High speed photography by Chase Jarvis
Saturday, October 18th, 2008Check out this inspirational YouTube video by Chase Jarvis. Four invaluable high speed photography tips and some very cool stunts to boot.
» More at www.chasejarvis.com
Archive for the ‘Tips and Tutorials’ Category
Make a cartoon effect using iPhoto
Friday, August 1st, 2008Yet another reason to try out the special effects in iPhoto
Again, Cordelia has agreed to model for this installment in the iPhoto series of Tips and Tutorials. In this article we’ll make a cartoon effect using iPhoto.
I have a lot of photos of my cats and like many hobby photographers they can be very hit and miss. Sometimes, though, the expression caught in an otherwise ordinary photo makes deserves some post-processing.
The photo
Here we have a photo of my British Shorthair, Cordelia.
You can see that it’s quite grainy and blurry at the same time, very low light conditions and not exactly result I was hoping for. But the look on her face made me want to try to improve the photo somehow. So I decided to do a little more experimenting with iPhoto. In no time at all I had a cartoon/comic type of effect.
It’s all about smoothing the grain
The Reduce Noise option is the key to a cartoon effect. It smooths out all the grain in the image and almost gives it a paintbrush texture.
To start with I opened the Adjust settings and moved the Reduce Noise slider all the way to the right. Play around with this as you mightn’t need to always set this to maximum. In fact, I decreased it a little (to 89.0) as the effect made the image so smooth it became even more blurry. However, even with the decrease the eyes are still out of focus and as any eager amateur photographer knows - the eye have it.
So instead of decreasing the smooth paint-like effect even further I increased the Sharpness (to .71). Instantly the eyes stood out and the cartoon effect was still in tact. There was also more of an outline around the cat.
A few more minor adjustments
To polish up the final image I made a few more adjustments.
Levels and Contrast and Crop for an overall improvement. Saturation to bump up the color. The change I was most impressed with, possibly because I don’t use it very often, was the effect an adjustment to the Highlights setting produced.
Here is the Adjustments window showing the final settings.
And the final result. Voila!
If you have other iPhoto tips you’d like to share let us know in the comments. If you’d like to write a guest post about using iPhoto then get in touch with me via the Contact Form.
Related posts
Cross processing with the GIMP
Monday, June 16th, 2008Create a cool green colour effect with curves
Cross processing is something I have started to experiment with. I find I’m drawn to many of these photos on Flickr - the effect can be quite stunning. I uploaded the final cross-processed result of this image to Flickr and it made Explore soon after.
Here we’ll focus on the green effect you can produce, although you can also adjust your settings for other hues, such as red.
It’s all about the curves
Cross processing can be a very simple GIMP edit if you set and save the RGB colour curves to your GIMP library. You can then re-use the setting again and again with other images. I have a few of these options saved in my GIMP library: one is a general curves adjustment; one boosts each RGB colour channel for retro effects; and now I have a green cross process setting.
Save the setting the first time you use it and it will then be available for future edits.
Auto-levels
In the image above I did a quick auto-levels adjustment Colors -> Levels -> Auto. I played around with the Hue-Saturation and Contrast options but decided to not to use these changes as there is quite a lot of contrast already. It will depend on your image if you need to boost the colour and contrast.
Save your curves setting
Now to the curves. Go to Layer -> Duplicate Layer - a handy option as you can simply delete the layer if you don’t like the results. The settings below are what I have come up with after reading a bagful of articles about cross processing.
Select Color -> Curves and change the individual RGB channels to the settings below:
Red setting
Green setting
Blue setting
Select Save and name your curves something useful, like Cross Processing - Green. You can use this setting for other images you cross process without having to change the RGB values each time. To access your saved files next time simply go to Color -> Curves -> Open.
Click OK and the image now looks like this:
You can also add an almost transparent fill layer of a lime green (to bring out more green) or a fushia (to bring out more red and blue). I’ve decided against a fill layer with this particular image.
Crop and you’re done
I cropped the balcony out of the image which brought more focus to the sky and those gorgeous sunbeams.
Et voila! Click the image to view a larger size in Flickr.
Related cross processing articles
- Brian Auer has a great tutorial on both green and red cross processing over at Epic Edits Weblog
- Check out the impressive results by Danny Ngan at Poo-Poo Platter
Other examples
It’s interesting to see the various RGB settings that are used and leads me to think I should make save a few more curves settings saved to my library.
Here are some other images I have cross processed - with varying degrees of success.
Do you have any handy cross processing tips?
