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Hijinx in Green: Full Tutorial

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Editing: Tutorials Hijinx in Green: Full Tutorial
DSC01244-Pano-2 DSC01244-Pano-2-Edit
Download the raw Files here

This was such a fun little edit! Making a panorama, taking our overly bright photo and deepening those greens, working through so many of my normal process.

Make sure you download the 4 raw files from above. To take this photo, I used my panorama technique which I cover in depth in the Learning Journey. But in this case, I’d gotten a bit too close to Hijinx as I’d only JUST gotten into position but hadn’t framed up the photo yet, and was expecting him to look toward me, when he looked so beautifully to the side and into this lighter, open space. 

I could either forgo the shot and move backward/change my perspective to be lower, and wait for him to look at me to have better composition…

Or I could take the photo with the perfect gazing direction and expression, and take extra photos of the scene to “build out” later in editing. So, that’s what we’re going to do. 

Make sure you check out the step by step editing process that accompanies this video, but remember! You don’t have to do the exact settings as me, with the exact numbers. 

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Editing Dogs in Landscapes

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Editing: Tutorials Editing Dogs in Landscapes

Watch the video tutorial below to edit this image step by step. My process for editing landscapes is a fair bit different to my normal process in that:

  • I don’t shape the light nearly as much
  • I’m a bit more flexible with colour-grading and don’t mind if the dogs get a little coloured
  • I am not obsessing quite as much about drawing attention to the subject (especially through use of light and dark) but instead about creating a balance between the subject and the landscape
  • I may use self-created presets for series of images taken in the same landscape with similar lighting, to speed up the process
  • I make more use of the HSL panel, and the colour grading panel in LR/ACR than I normally do.
DSC04402 DSC04402-Edit

Beware the glow!

Often, when editing our landscape photos, we need to quite dramatically darken the sky, while brightening our subject. Depending on how you do this, it can quite quickly create a glowing white halo around your subjects. If you’re using the adjustment brush to adjust exposures, this glow will be larger and soft. If you’re using “select subject”, it’s likely to be smaller and sharper.

It’s difficult to get rid of this glow without spending a lot of time very precisely adjusting your masks. Therefore I recommend gradually fading your exposure adjustments, using radial filters in a not-too-specific way, and avoiding as much as possible big exposure adjustments between subject and background. Not always possible! 

One way to see the glow is to zoom right out on your photo and look at it thumbnail size. And make sure you come back to it with fresh eyes later on!

Check your masks

Similar to “beware the glow”, do a good, thorough check of your masks if you’re darkening the sky and brightening your subjects, especially if you’re using a “Select Subject” tool. Often, it can miss small bits and pieces (see below example!) and these can look very strange and out of place!

Watch out as well that the new masking features don’t just blur furry parts of your subject, or parts where some fur meets the background and it has a hard time finding the edges. You will want to fix these masks up.

Below: before & after. If you see these blurry edges, just use the brush tool to either add or remove the effect from where it’s blurry.

Mask blurred edges Mask blurred edges 2
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Dreaming in Green: Full Tutorial

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Dreaming in Green: Deep Green Editing Tutorial Dreaming in Green: Full Tutorial
DSC01244-Pano-2 DSC01244-Pano-2-Edit
Download the raw Files here

This was such a fun little edit! Making a panorama, taking our overly bright photo and deepening those greens, working through so many of my normal process.

Make sure you download the 4 raw files from above. To take this photo, I used my panorama technique which I cover in depth in the Learning Journey. But in this case, I’d gotten a bit too close to Hijinx as I’d only JUST gotten into position but hadn’t framed up the photo yet, and was expecting him to look toward me, when he looked so beautifully to the side and into this lighter, open space. 

I could either forgo the shot and move backward/change my perspective to be lower, and wait for him to look at me to have better composition…

Or I could take the photo with the perfect gazing direction and expression, and take extra photos of the scene to “build out” later in editing. So, that’s what we’re going to do. 

Make sure you check out the step by step editing process that accompanies this video, but remember! You don’t have to do the exact settings as me, with the exact numbers. 

