Here is the before:

Before removing color cast (see under her chin!)

And now the after:

After removing the green color cast

The great thing about my technique to do this is that it is QUICK and you dont’ have to be very precise. I’m sure there are many other ways to do it, but this works great for me, which is why I’m sharing it with you!

Let me know if you have any questions! :)

I realized after recording this that I left a couple of important things out.. you can not use content aware scale on an image that is your locked background layer. You have to have the image you are trying to stretch be a layer on TOP of your background layer.  The easiest way to achieve this is if you create a PSD file that is the size that you want to stretch the canvas to and then copy or duplicate the image into that document as a separate layer. Then you are good to go to scale that image to the size of your canvas!

Otherwise if you are just starting from your image as a jpg or RAW file you can go to canvas size and make your canvas larger. Then, go to your background layer and use the marquis tool to select the original size of your image (i.e. leaving off the white or black fill that is now around it) and then copy and paste that into a new photoshop layer before you scale it.

Let me know if you have any questions!

We’ve never delved into channels before here (except for channels adjustment layer tweaks) and truth be told I’d forgotten what a useful tool channels are to have in your photoshop arsenal until recently!

Here we cover how to make adjustments to spot areas that lack detail and also how you can use the information from one channel to spruce up your black and white conversions.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Like many things in post processing, there is an easy way and a hard way.. the easy way usually involves parting with some hard earned cash and this is no exception!  On freckly/sun damaged skin like mine, I could spend hours using the spot healing brush tool… or I can run a photoshop plugin called Portraiture and be done in about 2 seconds!

To demonstrate, I am going to use the images of me modeling my mom’s jewelry for her new etsy shop because it strikes me as a bit unkind to use a female client of mine to demonstrate someone who needs skin retouching!

Ok, so here is the before picture (can you see me cringing and covering my eyes with my hand??)

and here is after using portraiture on a separate layer and reducing the opacity to about 75%

Pretty fantastic no?

What portraiture does is look for skin colored areas and smooths them and then adds that adjustment to a new layer so you can reduce the opacity and erase back areas that you don’t want smoothed.  You can completely tweak to taste and necessity.   Like most things, moderation is key: I see some people totally abusing portraiture to the point where children look like plastic dolls – I don’t recommend going for that look, it’s rather creepy actually!

To further “perfect” this portrait I would use the patch or the spot healing brush tool to get rid of that deep furrow above my brow – (I think botox may be in my future!)  I went over that technique in the second part of my newborn processing tutorial so I’m not going to repeat myself, but if you aren’t familiar with these tools, it’s totally worth the time to play around with them.

Lastly,  close up portraits really require a subtle hand when output sharpening.  I usually sharpen all of my images for web viewing using Unsharp Mask at an amount of 100-400% and a radius of .2 and a threshold of 0 and adjust to taste.  But global sharpening can do nasty things to skin, particularly when you’ve taken so much time and care to smooth the skin out -why introduce harshness in the sharpening step?

That’s where edge sharpening comes in.

Jodi from MCP actions has an EXCELLENT edge sharpening tutorial and FREE action on her blog. I highly, highly recommend it.

So, here’s the final result, portraiture, some “healing brush” and some edge sharpening which mostly applied it to my eyes, lips  and some bits of hair:

One more thing: Imagenomic offers a free 15 day trial of Portraiture so you can try it before you decide if it’s worth the $200. I apologize in advance for adding something more to your photography wishlist, but hey, I also linked you to an awesome free action right?

ETA: After the publishing of this post, the kind folks at imagenomic offered to give becoming-mom readers a coupon for 15% off any of their products! Use the code MOMMYBLOG. hmmm, how appropriate!  I am not receiving any financial incentive for your purchases at imagenomic, just in case you were wondering ;)

So we will cover how to go from blue blotchy baby:

to gorgeous warm creamy skin!

