Adjustment Layers

Here's a great intro video: link here.

But basically, you can use adjustment layers to alter your images without making permanent change. That is, you can go back later and "turn off" the change if you want. Think of it as throwing a filter on top of your images.

The main advantage of the adjustment layer is that it automatically comes with a mask. This means you can add the change (or "filter") just to a certain part of the image, instead of the whole image. You do this by painting with either black or white. See this curves demo to understand what I mean.

*rule of thumb with masking: White reveals the change and Black conceals the change.

CURVES:

You can use a Curves adjustment layer to brighten (dodge) or darken (burn) selective areas of an image.

For example, in the image below, I added one Dodge layer to brighten select areas. The result is an image that looks more dynamic and less flat:

In your adjustments palette, choose the Curves icon. Drag from the middle up for brightening, or down for darkening:

This automatically makes a mask for you. Invert the mask (command i) and then paint with a WHITE SOFT BRUSH on the mask, just on the areas where you want to see the change.

Remember, on a mask: White reveals, Black conceals. Above, I have painted with white JUST where I want the change to show through.

HUE SATURATION:
(to boost individual colors)
In the image below of the pomegranates, I used a hie saturation adjustment layer to isolate and boost just the reddish tones in the picture by moving the "saturation" slider to the right:
(Be sure to choose "reds" instead of "RGB" in the menu I've circled here -->)

This is what the adjustment layer looks like on your layers palette:

Because the adjustment layer's mask is white, the change is visible.
Remember, WHITE REVEALS, BLACK CONCEALS.

Similarly, you can reduce the red by moving the slider to the left.

Night Photography

Suggested Homework Due April 20th, 2016: Shoot a series of images outdoors at night. Here are some past student assignment examples: Below is a selection of images shot by students for the Night Landscape assignment.  Some fun things to try:

• Try using a High ISO (as high as your camera will go) and no tripod (remember to keep your shutterspeed at 60 or above so it's not blurry). This will create a lot of graininess.
• Try using a tripod and a lower ISO (like 200 or 400), but a very long exposure (perhaps a couple seconds).
• Try having some motion in the shot for a long exposure (like this flashlight motion around the tree, below)
• Try a long exposure combined with a flash (perhaps having the flash light up a person in the dark while the long exposure shows detail in the dark background). Try having the person run through the frame and the flash will "freeze" them.

Long exposure shows motion. Photo by Joel Stuckey

These 2 photos by one of my students, Gary Prideaux, perfectly illustrate the difference between a long exposure night shot and a high ISO night shot. A high ISO often produces graininess, but doesn't require a tripod:

Short Exposure, High ISO- grainy! Photo by Gary Prideaux

Long Exposure, low ISO, more clarity. Photo by Gary Prideaux

This long exposure shot by Mira Zaslove shows some motion on the water,
but the architecture is crisp since she used a tripod.

Here are a couple fun photos by another student using a long exposure, tripod and a flashlight:

The 2 photos below are by my student Chuck Thompson, taken in Palo Alto at Bowden Park. His Shutter Speed was 1/5 sec (which allowed for the motion of the cars). The aperture was f/8.0. The ISO was 1600, which is somewhat high and added a bit of graininess in the darker areas like the tree trunk and the roof of the train station.

Graininess is common in night photos (because of the high ISO). If you want to avoid graininess you can use a lower ISO (like 400) and a longer exposure (maybe like a half second, with a tripod), and perhaps a lower number F-stop (wider aperture), something like F 2.8.

Photoshop Tools & Object Removal

Once you process your image in Adobe Camera Raw (the raw window with the sliders), you can then open it up into the "regular" Photoshop interface. In this interface there are different tools to do more localized edits to small areas of the image. Here is an overview of the tools:

Also, this is sort of a fun "visual dictionary" for Photoshop terms.


PHOTOSHOP TOOLS for OBJECT REMOVAL:

• Clone
• Patch
• Healing and Spot Healing
• Fill with Content Aware

Usually the quickest/easiest is to use the Lasso Tool (L) to circle the object you want to remove (like below) and then go to EDIT > FILL WITH CONTENT AWARE. It magically erases the object!

