Photoshop Elements 10 Depth of Field Effect

I tried out Photoshop Elements 10's depth of field effect on the shot above.  It's a big improvement over the original shot:

The original shot.  What's with the evil eye, lady?

This is one effect that I can't pull off in Lightroom.  To create the appearance of a shallow depth of field with PSE 10, I used the guided mode to walk me through the steps.  First, I used a selection brush to identify the subject.  Next I clicked on the button "add blur."  Finally I dragged a lever to determine the intensity of the effect.  It's a pretty simple process, although a similar result can probably be achieved using a gaussian blur with a layer mask.

Merging a Group Shot Manually

When you plan to merge a group photo and take the shot accordingly, the results of an automatic photomerge can look great.  But what if you weren't planning on merging the group shot?  In that case, merging a group shot manually may help you get better results.

Understanding Post-Processing by Mitchell Kanashkevich

cover of Understanding Post-Processing

 Besides Rick Sammon's Light It! app, another tutorial I read over the weekend and that I'm excited about is Mitchell Kanashkevich's ebook Understanding Post-Processing.  Whereas Rick Sammon's app is addressed toward beginners and novices, Mitchell's ebook is primarily for intermediate or advanced amateurs and even pros.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mitchell Kanashkevich is a travel photographer who's career as a pro started taking off not too long ago.  He's very modest about describing how he got there, but his gallery shows that his newfound success in his photographic career is no accident.

ABOUT THE EBOOK
Many times, I've taken photos of scenes that had gorgeous lighting to my mind's eye but I felt I was unable to recreate that beauty in the photo that I took.  When I saw Mitchell's photos, I thought that many of his final images glowed with the kind of light that I have sometimes seen and sought to capture.

Mitchell has two ebooks, Seeing the Light and this one, Understanding Post-Processing.  I thought to myself: I've seen beautiful light, so perhaps his first ebook is not the critical piece that I'm missing.  I figured I would probably get his first ebook eventually, but I thought I had more to learn from his second book.

Mitchell's ebook is written with Photoshop and Lightroom in mind, though the techniques can be translated to other software as well, including Photoshop Elements 9 (whew, thank goodness).  His book assumes that the reader already has a good working knowledge of postprocessing programs, so it's not for the postprocessing novice and is written pithily (really -- it's 37 pages).  If, for example, layer masking is new to you, you might find this book challenging.  Rather, his book is for a reader who knows the technical steps of using various features of postprocessing programs, but is looking for direction in applying those techniques to photos.  (That's exactly where I am right now.)

Mitchell first discusses briefly the main tools that he uses, then he goes through 5 case studies of how he used those tools to achieve his final results, step-by-step.  In describing his steps, Mitchell explains his thought process, and shows the settings he used together with screen captures of the edits.  See thumbnails of his book at his website here.  The case studies all follow a similar process, but each one emphasizes a particular tool, thus providing readers with a view of Mitchell's general postprocessing workflow, as well as a better understanding of how particular tools can be used.

How well does the book fulfill its promise?  If you're a photographer with the level of postprocessing skill for whom this ebook is intended, none of the techniques are truly novel or earth-shattering.  However, this guide afforded me a glimpse into a gifted photographer's thoughts as he works on his images, and walking through the images showed me not only how he realizes his creative vision, but more importantly for my purposes, gave me insight and direction for elevating my post-processing work.

Deep Blue Skies

Through correct exposure and simple postprocessing, it can be relatively easy to get deep blue skies even without a circular polarizer.

Overview: the key is make sure clouds aren't blown out when you capture the image.  In general, this will require a high shutter speed, a narrower aperture, and/or a lower ISO.  The exposure that will be dark enough to capture clouds will likely make the subject very dark.  We correct for this using flash to illuminate the subject.  After the image is captured, you can then adjust the blue channel's luminance to change the sky into a deeper blue.

For the shot above, here's what I did:
1. When I was choosing my exposure, I made sure clouds wouldn't be blown out.  I confirmed this by confirm this by looking at the LCD preview screen to watch out for blinking highlights.  As long as the clouds are not blinking, I knew I would later have the flexibility to change the color of the sky. I also knew I would be adding flash, therefore I immediately switched to my sync speed (1/500 in the case of the Nikon D70).

2. I added flash to illuminate the subject.  Rather than overpower the natural light (in this case, the sunlight, shining upon the subject's right shoulder), I wanted to respect it.  Flash was merely acting as fill light and I made sure to dial down the Flash Exposure Compensation to make the flash intensity look more natural.  I also used a handheld umbrella (with a Propet umbrella bracket) to soften the light - mimicking the softness of shade on the subject.

Here's how the shot looked, straight out of the camera.

3. In Lightroom, after I did the usual tonal adjustments, I went to the HSL menu in the Develop module and selected Luminance.  I clicked on the Targeted Adjustment tool (the one that looks like a little bullseye).  I clicked on any part of the blue sky, then dragged down the cursor.  The Targeted Adjustment selected the correct proportion of color channels (Blue and Aqua in this case) to change the color of the sky.  What I find cool is that because it affects the entire image, even reflections are adjusted (check out the water below).

In other postprocessing apps, I think you can get the same effect by adjusting color channels, though you may have to do some trial and error.

4.  I chose "Edit in... Photoshop Elements" and used content-aware spot-healing to get rid of the junk in the background.

5. Back in Lightroom, I added a slight vignette to complete the image.

Note: the first step here - getting the right exposure is essential.  In this shot, some parts of the clouds were blown out:

When I adjusted the skies, the result didn't look as convincing:

Anyway, here's another example of this technique.  This one was interesting to me, because I was able to edit it in literally just two or three minutes, using the content-aware spot-healing tool of Photoshop Elements 9.

For comparison, the original shot looked like this:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 9: CS5 Content-Aware Fill for the Masses?

When Photoshop CS5 first came out, its headline feature was content-aware fill, which removed objects and filled gaps seemingly out of thin air, as if by magic.  In truth, careful cloning could have done the same but content-aware fill was a lot faster.  The only problem for me was Photoshop's exorbitant price tag.

At Photokina 2010, Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 9 with two major features: a souped-up spot healing brush (similar to content-aware fill) and photomerge styles (copying the 'style' of any photo and applying it to another photo).

Does the new spot healing brush work?  Take a look at the original version of the shot above:

The spot healing brush removed the light pole with a single stroke. Awesome!!!  I then refined the results further by additional applications of the spot healing brush and by cloning small areas.

As for the photomerge style, it was disappointing.  I couldn't get good results from it.  I'll continue to experiment with it.

Another new feature of PSE 9 is layer masks.  Finally!  Previous versions required workarounds and plug-ins.  Still no real curves adjustments though.  Or vibrance, or clarity (outside of the RAW lab).  I've gotten used to Corel Paintshop Photo Pro, and am a bit frustrated at the missing functions in PSE.

I'm nonetheless excited about the new content-aware fill "lite" of PSE 9, and I think it's a good enough reason for me to upgrade from PSE 8.  I'm hoping though that Paintshop will have a new version soon and that new version hopefully has an answer to content-aware fill.  Meanwhile, you may want to take advantage of a $20 rebate on PSE9, plus a $20 gift from Shutterfly.

Update: PSE 9 is available at Costco.com for $49.99 through 11/28/10 while supplies last!