In this post, I’m going to experiment with a new way of delivering tutorials to you … Video.

I like the screen shot and text method to explain things. It gives you something you could print if necessary or have open in another window to go at your own pace. However there are some tutorials that involve movement that don’t work well on a fixed web page. This particular tutorial is one of those.

I discovered the Patch tool in Adobe Photoshop via another video tutorial and I thought it solved a problem in such a great way, I wanted to share it with you, but you really need video for it. So without further ado.

Let me know what you think about this format.

The wonderful folks at I Heart Faces has a weekly feature called Fix-it-Friday. Its a great opportunity to work on your post-processing skills and show off what you can do making a photo better.

The Original Photo

This week’s photo is pretty good as is. The “Rule of Thirds” was followed. It’s making use of an interesting frame. Its well exposed given that its shot in shadows with a bright sunny background. Its sharp and most importantly, the subject has an interesting expression.

But it can be made better.

The first thing at issue in this case is the “Rule of Thirds”. There are some cases where it does not fit and this is one of those. No one rule fits every photo. In this case, I’ve got two reasons why I’m going to break that rule for this photo. First, the subject’s expression gets lost in the wider shot. This isn’t a photo of the landscape, its a photo of the child.

Secondly, we have a great “frame” to use. When you have a frame you generally want to balance your subject in the frame. In this case, all the extra rock becomes negative space, so:

Step 1: Crop

Now there are a lot of differing philosophies on cropping. Some photographers will crop to the optimum shape regardless of the shape of the photo. Maybe it should be square or a tall-skinny panoramic crop. Regardless the balance of things in the photo is the deciding factor.

Cropped to 5x7 shape

The other way of cropping is to consider your output. Now for uploading a photo to a web site or a sharing site like Flickr you don’t need to think about this and the “Crop for optimal” works. But what if your going to print this photo? Well you have to think about the final display. Is this going into a 4×6 metal frame on your desk? Is it going to be matted and hung on a wall? Both require different crops and both can cause you to leave space that is less than optimal.

If your cropping for print, what size to you crop to? 4×6 is longer, skinnier photo than an 8×10 is. The 4×6 is 1.5 times longer than it is wide, the 8×10 is only 1.25 times longer. Then you have 5×7 which is in between.

For safety, cropping to 4×6 will always allow you to crop shorter, but to do so, means you have to have some negative space to crop out. So in some aspects, thinking about an 8×10 crop, but leaving enough space for a 4×6 will let you crop to any size, but you have to be willing to leave extra space at the top and bottom.

There is no right answer here, but its something to think about. I went for a 5×7 for this photo since it also was fairly optimal.

Its shaping up, but the contrast is a little flat and could use a little pop.

Step 2. Color Balance, Equalize, Add Contrast.

Color Corrected and Contrast added

I also wanted to check the white balance and do a little touch up there. Using a simple white balance color adjustment and equalization, our image now has a little bit of pop.

This technique allowed me to remove just a touch of red cast in the original photo. Secondly, the histogram for the photo showed that there wasn’t any blacks in the photo. Its slightly over exposed (probably less than 1/3 stop). As part of the color correction step, the last step adjusts the black point which gives us richer shadows. Now the zipper is closer to black than grey and the other dark areas are richer.

That one step improved the photo considerably. But it still needs a little more contrast, so using the “Curves” Tool (CTRL-M or Apple-M) I applied a slight “S” curve to the combined RGB channel.

You could quit here and be very happy with the photo, but the frame is still pretty bright and following the advice of my first photography instructor, I chose to:

An S curve makes the shadows a bit darker and the lighter tones a bit lighter.

Step 3. Burn in the edges giving the photo a slight vignette.

Using a large brush soft brush (about the size of a quarter when the photo is at a “Fit to Screen” magnification) and the Burn tool set to “Mid-tones” and 12-14%, I gently went over the four corners, the edges working in towards the subject. Its easy to over do it, so I like a low percentage value so I can gradually add darker tones. If you mess up, use your undo to back up as needed.

