curves tool in CS is WAY better than the similar methods in Elements (whatever that means), so he is pleased we can all just work in CS.

This ends my initial blog post to describe the course.  Hopefully in the next week I will be able to do a blog post with the first homework: selecting a specific area of a photo and adjusting brightness/contrast for that selection.

Note to Amber: the first thing he went over in class is "how to get your file to open up in Photoshop for editing." I mentioned "yeah, one of my friends warned me that she had been confused by that" and he said "yeah, that happens to everyone.  It's so confusing."  You would think a basic operation like opening a file into the right program wouldn't be so mysterious!