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Editing Toolbox: Reduce Highlights

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Editing Tools & Techniques Editing Toolbox: Reduce Highlights

As always, there’s about 100 ways to do things or fix problems when it comes to editing, so this toolbox goes through a few options for you.

Keep in mind that how effective these methods will be depends on how large the blown out areas are. If you have HUGE white blobs, this is going to be much harder to fix and might be something you look at fixing in camera, on location in future. Bracketing, under-exposing, or using an external light source or reflector could help.

Some options for fixing/reducing blown highlights include:

  • Lower highlights in LR and reduce clarity
  • Copy/paste some bokeh from somewhere else in the background
  • Clone stamp bokeh from somewhere else in the background
  • Using Generative Fill in Photoshop (video below)
  • Use motion blur on the bokeh
  • Use gaussian blur on the bokeh (I recommend you add noise afterwards)
  • Fill in the white spots with the brush tool in a colour from the outside of the bokeh
  • cover the bokeh with a radial gradient, or add haze in Adobe Camera Raw.

Your main goals are probably going to be to:

  • soften the edges of the blown out areas so they aren’t so sharp
  • add some colour so it isn’t so white

Keeping that in mind will help you decide what you want to do, and how to do it with the tools available to you.

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“Joy” Challenge

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Challenges “Joy” Challenge

The “Joy Challenge” is all about capturing the essence of joy in your pet photography. Even the most serious dog can show joy in the right circumstances, and there’s nothing better than looking back on joyful photos.

Here are some guidelines to get you started:

  1. Focus on the dog’s expression: The key to capturing joy in a pet photo is to focus on the dog’s expression. Look for moments when the dog is relaxed and happy, with an open mouth, raised ears, and bright eyes.

  2. Choose a bright and happy location: To enhance the joyful mood, choose a bright and happy location for your photo shoot. Beaches, flowers, and plenty of bokeh can all create the feeling of joy. Avoid deep dark forests, solid backgrounds and places that feel a bit “closed in”. 

  3. Interaction can create joy! Get your dog moving! Interact with your dog or have your owner interact. Prompt them to cuddle, play and be silly. Be natural with your dog and muck around. These will create genuine moments of laughter and joy together. 

  4. Use a fast shutter speed if you’re working with more candid moments and movement: To capture your dog in motion and to avoid blurry images, use a fast shutter speed, over 1/1250 sec. This will help to freeze the moment and capture the essence of joy in your pet’s expression.

  5. Edit for brightness and color: In post-processing, edit your photos for brightness and color. By going dark and moody, you likely won’t be supporting that bright, joyful mood you want to create. Remember as well that warmth has more of a feeling of joy than cooler temperatures.

Get to it! Make sure you check out the Challenges rules before you get started. Can’t wait to see your joyful photos!

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Layers Flowchart

in Fixing Things Photoshop Tools Rationale & Style on 0 190 Views
Editing Tools & Techniques Layers Flowchart

I’ve been asked a couple of times whether there are lessons or resources on layers, specifically:

  • when to group and hide layers
  • where in the process to do clone/healing layers
  • what the hell is going on with smooshed layers

The problem was, the answer always begins with: “It depends.”

After all, whether or not you turn off layers depends what you have, and what type of layers are there. Where you do your clone stamp depends on what you’ve done already. 

So I made this flow-chart. I’ve tried to cover as many possible editing scenarios as I can think of, and of course some scenarios will have more than one “thing” that you’ve already done or WANT to do.

The important thing is to understand why it might be important to do things in a certain order, so you can make smart decisions about your workflow. I’ve tried to include some explanations as to why I would do things certain ways. 

As this is a Canva whiteboard, I can add or change whatever is there easily, so if you think I’ve missed something, haven’t explained something well, or want something added, let me know in the comments box at the bottom of this lesson. 

You do not need a Canva account to view it, and you can zoom in and out and navigate around. You can also download a .pdf version but it might be more difficult to read and can’t be updated if anything changes – unless you download a new version.

Go to Canva
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Editing Toolbox: Add Snow

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Editing Tools & Techniques Editing Toolbox: Add Snow

In this editing toolbox, we’re going to add snow to the green parts of our image. You can of course add this to any coloured area of your image, it doesn’t have to be green. 

We won’t be adding falling snow. You can learn how to do that in the “Add a snow overlay” lesson here. 

You’re going to need a pretty decent understanding of Photoshop to follow this tutorial.

Note that it DOES take some playing around, experimenting, and redoing the layers and effects to get it to look how you want it to look. Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work immdiately. Use the many tools you have in your toolbox to fix the issues you might have.

For example, in the video, you’ll notice I say that I don’t like the dark corner in the lower right. I later fix this with a curves layer, simply pulling up the curve to lighten that section so it isn’t darker than the rest of the snowy foreground. 

If problems pop up, ask yourself: what tools do I have to fix this?

How to do it:

In this particular case, I started by already separating the yellows and greens with the HSL panel in Lightroom so I could just work on greens. It didn’t really help. 

On an image layer, go to Select > Colour Range.

Use the eyedropper tool to select the colour of the ground/foreground/whatever you want covered in snow. Hold shift and click to add more colours, or click the eyedropper with the + next to it. 

Adjust the fuzziness to soften the edges of your snow and make it less harsh.

Hit ok when you’re happy. Be prepared to revisit this screen. 

Go to the adjustment layers panel (lower right hand corner, where you make curves layers etc), and click “Solid Colour”. Select white. Boom! Snow! 

Let’s make it more natural.

Double click the layer (not the thumbnail) to bring up the blend options.

Move the shadows/blacks arrow of the “Underlying Layer” toward the middle. You may want to split this arrow to better/more gradually blend the effect. To do so, hold option/alt and click the arrow. 

Now, your snow should be looking reasonably good. If not, you might want to make a new selection and try again. 

What you do from here is really up to you!

You might want to make your snow a more blue tint, or you might still have some green that you don’t want there.

Some options to colour the snow include:

  • hue/saturation layer, either very specifically isolate the green tones and desaturate them, or possibly even use the hue slider to shift it toward blue. 
  • gradient map. Make the shadows a more deep blue/purple, and the highlights a pale blue.
  • colour balance: add blues/purples as you want
  • gradient: try making a gradient from one colour to another. In my final image I used one going from a kind of  orange, to pink tone in the top right, to deeper purple.
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Editing Toolbox: Grey-Green Warm Yellow Tones

in Changing Colours Lightroom Photoshop Tools on 0 234 Views
Editing Tools & Techniques Editing Toolbox: Grey-Green Warm Yellow Tones

In this 15-minute Editing Toolbox, you are going to learn how to create the soft grey-green and warm yellow-orange tones as seen in the photos above, when starting from a relatively green SOOC image. 

To be able to follow along in this tutorial you will need to know:

  • how to use the HSL panel in LR or ACR
  • how to use adjustment layers in PS
  • how to mask adjustment layers

Below, you will find a link to a similar photo taken at the same location, so you can try the techniques on this picture.

Feel free to share it in our private network, but please do not share on social media as it was part of a client shoot.

As I say in the video, keep in mind that the exact settings and numbers used in each of the layers WILL CHANGE dramatically from photo to photo. Therefore, don’t try and copy the settings exactly. Or even the process!

Instead, use the process and concept as a starting point, and tweak, change, add, remove layers and colours as needed. 

The main thing to remember is that you’re moving the green tones toward cyan and removing yellow from them, and you’re moving the yellow tones toward orange, and removing cyan from them.

Click here to download the RAW file
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Editing Pets & People: Ike & Cecilia Tutorial

in Editing Tutorials Photography Genres on 0 395 Views
Editing: Tutorials Editing Pets & People: Ike & Cecilia Tutorial

in this tutorial we’re going to work on this photo of Ike & Cecilia, cuddling in the green woods.

DSC06712 DSC06712-Edit
Download the RAW file

You are welcome to edit along, but I’ll ask you not to share this one on social media! Thanks!

After I finished recording, I went and cooled down the image a bit, as it finished feeling a bit too yellow/warm for me. Other than that I don’t think I changed anything afterwards.

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