Step 4. Selective Desaturation (optional)

This photo is about the kids expression. I could do various effects like Black and White, Urban Acid, Glow effects and so on. But I think anything would take away from the expression. About the only thing I would do is maybe continue to separate him from the background.

So far, I’ve applied my Curves and Layers using “Adjustment Layers”. Instead of changing the base image, we can apply these tools to their own layers. They do not increase the size of the file by much and you can come back later and change them if your taste changes. Adjustment Layers can also make use of masks.

A little vignetting with the Burn Tool

If we think of layers as pieces of paper stacked on top of each other, the top sheet will hide the lower sheets. The only way to see the lower layers is to cut holes in the top layer. Thats what layer masks do, they allow you to make holes to let the lower levels show through.

I applied a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer on top of the background layer and set the saturation to -100 (Black and White). Then clicking on the white block in the middle of the layer palette for the Hue/Saturation layer, I used a large soft “Paint” brush with black as the color and painted the subject in. Of course I made mistakes, coloring outside the lines, so to speak. But by switching to a smaller brush and painting in white, I went back and painted over the mistakes. I continued using smaller and smaller brushes, switching between black and white until the child was in color, the rest of the photo was in black and white.

I did not want to leave the photo B&W with bright colors, I only wanted to fade the background colors a bit. I needed to get back to the Hue/Saturation/Lightness tool for that layer and bring some color back. By double clicking on the block on the left side of the layer palette for that layer, you are brought back to that adjustment tool at its current settings. I played with a few varying saturations and decided that -50% was the best.

Happy with the results, I saved the document at a Photoshop PSD file to preserve my layers. Then I saved a copy as a JPEG for posting on line.

Step 5. Blurring the background.

Now time to play a bit further. The background is a bit too much in focus, so I want to blur it a little. Of course, I don’t want the rocks, the ground or the subject defocused. I also have the ground texture that needs to fade a bit instead of just a hard blurred line.

For this, I selected the background layer and then I used the “Quick Mask” tool. This tool lets you apply masks to a regular layer and when your done creating the mask, you are left with a “Selection” that you can then work with just that area.

With Black as the background color and white as the foreground, click on the Quick Mask button and hit the Backspace key. This causes whole mask to fill with black, the background color. Which in effect selects the entire photo. Your photo will turn red and it will look like you’re looking through a red filter. What is in red is selected.

Now with a medium-to-large soft brush and white as the color paint out the parts you do not want selected. In this case, the subject the foreground “ground” and the framing rocks I wanted to keep, so I used the white brush. The regular photo colors come back in these keep areas (we are actually deselecting this from what we will eventually blur!!!).

Like working with any mask, you start with large brushes and then work with progressively smaller brushes, flipping back and forth between black and white to get just the right area selected.

Now with masks, in particular with large soft brushes, you will have some areas that are only partially painted so with a really big soft brush painting in white I clicked over the ground area to the subject’s right giving a gradient from black to white (red to clear in the mask).

To get out of quick mask mode and get your selection, you click the Quick Mask button again and you will see your marching ants marquee roughly selecting the area. Its “roughly” showing you the area because the marching ants can’t show the gradients between black and white.

Here comes the fun. You could at this point apply a blur filter, but that would actually affect the background layer and if you want to refine things more, you need yet another layer. So using the selection, I used CTRL-C (Apple-C) to copy what is in the selection, then CTRL-V (Apple-V) to paste it back in, creating a new layer. This new layer will just have the background area to be blurred.

You can blur this however you want. I used a Lens Blur, Octagon Shape, 5 Radius. It wasn’t enough so I re-applied the filter (Ctrl-F or Apple-F) several times until I had the right amount of blur. In doing so I found there was some area where my subject was still being blurred, so I used the eraser tool on the blur layer to apply a little touch up.

Step 6. Save and Publish.

The final result

The best way to color correct is of course to use a calibrated monitor, color management, but for many, color management is overly complex. Since we don’t all have calibrated monitors and all our viewers won’t have managed systems anyway, we need to know how to color correct “By the Numbers”.

This is the out of camera image, though cropped a bit and resized.