See also:
Make your images outstanding using iPhoto effects
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008iPhoto editing features can make an ordinary photo extraordinary
This is the next installment in the iPhoto series.
One of my cats, Cordelia, agreed to help out with this post. Gorgeous as the subject is, the image is a bit dull; there’s not much color and the background could have been better. And, I unfortunately cut off the tip of her right ear. But she is worthy of rescuing with iPhoto!
Before I begin I’ll make a copy of the image.
Open the special effects windows
In this iPhoto edit we’ll combine a few special effects features. So, select Edit and open both the Effects and Adjust options.
Move the special effects windows to either side of the image so you can see the changes as you edit. The editing sliders in the Adjust window are all at the default settings and you should already see the special features from the thumbnails in the Effects window.
Adjust the levels to brighten the image
Adjusting the levels is always my first step when editing. Sometimes a slight levels adjustment is all a photo needs. The left-hand slider controls the darker tones and the right-hand slider controls the lighter tones while the middle slider helps to balance the brightness and shadow. Play around with the settings to see which best suits your image. I moved each slider for this image. I also slightly increased the Exposure (to 0.24) and bumped up the Contrast (to 20)
See the difference these changes have already made. The background is more washed out and Cordelia is more prominent.
But, we can do more.
A tiny retouch
In the original photo do you see the tiny blemish under Cordelia’s right eye? It looks like I took the photo before she had finished grooming. Using the Retouch tool, I moved the slider to roughly the size of the blemish and simply clicked over the spot to remove it. Much tidier.
OK, let’s adjust those settings.
Add some warmth and saturate the colors
The Temperature slider can cool down or warm up your picture. In this instance, we want a bit of warmth so I moved the slider to the right (set to 6.5). This has changed the colour of her eyes to the correct shade of gold. The picture still needs some more color so I slid the Saturation to the right (up to 61). To remove a bit of the darkness on the fur I moved the Shadow slider up (to 6.1).
Each change is small but significant.
A crop and a matte finish
Cordelia’s is looking slightly more reddish than she should be (well, she is a Chocolate British Shorthair after all, not a Reddish British Shorthair) so even though her eyes are now a more true to life colour, I added a slight Tint (to 9.8) to tone down the reddish fur and bring out more of the chocolate color.
Now to the Effects window, I selected Matte. Then a slight Crop to finish. Why the crop after the matte and not before? I did try it that way but the crop was too tight and the matte finish covered part of the cat in white. So I added the matte and then did a couple of crops to get it just right. Having said that, the matte does help disguise the fact that the tip of her right ear was clipped.
Et voila!
If you have other iPhoto tips you’d like to share let us know in the comments. If you’d like to write a guest post about using iPhoto then get in touch with me via the Contact Form.
Related posts
Give your photos a retro feel with the GIMP
Saturday, March 29th, 2008A curves adjustment can dramatically change the look of your photo
I took this photo the other day on my way home from work.
This friendly fellow was hanging about with his horse pals under the tree in the background to the right. That was going to be my composition, some horses crowding into the shadows of the tree to escape the glare of the sun. But as soon as the horses saw me at the fence they decided to come over and say ‘Neigh‘.
I had the camera on auto settings, the only change I made was to set the macro. Being a lovely rural area I wanted to give it a more country feel. The result ended up looking quite ‘retro’. So, “Bring out the GIMP!” and let’s get started.
A quick word about GIMP
I have written previously about the GIMP here. GIMP is similar to Photoshop but it’s free. You can find out more about it and download your own copy at the GIMP Website and there is a manual available at GIMP Documentation. I found the following post extremely useful in downloading GIMP for Mac:
Saturate the colours
The first thing I did was a quick auto-levels adjustment at Colors -> Levels -> Auto. Then I bumped up the saturation at Colors -> Hue-Saturation and moved the saturation slider up to 50.
Now for the curves adjustment.
Go crazy with curves
I’m relatively new to curves and have recently been experimenting with the color channels. I followed the advice at Layers magazine on boosting the individual RGB color channels.
See the difference each change makes to the image:
Red color channel
Green color channel
Blue color channel
Tighten the image with a crop
A quick crop, making sure to keep the fly-away hair of the mane intact.
Almost done. The image is now too saturated so back to Colors -> Hue-Saturation and move the saturation slider down to -20. Experiment with the different saturation and curves settings for the best results.
Et voila! Click the image above to view it at a larger size in Flickr.
Save your image
I have been saving the image in the its native GIMP .xcf format and then saving a .jpg copy to load to Flickr. To save it as a .jpg or .png etc go to Image -> Flatten image and then choose File -> Save As …