This video is in two parts because it’s a bit long.. the first part covers how I use a digital grey kard while I’m shooting , how I use it to adjust white balance in LR (or ACR it would be the same) and then how I use an inverted highlights selection to brighten everything but the highlights:

The second part covers using the spot healing and patch tools to get rid of blotches and blemishes and also how to use a levels adjustment layer mask to get rid of any remaining dark magenta areas:

Let me know if you have any questions!

PS, I did this on a different monitor that hasn’t been calibrated for quite some time, so my skin tones may be look  a tad off, but the principles are the same :)

How to use Lightroom (or ACR) to adjust the white balance of your image and then how to check and finetune it in Photoshop. This tutorial uses the CMY % method of correct skintones that I first learned about in Katrin Eismann’s book, but she credits Dan Margules for the theory.

It sates that the C value should be 30-50% of the M value, and that the Y value should be 1/5-1/3 higher than the M value.

BTW, C=Cyan, Y=Yellow and M=Magenta!

In this tutorial I eyeball the correct WB and then check my percentages using the info palette in PS. I then use a color balance adjustment layer to tweak as necessary.

You can see from the brief bit of playing I do with the color balance controls how much easier it is to get in the ballpark with just those two WB sliders.

As always, post any questions in the comments.

xoxo

PS, big thank you to Amanda from the Clickin Moms forum for allowing me to use her gorgeous photo for this tutorial! :)

PPS: IMPORTANT! In the like 5 minutes since I posted this I have been involved in a discussion where it was pointed out that Katrin Eismann’s #s might be a little heavy on the cyan and that the correct ration is actually C= 1/5-1/3 of the M value.  I didn’t want to rerecord the tutorial,  but the same technique applies, you would just warm up the image even further in LR or ACR than I did until that C value dropped even more.

So you MAY have noticed that your DSLR has the option to shoot in just jpg (in a variety of sizes) or RAW + jpg.  This is probably all foreign to you if you just upgraded from a point and shoot that only shoots jpg.   Almost ALL serious photographers shoot in RAW and here’s two big reasons why:

1) It’s a non-destructive image format – you can make many more exposure, color, saturation and White Balance (hereafter I will refer to this as “WB” in this post) without degrading or “adding noise” (pixelation) to your images

2) Because of the above, It can save your butt.

Let’s start with #1: Non destructive (or less destructive) image editing.

Jpgs are a compressed file format, RAW is not. For this reason the RAW files are MUCH bigger than jpg files, which is incidentally also the only downside to shooting RAW: diskspace!

So when you edit a jpg in photoshop, you are already working with less information than the RAW file. Which may be ok if all you are doing is a slight color balance and sharpening or something, but if you really need to make some more blunt adjustments like increasing or decreasing exposure, you will start to notice that your images look grainy or “noisy” as we say in photography lingo.  But make those same changes in RAW and you will notice much less destruction to your image quality. Now, I should mention that if you wildly under or overexpose an image no file format in the world is going to save you, but by now you know how to shoot in manual mode and how to read your camera’s histogram so you know you are exposing properly. Right? ;)

But even when you metered and read your histogram correctly and exposed correctly for your subject, you may still have overexposed to the point of losing details of small bright areas of your image (known as “clipping” the highlights).

Using a RAW image editing program like Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Lightroom allows you to use the “recovery slider” to tame those bright spots (within reason) so that they won’t print as pure white, which is to say those areas wouldn’t have any printing at all because printers can’t print in the absence of color and your prints will look crappy.

So that’s the “save your butt” part.  What about other advantages?

Ok, here’s another big one: Ease of White Balance (WB) adjustment.

What is WB? WB is essentially setting the correct color temperature so that your image neither appears too blue, too yellow, to magenta or too green.  If you leave your camera in auto WB mode (which all cameras are set to by default) your camera will try to guess at the correct WB  for you, but it will guess wrong most of the time.. quite wrong actually.

Here’s an example, correct WB on the left, SOOC (straight out of camera) to the right:

Notice the ghastly bluish cast over the whole image on the right? Zombie baby!

