Fun with cliched effects...

Recent work trip to Devon, visting about 12 pubs a day over four days to talk to the licensees and photograph the pubs. Not as much fun as Toby might imagine, and much more fun than Kevin might imagine. Driving down tiny, twisty country lanes and no drinking involved at all (until I got to the hotel each night).

New LX5 firmware comes with a "tilt-shift" effect built in, which I tried a few times - but forgot to switch camera into JPG mode, which mean the filter effect wasn't on the RAW files. Played around in photoshop instead to try to get a similar effect.



This is the original - pretty dull bar shot, very little DOF. Used the quick mask mode, the gradient tool and then the lens blur filter on the selected area to get the effect.



I'm still not sure if I'm a huge fan of this sort of shot - it's certainly being overused everywhere at the moment. Interesting to see how easy it is to do though.

Carpark pushed processing

Generally not very good at creative photoshopping - tend to be more an enhance, repair and rescue user. Tried pushing processing bit further, as Kev's suggestion....suspect I'm still being too restrained!

Distorted thinking

Nothing to do with the current challenge - still "pre-visualising" on that one (i.e. very little idea of what to do and hoping something will occur soon!)

To fill the time, here is a photo I took while on holiday in Scotland this August. Thought it might be good for stock, but then wondered about the perspective problems caused by the wide angle - so had a play in Photoshop with the distortion correct filter and ended up with the second picture.

Interested in your views - was it a successful exercise? Is it worth going to the bother? Does the uncorrected image look too distorted to you? Does the new version look better?

A noisy noise annoys a photographer pt 1

Lacking the budget for a decent travel tripod and the fact the £30 Jessop finest I do have doesn't actually fit into my "three-day-trip" size bag, I ended up experimenting with low light, handheld photography in some dark and dingy Czech breweries illuminated by dark and dingy late-november light.

First example is a massively underexposed 1/60s, f8 at 1600ISO shot, with 100 per cent crop to show just how nasty it is and then, really just as a bit of fun, what slamming Photoshop's noise reduction filter through it at max settings does. Result: some really odd smearing and additional texture, but I'm surprised how much detail gets retained.

Sharp practice

Warning: Tom has a blindly obvious realisation moment.

Having spent far too much time fiddling with photos over the last few years and trying to balance reducing noise, with preserving detail, and then trying to sharpen that detail without sharpening the noise and plunging back to square one, I've had a bit of a slapped forehead moment in the last few weeks.

Selective sharpening. In my defence, the reason it's taken so long is because it's staggeringly easy to do in Capture (another point in its favour) while I suspect it's a bit more complex in PS - which is where you come in.

In Capture, I can set the sharpening levels (or anything for that matter, this method works with all the adjustments, including noise reduction, gaussian blur, b/w conversion etc) and then just click on the slection brush and brush the adjustment onto the picture. Sharpening eyes while leaving skin nicely noise reduced is a thing of simplicity.

But what is the easiest way of reproducing this on PS? Layer masks?

I ask because my free trial on Capture NX 2 runs out on Monday, leaving me with my Capture NX on the horrendously slow, old and electrified Dell, or CS 2 on the work Mac (which also involved DNGing my NEF files thanks to Adobe's policy on ACR upgrades)