Be sure you do the object removal on a duplicate layer of the background:

Here's a demo video of "Fill with Content Aware"/ object removal:
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/photoshop-fill-content-aware.html

Intro to Camera Raw & Photoshop

There are 3 main Adobe interfaces I work in. I start in Bridge to organize and star favorites, then I process my favorite RAW files in Camera Raw, then I retouch them in Photoshop. Each interface looks a bit different and we'll go over the basics of each together. (Camera Raw is part of the Photoshop application- Raw files automatically open up into it. Bridge is a separate application for organizing.)

WORKFLOW

Intro to Bridge:
When starting with a large group of images I've just shot, I begin by previewing them all in Bridge, Filmstrip view. I delete ones I don't want to keep, rename all the files, apply my copyright metadata, star my favorites, sort them, then open up into Camera Raw.

To open and process lots of images at once, highlight them, then hit Return/Enter and they should open up automatically into Adobe Camera Raw. Looks like this (see all the images stacked up on the left):

Some basic info about the sliders in Camera Raw:

When opening up a RAW file into Photoshop, it will initially open into the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) window. It looks like this:

Be sure to click the blue text at the bottom to set your resolution to 300. Leave everything on "DEFAULT" so you can control the quality of all aspects of the image. When you move each slider, the adjustments are saved into a "Sidecar" .xmp file that is stored in the same folder as your RAW file. If you toss this .xmp file, your image will go back to how it was when you had just downloaded it off your camera.

The main adjustments you want to make for most images are Temperature, Exposure, Highlights and Shadows. In the image below, I made it a bit warmer by moving the temperature slider to the right, and I brought out detail in the shadows by moving the shadows slider to the right. Notice it's a bit grainy because it was dark and I was at ISO 800.

After processing a large group of images, you usually hit "DONE" or "SAVE IMAGES". I generally save as JPGs, which creates a new folder.  I then photoshop/retouch the hi-res JPGs.

For a single image, when you hit "OPEN IMAGE" in the lower right hand corner, it opens up into "Regular" Photoshop, and looks like this, with a layers palatte:

Description of Tools:

Portrait Exercise (Window Light)

Let's take a look at the differences in quality of light a simple window can offer. Window light looks different when coming from the side, behind or directly at your subject's face. Use of a fill card (reflector or white poster board) can alter the light dramatically and fill in shadows to reveal more detail.

 In Class Demo Exercise: Taking a Portrait with Window Lighting

1.) SIDE LIT: Take a photo with side lighting from a window. Take one with and without a fill card.   Try having the subject's face pointing toward  and then away from the light.

Examples of (what could be) window side-lit portraits:

by Annie Lebovitz

by Annie Lebovitz

 When shooting portraits, pay close attention to the direction the light is coming from and the quality of the shadows. Generally softer shadows are more flattering (i.e. shooting near a window with diffused light, or in the shade or on a foggy day).

2.) BACK LIT:
Try taking a picture with your subject's back to the window. Camera faces window. How does this affect your exposure settings and the light on the face?

3.) FRONT LIT:
Try taking a picture of someone where they are facing the camera and the light is hitting their face directly (window behind the photographer, subject looking out window)

*Note that the window we used did not have direct sun coming through it- the light was diffused so the shadows were softer.

Intro to Digital Photography & Photoshop

Welcome to Art 35 at Stanford Continuing Studies! This 8 week course will introduce you to the basics of your DSLR camera, enable you to take better photos and will provide an introduction to editing and retouching your images in Photoshop CC.

Each week, you can find course materials via this Dropbox link.

Week 1 Class Outline:

• Introducing the group
• Learning from the masters: What makes a good photo?
• Digital Camera Basics: F-Stop/Aperture, Shutter Speed, priority settings on camera, Flash, White Balance, ISO, lens length, motion control, light meter in camera.
• Composition/Lighting
• Shooting in RAW (RAW vs JPG)
• File type and size basics (jpg/tiff/psd/png/pdf, etc…).
• Thinking ahead: creating a cohesive series of images

What Makes a Good picture? Lighting, exposure, composition, quality, color, and subject matter are some of the main considerations.