In fact, when I look at the images of photographers who are just starting out, the incorrect WB stands out almost more than any other technical deficiency… almost uniformly their images look too blue (blue babies = SCARY!)

Now, to be clear: RAW will not magically set the right WB for you unless you set custom WB in camera or use a digital gray kard (subject of a future post!), but it makes it a whole lot easier to adjust than if you just try to find the correct color from within photoshop, and it does this with the temperature (yellow/blue ) and tint (green/magenta) sliders.

Photoshop has color balance layers, channel, curves and levels layers with a gazillion adjustments you could do to each (and you may even need to tweak these after you find the correct WB level in RAW) but trust me when I tell you it is soooo much easier to get this correct in RAW vs in photoshop.

The difference from the right image to the left, was the adjustment of just those top two bars (temperature and tint) in Lightroom:

and here are the same controls but in ACR which is technically a free “plug-in” for Photoshop for handling RAW files that you can download from Adobe for free:

You will notice that there are lots of other adjustments you can make in both LR and ACR, and all of those before you even OPEN the image in photoshop! The point of this goes back to what I said about less destructive image editing: If you make the majority of your adjustments to the RAW file itself before opening it and doing final tweaks in Photoshop, you will be preserving the best possible image quality.

So, that’s the upside to shooting in RAW, what are the downsides?

Well, I’ve already mentioned the biggie: filesize.  My mark II RAW files are 27.5 MB EACH! Which would explain why I just had to buy a terrabyte External hard drive. (The RAW files from the Rebel are about half that size – but still way more than the highest quality jpg.)

The other is that unedited, the jpg files that your camera produces will actually look BETTER than the equivalent RAW file. That is because the camera manufacturers have built all sorts of magical formulas for making that jpg look great including S curve, sharpening, saturation and other neat little adjustments.  So the image in RAW (depending onyour settings) can look a little less sharp, a little less contrasty and you will have to add those back in to taste, but the point is that YOU will be making those decisions and not letting the camera make them for you.

In summary, shooting in RAW is definitely not for everyone – if you do very little post processing tweaking to your files, don’t batch process, are uncalibrated and don’t really want to – you probably are just fine sticking with JPG.

But if you want to do more post processing and still maintain the highest image quality and control over the final output – go get yourself a huge external hard drive and start shooting in RAW! Chances are, you’ll never go back…

Here is a common scenario:

You get a new DSLR and you immediately realize that when you use program mode with your kit lens, the camera wants to use the flash all the time but your pictures look god awful, probably not much better than your point and shoot! So you do some research and maybe come across a post like mine that tells you to NEVER us your pop up flash. Aha!

So you set your DSLR to force the flash off. Now, you are maybe still in program or even AV or TV mode but you notice that your images are always blurry.. so you do some more research and learn that you need to upgrade that crappy kit lens to something like the universal first upgrade lens the 50mm 1.8 (nifty fifty).

Now, you can open up your aperture all the way to 1.8 and let TONS of light in.. yippee!! And at first you are so happy, because you are getting tons of beautiful lens blur (bokeh) and your images are staring to look more artistic. Awesome. But then, as your eye starts to become more trained you notice that your images look “soft” if not downright out of focus compared to the images of photographers you admire.. but you don’t know why.

Sound familiar? Yeah, to me too, because this was ME a year ago!

There are TWO main reasons (Ok actually three in my case, but the last one is more rare) that you might not be nailing focus:

1) Focusing technique
2) Settings (aperture/depth of field and shutterspeed)
3) A problem with the lens itself – again, rare but it happened to me so I want to include it.

Let’s tackle them in order..

Focusing Technique – Yes, there are actually techniques to achieving good focus!

The first focus rule is that you should always (except for certain artistic situations) strive to have the subjects eyes in focus, so you should use the forward eye as your focal point. Ok, that one is easy, but I have to say it because I didn’t realize this when I first started shooting!

Now for the more technique part: There are TWO methods to focusing, one is called “focus recompose” and the other is to toggle the focal points on your DSLR to manually choose the focal point closest to the eye of your subject in the composition in front of you.

