So you were blessed this holiday season with a new digital camera, but you don’t have any idea how to make it work? Local camera-specific instructional classes and web forums have got you covered no matter what brand you are packing. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you take a picture and you know in your mind that it could have been different or better if you had taken it on a different day or at a different time. Lighting can play a huge role in what your picture conveys. And this is where “Creative Photoshop Lighting Techniques” comes into play.
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Selective coloring…you know the process of taking a B&W image and only showing something in a vibrant color in the photo. Yeah, looks really cool but how the heck do you do it?

Get ready because it’s actually very easy and one of the first photo editing (processing) tips that was passed on to me.

First find a photo that lends itself to a bit of selective coloring. Look for photos that have vibrant spot colors that do not mesh with any of the background colors. I am going to use this photo of a rose courtesy FreeFoto.com for our tutorial.

Now, open your image in PhotoShop (I am using CS3, but most of this should be backward compatible to earlier versions).

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Still stressing about what to get for that budding photographer in your life? Give the gift of knowledge by surprising them with a gift certificate for a photography class. Local schools are offering exciting workshops that will inspire your photographic friends for months or even years to come. Fess up — you know you can’t really afford all the specialized equipment photogs want anyway since all their “junk is expensive” according to one colleague.

Check out these offerings:

The Denver Darkroom gift certificate can be purchased in any denomination and applied toward classes, workshops and darkroom rental.

Digital Photo Academy’s local instructors Russ Burden and Allen Birnbach teach beginning, intermediate and advanced classes.

Working with Artists offers adult and children photography programs just in case you want to get them hooked to the craft when they are young.

My background in photography is that of a complete layperson. I started out in middle school with the Kodak equivalent of a Polaroid. Eventually I graduated to a 35mm point and shoot. Following that was an Olympus D-490Zoom. All cameras that didn’t allow for a lot of tinkering with settings. Since that was all I knew, I still took pictures that way when I moved on to the more capable Canon Powershot G5. It has full control over aperture, f-stop, etc. But I was very intimidated by trying those kinds of things out. Over the years I had managed to get a few pictures that I was really proud of, and even some that garnered compliments from total strangers.

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So you are the new kid on the block, the newest wet behind the viewfinder photographer looking to score your first paying gig. Of course there is always someone out there who wants their picture taken and who will pay you some cash to do it, but where oh where do you find them.

For many photographers the social networking sites are becoming the go to place to get real paying clients.

MySpace, FaceBook…and the like are great spots to find folks looking for photos.

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It can be difficult to upload, organize, describe and create tags for hundreds of digital photos at one time. But the new revamped Flickr Uploadr 3.0 introduced last week made this an easy process.

The first time Uploadr is started, users will be asked to authorize it with Flickr, but you don’t have to do this now. Version 3.0 lets you work offline, adding and organizing photos until you are satisfied before the actual uploading begins. I would recommend authorizing from the start because the process seemed more streamlined to me. When you are ready, click “Sign In,” and you will be directed to Flickr.

Photos can be dragged into the Uploadr individually or in large numbers. My first batch contained 171 photos.  Click the “Add” button in the upper left hand corner. When the window opens, navigate to your photos. I selected all of my photos and hit “Open” to place them in the Uploadr box. Once the pictures appear, select a photo (or as many as you like), and start adding titles, tags and descriptions. The Uploadr also allows users to choose who can see the photos, define safety levels and content type, and create sets. Hit the large “Upload photos” button on the right hand side of the page.

At this point you can walk away and do laundry or something. It could take a while, depending on the speed of your internet connection and how many photos you are uploading. The cool thing about this new Uploadr is that you can go ahead and immediately add and organize more photos — all while the first batch is still loading to Flickr. I added three sets of nearly 500 photos. Out of those, only two images weren’t uploaded, which is pretty amazing if you ask me. A message comes up saying, “Darn! Some photos didn’t make it.” The culprits are shown in the Uploadr screen. Just tell it to try again, and the remaining photos will join the rest.

Need more help? Check out the official forum thread for tips.

For all the fans of Flickr who happen to have a Pro account it’s time to get excited! Just announced was the new Flickr Stats for Pro users to get a nice visual of the stats for each photo.

You are presented with a nice graph for each photo with info on where traffic is coming from, who is viewing your photos and most visited photos in addition to several other categories of interest. Good stuff!

While you have to activate the stats on your account and a warning screen says it can take up to 24 hours for your stats to appear my stats were available in about 30 minutes.

Flickr is about the most popular photo sharing site on the ‘Net due in no small part to its ease of use and ease of sharing amongst friends, family and complete strangers. While regular free account holders are left out of the statastic fun, a Pro account is only $24.95 a year. Pretty darn cheap for unlimited storage and bandwidth.

OK so you took some pictures and they look great right? Right, for the most part.

Your camera does its best to figure out the lightness and color balance needed but it isn’t always perfect. Thats where Photoshop comes in.

OK, start by opening your image into Photoshop.

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Photography forums are littered with posts from rookies asking about filters and other effects. Almost immediately someone will post “that’s easy to do in Photoshop,” without a link or any other explanation. For a Photoshop AND photography rookie like myself, that makes it doubly frustrating. Luckily, help is just one book away.

“The Photoshop Show Starring Russell Brown” is a timeless book with techniques that will help you regardless of which Photoshop version you might have. As someone who has only used Photoshop to edit images for websites, this book was a helpful glimpse into the full power of what the program offers. Brown covers such topics as Channels and Blending, Layer Masks, Filters and Patterns in a way that makes it very easy for the novice to ‘get’ the concept being illustrated. The enclosed CD offers sample files for all of the exercises, which is invaluable for retaining the skills this book teaches. Several chapters are also devoted to transforming an image to create a completely new work. Again, all samples are included on the CD so that you can get the most out of the exercises.

I still consider myself a Photoshop novice, but this book has enabled me to do much more with photos than I could before I read it. I highly recommend it for photography and Photoshop novices alike.