Let's start with composition. We will look at the work of 3 well known photographers to think about composition: Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston and Gregory Crewdson.
Here's a short video interview on the working process of Gregory Crewdson:



Considerations when thinking about composition:

• Look at all 4 corners of your frame- are you chopping anything off awkwardly?
• What is the subject? (Should be clear what the viewer should look at)
• Rule of 3rds, strive for balance
• Try NOT centering your subject
• Are there any interesting lines in the image I can work with?
• Look for lines, shapes, geometry that guide the eye and frame the subject
• create some "tension space" between objects in the frame.

Rule of Thirds: breaking the frame in thirds both horizontally and vertically, place points of interest in the intersections or along the lines so that your photo becomes more balanced.

Look how the composition in the above image by Henri Cartier-Bresson falls perfectly into the rule of thirds.

Always Shoot RAW: (not JPG)
RAW files are much bigger because they store much more information in the shadows and highlights that can be subtracted later if need be.

Digital Camera Basics:
Try taking your camera off Auto and shooting on Manual. "M Setting". You'll really be able to custom tailor the look you're going for that way.

There are 3 main factors that determine exposure, or how bright or dark your picture will be: F-stop (same as aperture), Shutter Speed and ISO:

Start here:

Try setting your camera to ISO 200, 1/60 Shutter speed and F3.5.  Think of it as a science experiment - keeping one item constant, change the other 2 variables. I usually keep my F-stop as the constant (at the lowest number my lens allows like F2.8 or F3.5) and change the shutter speed and ISO according to the lighting around me. I change the shutterspeed first, and changing the ISO is my last resort (and usually only happens when I'm in a darker area).

• Aperture/F-Stop: (Aperture and f-stop are the same thing). I generally set my F-stop to the smallest number possible (like F2.8 or F3.5) because I like a blurry background (shallow depth of field). The smaller the F-stop number, the blurrier the background:

• Shutter Speed: Set your shutter speed to 1/60 or faster (1/125, 1/250 etc...) to avoid motion blur when shooting hand-held. Shooting at a shutter speed slower than 1/60 (1/30, 1/15, 1/4 etc... ) may cause motion blur. You should use a tripod when shooting at a number smaller than "60".

• ISO: Take ISO off "Auto" and set it manually. The only reason to increase the ISO number is if you're in a low light setting (indoors or at night). Depending on your camera, when you choose a really high number, like 1600 or higher, you may start to see unattractive graininess (speckelled noise). Like this:

 Other items to set on your camera:

• Auto White Balance. This will ensure your image never looks too blue or too orange. Below is what may happen if you have your white balance on the wrong setting for where you are shooting. (the flower images below were shot inside)

How do different lenses make the picture look different?
Here's a great overview. But basically, if you have one zoom lens, try shooting your subject both from up close and from far away. The perspective will change:

Generally, portraits are more flattering when you stand far away and zoom in as well.

RAW vs. JPG:

RAW files are the ones that come right off your camera. You can't save a file as RAW. Each manufacturer has its own label...Nikon RAW files are .NEF,  Canon's are .CRW, etc...

JPGs are smaller compressed files. They take up less room on your computer because they don't have as much detail and information. JPGs can be both hi-res or lo-res. You can print from the hi-res ones, and the lo-res ones go online.

When files have layers in Photoshop, you save them as .PSD or .TIF. (JPGs and RAW files cannot have layers).  It really varies file to file and camera to camera, but below is a very estimated summary of approximately how big these types of files are.

Also very important to remember is that once you shrink an image, you can't make it big again. It's kind of like cutting a piece of paper in half: you can tape it back together but it won't look as good. When making a web size image, always save a duplicate.

Image on the left is print size (hi-res). Image on the right was shrunk to web size (lo-res) then enlarged back to print size (and looks terrible!)