Category Archives: digital editing

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super cool photoshop trick for better black and white digital images

June 16, 2008 – 6:35 pm

Last week I was on my way out the door to meet a friend for dinner, and I stumbled on a website while doing a search for another website to send to a photographer in an email I was composing to her about digital editing. It was so engrossing I ended up being late for dinner (and fell on the pavement on my way out in a rush- more on that later).

The ‘accidentally stumbled upon’ site had a tutorial about editing black and white images, something all digital photographers know can be challenging.

This tutorial wasn’t about how to convert a color image to a fancy black and white in one step, or create a processing action, or use filters or anything like that. It was about how to take your b/w images from good to “awesome!” using the very strange (and counterintuitive) process of selectively applying the saturate sponge to your image.

Example below of Duke:

Original, unedited file. (I prefer to say ‘SFTC’- straight from the camera, which to me is more natural than ‘SOOC’- straight out of [the] camera)

File converted to grayscale:

File after receiving the ‘magic treatment’

Let me explain. This so easy to do you won’t believe it. 

Here is what you do:

  1. Open your original, unedited image in photoshop (any version)
  2. Duplicate your background layer
  3. Convert the layer to grayscale using image-mode-grayscale
  4. When it asks you if you want to discard the color information, click yes. (be sure to save this new file as a copy!)
  5. Go to your sponge tool (it’s with the dodge and burn tools)
  6. Select a fairly large soft brush (350-500 pixels) in the preferences bar at the top
  7. Select ’saturate’ from the drop-down ‘mode’ menu
  8. For ‘flow’ select somewhere between 40-60% depending on how dark or light your image is (lower percentage for darker images; higher for lighter images). I used 52% for Duke above, which was a fairly overexposed image. 
  9. Start applying the saturate sponge to your image and watch the magic happen.

If this works for you the way it did for me you will be saying “wow……. WOW!” and wondering how in the world it does that. Apparently the process increases the local contrast in an image, in ways I don’t really understand. Note: I didn’t do anything extra to the shot of Duke above- no sharpening or levels or anything else- just exactly the steps listed above. 

To read more about this cool trick, check out the forensic photoshop blog post where I found the tutorial. 

Also, be sure to do a google search for ‘local contrast’. You can learn a lot about how the brain processes visuals. It’s really fascinating stuff!

LOVE this trick! It even fits in with my TMOL (two minutes or less) editing philosophy. Have fun with it all of you shutterbugs!

By Jamie 'Cowbelly' | Tagged , , , , | Comments (6)

Lovely Lily the Lab

May 8, 2008 – 4:33 am

Lily was one of the easiest dogs I have ever photographed. She is sweet, playful, adorable, fun-loving, patient, obedient, loving, smart, man you name it. I love her.

I knew the shoot was going to go well because the very first shot I took was exactly the kind of shot I was aiming for, only that shot was an accident because I hadn’t adjusted the settings yet. It held the perfect settings for the high-key shots I was really hoping to get during our shoot. Call it Serendipity.







the ‘parents shot’. Awww…

Lily is like a blonde Samson. Can’t you just picture the two of them as boyfriend and girlfriend? Totally…







More high-key shots. These next handful were done digitally, meaning in photoshop. The series after those were done manually- meaning- in the camera. The eyes are cool in the digitally processed images, but I met Lily and I know her eyes don’t look like that so I prefer the ‘natural’ ones best. Looks more like ‘her’.










The ‘naturally taken’ high-key shots.




And, of course, no Cowbelly shoot is complete without the blue sky shots. (I told you I’m obsessed.)






Hope you enjoyed Lily. I LOVE HER!!

By doggirlseattle | Also posted in Private client shoots, seattle cat photography | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

new black and white

May 8, 2008 – 2:56 am

I take almost all of my shots in color, then convert to black and white in photoshop. After years of using the same conversion, I decided today while converting images for a client that it needs some revamping. What do you think?

New:

Old:

The differences are subtle but I like the new conversion better.

By doggirlseattle | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

moody cats

March 31, 2008 – 5:25 am

I have been going through my archives again this weekend and came across these images of a repeat client’s kitties: Sugar Ray, Ali and Floyd. (yes, they are all named after boxers)










We are overdue for the boys’ annual photo shoot, and have been playing email tag since December, so I am posting these images here to put out some good ‘call me’ energy to their mom. I’m ready Ronnie! Call me! :-)

I haven’t photographed these gorgeous guys since I got my Canon. They have a really incredible house, with steel walls and lots of black and white. The most unusual architecture I have ever seen in a house. To say I can’t wait to get back in there with my Canon would be an understatement. We can *finally* capture those action shots in the bedroom their mom has so long desired. Whoopee!

So Ronnie if you are reading this (I know she’s not, she is verrry busy- busier than me even!), call me and let’s get you scheduled! I can’t wait to see the boys.

Also, you probably noted that these images look pretty different from what I normally do.

That’s because I finally decided to see what all of the fuss was about Photoshop action-wise. In late December I paid for some pro actions, and piddled around with them the last few months. It wasn’t until this weekend that I finally got around to really trying them.

The actions I bought are from Michelle Black and Nichole Van.

I bought ‘Perfect Enhance’ from Michelle Black and ‘Complete Workflow’ from Nichole Van.

I tried out every action from both gals’ sets on just about every different type of photo I could think of (all dogs and cats of course, cause well, that’s pretty much all I have).

I played around with layer opacities, and deleted layers, and layered new layers on top of old layers. I did all kinds of stuff as I normally do when trying something new. I combined the actions with my already pretty good pre-existing knowledge of Photoshop.

My conclusion?

Although the actions themselves are very cool, and very impressive, and clearly took a vast knowledge of photoshop to create, they don’t really work for my purposes or give me the look that I am going for, which is in a word: realistic (the action fans would probably say ‘boring’).

I’m still a big fan of getting the shot right in-camera, and although it’s not always easy with pet photography, the challenge is part of the fun.

I do, however, like the ‘evenout’ action in Michelle Black’s set, and overall like hers the most, but all I really want to do with my images is tweak the contrast a little, and lighten them when they are too dark.

Having said that, I discovered that these black cats look truly amazing with Michelle Black’s ‘dramatic’ action. It produces really cool, slightly desaturated moody images. And I also think some of the actions might be fun to play with for my Decopaw art process. Oooh, I could waste a lot of time there, oh no. Maybe next year.

These shots are all from my prosumer Fuji camera, and I just applied the action to the unedited files, then flattened layers and saved as-is. No messing around with layer opacities or anything fancy. Just click play, flatten, resize, save.

I totally dig the way Sugar Ray, Ali and Floyd look with the ‘dramatic’ action (I tried them on other cats and wasn’t nearly as pleased; I think it’s because these boys are black), so I’ll keep them for my own personal file.

Whether or not the boys’ mom Ronnie likes them remains to be seen. Maybe if she sees this post she can tell me. Ronnie, where art thou?! :-)

By doggirlseattle | Also posted in Private client shoots, seattle cat photography | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)