Color correction “By the Numbers” is a common practice used by image technicians who prepare images for four-color print systems that you see for newspapers and magazines. The inks and papers may vary from run-to-run or from day-to-day. They use a technique of using levels and curves to make sure the image calls for the right amount of inks by sampling areas of the image and working the color channels until they get certain numbers, for example they adjust until skin tones are a certain mix of Cyan, Yellow and Magenta.

Well we can do a similar process for our images. Since most of you are probably outputting photos for web use, or printing at mini-labs, if we are to avoid color management, we need to work in the sRGB color space. Most camera’s will default to sRGB and for those that can use other color spaces, like Adobe RGB, set it to sRGB then set Photoshop (or your image editing tool) to use sRGB and you will have the best bet of having your colors consistent through your whole workflow.

Now most pro’s will not use sRGB since it has a limited color range, but these same pro’s are working with color management. If you want maximum performance, sRGB won’t be for you. Think of hese different color management workflows as the difference between music on a CD and music on vinyl. Most people think CD sound is clearer, though there is a loss of information. For some, vinyl provides a more rich sound, despite the static and noise. sRGB is like the CD, Adobe RGB and Color Management is the vinyl.

This technique works well under most circumstances. Where it becomes problematic is when either you’ve overexposed the photo where there are blowouts or where there isn’t anything “white” in the photo. The technique can be used for these, but you have to be careful. But for this tutorial we are going to keep it simple and assume we have whites to work with.

Use the levels tool and the histogram to determine the right exposure.

In our example photo above, we have a photo with a yellow cast to it. There are several candidates for white. The boards should be white. The ice of course should be white and there are several white targets in the two different uniforms. The camera was set to Auto White Balance and under arena lights, things can get off from frame to frame.

To do a quick color correct, use the “Levels” tool. You can bring this up by pressing CTRL-L on a PC or Apple-L on a Mac. Its also under the menu as “Image->Adjustments->Levels”. If you want to do an adjustment level you can as well.

This tool has several things we need to pay attention to. First, at the top of the dialog is a drop-down selector that defaults to RGB. This means that any changes you make will affect all three color channels, Red, Green and Blue the same. This is good if you just want to correct exposure but it won’t remove any color cast.

Notice how the historgram for the blue channel is under exposed in Blues. This is the cause of the yellow cast. Adjust the dropper until it mees the curve.

This tool can also work on each channel individually. You can select the Red channel, make adjustments, select the Green channel, make adjustments, then work on the Blue channel. This is what we are going to do.

The next important part of this dialog is the Histogram. It represents the range of tones in the image. The far left edge of the block represents 0, or the darkest possible values, the right side represents 255 or the brightest values.

An well exposed photo of an average scene will have a nice “bell” shaped curve, with the top of the curve at the center and the curves tapering off to the bottom at the left and right edges. If you see the bulk of the curve on the left side of center, its probably underexposed (which may be what you intended or a natural dark background). Generally if its to the right its over exposed.

Below the histogram curve are three small triangle / drop shaped icons. One is black on the left, one is gray in the middle and one is white on the right. These droppers can be grabbed by your mouse and moved to adjust the tones.

Finally adjust the blacks on the combined RGB channels.

The quick color correct method involves going to the Red channel and sliding the white point dropper left until it meets the point where the histogram bottoms out on the left side. If the histogram touches the left side or spikes back up, leave this channel alone and visit the green channel using the select at the top. You can also use the short cuts of CTRL-1 (red), CTRL-2 (green), CTRL-3 (blue) and CTRL-~ (RGB combined) to quickly move between the channels.

Repeat the process on the green channel, moving the white point left. Then take care of the blue channel. If the photo has a color shift, then you should notice the shape of the histograms will be different for each channel. When its done, the three channel histograms should be similar.

If your photo has specular highlights (like reflections on chrome) there will be a spike at the left/white edge. Since these points are blown out (and are supposed to be), its okay to move the white point past them to the real point where the tones bottom out since they will still be blown out.