There are actually two other types of focusing, one where your camera automatically tries to select one or two focus points FOR you and also AI Servo mode, but I don’t recommend these modes because we are striving to learn and control our focus, not let the camera make it’s own decisions. So for the purpose of this post, lets assume and/or turn our focus mode to use manual focus select.  To do this, you need to press the autofocus select button -  on canons it’s the button circled on the top right and then use the joystick arrows to move the focus points around on the rebel models:

OR my preferred method which is to use the wheel that is just behind the shutter to toggle:

Ok, so lets put this to practical use..

So assume I want this composition for my image:

Notice his right eye is closest to me and the one that I want to focus on:

So I want to use that focus point that is closest to his front eye by manually toggling my focus points to get to the one closest to where I want to focus which is what I actually did to take this image.

Now, you can imagine the downside to this is that if you want to change your composition around a lot, it can take a bit of time to keep toggling these points.  So that’s where the “center recompose” method comes in more handy.

To focus recompose you set the center point as your focus point, then you move the center point to the area you want to focus on, lock focus and then recompose.

So for example  to compose this image I would move my camera over Jasper’s face until the center point fell on his forward eye.  I would depress the shutter halfway to lock focus and then without lifting my finger I would move the camera back to compose the image the way that I wanted even and only THEN would I press the shutter all the way down to take the picture.   For you visual learners, here is a youtube video demonstrating that method.

There is a rather large caveat when using the focus recompose method which is that when you are shooting with a VERY narrow depth of field it can actually cause focus errors because even that little shift to his eye and back will cause your focus to be off.   There is an entire web page devoted to “why focus recompose sucks” and it is true in certain situations.   Those situations are when you have a really narrow Depth of Field (DOF) caused by your settings and distance to subject (and also your lens’ focal length.)

Narrow DOF is a bit beyond the scope of what I want to discuss today (click here to read about it on wikipedia), but as a general rule the closer you are to your subject and the wider your aperture, the shallower your DOF will be and in THOSE situations, even the slight shift of your camera angle while focus recomposing can actually make the focus fall somewhere other than where you intended.

Furthermore, if your DOF is extremely shallow and your subjects eyes are not squarely facing you on the same plane, it’s likely that even if you do get the front eye in focus, the back eye will not be because it is further back or on a different focal plane.  This is why shooting at wide open apertures when subjects are close to you is very tricky for nailing focus, and one of the reasons that people start to notice they have focus issues when upgrading to the nifty fifty..

After all, with the kit lens you can’t go wider than say 4.0, which means that your DOF is narrow enough that you won’t have these issues! (You may have OTHER issues, but that’s a whole other matter :)

Here’s an example:

Looks ok small, but when you look at it larger, you can see that his back (left) eye is softer focus than the right eye. This is because I was really close to my subject and I was shooting at 2.8.  To get both of his eyes in focus I would need to have either backed up, closed up my aperture a bit or positioned him so that his eyes were both the same distance/angle from my camera lens (yea right!).

So don’t be like me when I first got it and dial your nifty fifty all the way open to 1.8 JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN when  3.2 or even 3.5 will still give you enough light and lovely bokeh and a lot more wiggle room in regards to focus.

Which brings me to Part II: Settings!

Settings are extremely important as you can tell from the above few paragraphs, and often the aperture is too wide open, but even MORE likely is that your shutter speed is not fast enough. Well, I shouldn’t say that it’s more likely, what you really need to do is examine your images and see if the entire image is soft or if there is an area in focus but just not the area you WANT to be in focus! If the area in focus is not the one that you intended, chances are you are dealing with too shallow DOF or a focus technique issue.  If your entire image is out of focus (OOF) or soft then most likely you are not using a high enough shutterspeed to freeze the action of your quick moving toddler!

The general rule is to double your focal length with shutterspeed.. so if I am using a 50mm lens, I need AT LEAST a shutterspeed over 1/100, but for babies you really need much more than that because I think that rule was written with cooperative adults in mind!

