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: