The Digital Photography School has been a wealth of Photoshop tips this week. First, Elise Hennen has posted four mini-tutorials on using filter overlays. I like these effects, however, they don’t all work for every image. Each introduces some element of distortion into the image. It’s just a matter of where or not that distortion enhances or detracts from the image. I’ve got a couple of before and after shots below:
Before:
After:
You’ll probably need to click the links to view these larger to see any real differences. In this case, I copied the image into a new layer, added a Gaussian Blur, then changed the new layer to an overlay. This enhanced contrast and made the colors a bid more vivid. This does tend to increase distortion on the outer edges, so you’ll need to play with settings to get it just right.
Before:
After:
Again, the differences are subtle, so you’ll need to see the larger versions. In this image there was a very bright window that I cropped out. It was a distraction. However, I wanted to highlight the way light from the window was backlighting the threads in the loom. Once again I copied the entire image into a new layer. This time, instead of a Gaussian Blur, I added a Neon Glow filter, then changed it to an overlay.
Found in the forum posts over at DPS were links to two more excellent Photoshop resources. The first of these is a link to a set of Geometrical Composition Guides over at Stock Image Exchange. These guides are image overlays that can be added as a layer in Photoshop to help align your pictures according to various compositional tools (Rule of Thirds, etc.)
The Digital Darkroom at The Light’s Right Studios has provided an incredible array of Photoshop Actions for download. These included black and white conversion, color enhancement, filtering, noise reduction, etc, etc., etc. As with the tutorials posted on DPS, not all of these actions will be appropriate with every photo. However, there are tons to keep one busy experimenting with image post-processing.
[tags]Photoshop, actions, photography, composition, digital imaging, tutorial[/tags]