If you had all the light in the world (or are using a speedlite),  you would be able to keep your shutterspeed always up over 1/200th or so. But we all know that doesn’t always happen, so what are your options? You can sacrifice either your aperture opening wider OR crank up your ISO to let in the extra light to be able to keep your shutterspeed high.  Now before reading this longwinded neverending post, you MIGHT (like I used to) always choose to open your aperture all the way to 1.8, but now you know that you will have a hell of a time getting perfect focus at 1.8, so you might want to compromise and go a little less wide on the aperture and compensate with raising your ISO.  Yes, high ISO produces noise on entry level DSLRs (this is one of the main reasons I upgraded to the mark II) but you can run your images through free community versions of noise reduction software like noiseware and neatimage.

I used to always err on the side of lowering my shutterspeed because I HATED the noise I got on my rebel at 400 ISO or above, but then I realized that motion blur was ruining my images a lot more consistently then too much noise – there is no software that can take your OOF image and make it in focus!

All of what I just said in the previous few paragraphs assumes that you are shooting in manual mode. Why? Because if you are shooting in P, AV or TV modes you will not have the kind of control you need to MAKE the correct trade offs and decisions about where you have room to let more light in, SS, aperture or ISO.   Ask me how I know this is not the right thing to do…

Ok, I’ll show you!

Here is an image I shot of baby Jasper:

Totally OOF. And now that I look at the settings in Flickr it’s very obvious why! I was shooting in AV (aperture priority) mode with my aperture at 2.8 – ok, fine, but the necessary shutterspeed that the camera gave me for the amount of light I had in the room was 1/15th!!! I should have shot in manual mode, opened my ap up a little bit more AND either raised my ISO even higher or better yet, found more light so I could just raise the shutterspeed with out having to up the ISO higher than 800.

And now the last possible (rare, but not as rare as it should be) reason you are not nailing focus well..

A defective lens

After months of not getting my focus correct, I noticed that almost ALL of my images were not focusing where I wanted them to, even when I DID toggle the focus points and use a wide enough aperture and fast enough shutterspeed.  These images look something like this one:

A blurry subject which is where I wanted my focus to fall, but an IN focus area (notice that the zebra stripes in the left foreground are perfectly sharp). Now, this can happen in some images, but this was happening in ALL of my images, even when I did use a narrower aperture or a high shutterspeed. At this point, I started to suspect that there might be something wrong with my lens.

To make a long story short, I STILL wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t my fault even after I sent it in to Canon to be serviced, so felt very vindicated when the lens returned from Canon and they confirmed that it did indeed need to be adjusted.

Like I said, this sort of thing is rare for a new lens, so is definitely not the first thing you should suspect if you have focusing issues, but if you really focus on technique and settings and still see no improvement after giving yourself ample time to master these skills, you might start investigating this option.

Ok, now – any questions?? ;)

This is something I just learned how to do.. select JUST the highlights of an image so you can invert the selection and brighten everything BUT the highlights. Why is this useful? Because so often there are  some areas on the subjects face that are already close to clipping (a value of 255) particularly in the red channel but you still want to brighten or add contrast.. this is one method of doing just that.

I also show how you can use a selective color layer to just add blacks to give a further effect of adding contrast without effecting bright areas.

The before and after difference are subtle but trust me this is a useful thing to know..

Watch it below or click here to see a larger version. Have a great weekend!

Here is the video:

And here are some excellent resources to read up more on histograms:

A thread on good exposure based on histograms and what is known as “shooting to the right” (getting as much light as possible without clipping the highlights).  This is a link to I Love Photography which you need to register (free) to become a member to read.  It’s an excellent site and you won’t regret joining and you’ll learn tons!

“Understanding Histograms” which goes much more in depth than my little lame drawing in the video.. as you can see, mine was a BROAD generalization, there are many different types of histograms.

Happy shooting, and have a great weekend!!