After you visit each color channel adjusting the white points, then go back to the combined RGB channel (CTRL-~ or Apple-~) and bring the black point in until it touches the bottom out point on the left side. This will add contrast to the photo (if that’s desired).

The final corrected image.

Since you’re not looking at the actual colors on the screen, but the values of the histogram, you get reasonably accurate colors even on an un-calibrated monitor. If there are no whites, this won’t work.

If you have Photoshop CS3 or later, an additional tool you can use with levels is to hold down the ALT key while sliding the droppers. The photo will turn black and as soon as you seen any spots of color (it will be red color while on the red channel, green on the green channel etc.) then adjust it to the point where you’re on the border of color spots and no color spots. This will be a little more accurate than just using the histogram.

Click “Okay” when done and voila!

There are three main reasons why we want to get our speedlight’s off of our camera:

1. Eliminate Red-Eye.
2. Control the Angle of the Light
3. Control the Size of the Light

Red-Eye

Red-Eye happens when the flash bounces off of the subject’s retina back to the lens. The closer the flash is to the lens the greater the likelyhood this will happen. Since we tend to use our speedlights in dark conditions, the subject’s pupils are wider which amplifies the problem. Since this is about angles, the subject-camera distance factors in as well. The further away the subject is the further away from the lens the light has to be to avoid red-eye.

Generally using an external speedlight mounted to your hotshoe will be much better than a camera’s built-in flash. Most photographers though will invest in a flash bracket, which

attaches to your tripod socket on the bottom of the camera. You mount your speedlight at the top of the bracket and use a cable to run from the speedlight to the camera.

If you’re shooting modern camera’s using TTL flash metering, you will need a special (and expensive) manufacturer’s specific cable to make this connection. For Nikon users, its an SC-29 and is rather expensive ($70 at online stores). You attach this cable to your hotshoe, mount the other end at the top of the bracket and then put your speedlight into the hotshoe at the end of the cable.

This should solve most red-eye problems, except for subjects at a distance. You will also get some better shadows with this setup, but they will still be strong, hard shadows.

Angle of the Light

You can’t be very creative if your light only comes from one direction. Being able to move the light around expands your creative options. Hotshoe mounted speed lights, and even bracket mounted lights basically still give you frontal only light.

Most studio lights have long cables that allow the camera to trigger the light. They also have built-in sensors called “optical slaves” which lets them trigger when they detect that another flash has fired. But we hate cables and we are not going to be using studio strobes.

Luckily for us, the camera makers have given us a cool, wireless way to trigger our speedlight’s off camera. Different makers will call it something different. Nikon calls this their CLS or Creative Lighting System.

If you have an SB-800, SB-600 or SB-900 strobe, you can set it into a remove slave mode and then using your camera’s popup flash or a second speedlight (or a dedicated trigger), you can, from your camera, set the remote strobe’s power settings. Canon and Sony offer similar systems.

Unfortunately, not all camera’s will work with their popup lights. The D100 and D50 do not. The D70 has limits. Cameras that don’t have popup’s, like the D3 or D2X, or the camera’s that don’t support CLS with the popups can use an SB-600, 800 or 900 in the hotshoe or the specialized SU-800 to manage the remote lights.

For Canon users, you will need a 550EX or 580EX to act as master flash. In addition the 420EX and 430EX can be used as slave flashes. I don’t believe Canon pop-up flashes can drive and control remote lights. So Canon users will either need a 2nd speed light or the Canon wireless Infra-red trigger.

The Nikon SB-800 and possibly others ships with a small plate that you can slide the flash into and sit it on a table or other flat surface so that you can sit the flash off camera. This plate can also screw into a standard tripod so you have the ability to place the flash any where you want in respect to the subject. Then you use your on-camera light to trip the off camera light.

You can move the flash close to the subject, place it above them, behind them, to the left, to the right and create different looks.

A popular setup that photographer’s use is to buy a light-weight “light stand” and a hot-shoe compatible “swivel”. The swivel attaches to the light stand and lets you plug your speedlight in to its “hot shoe”. Of course there are no electronics so its really not “hot”. The swivel has a vertical adjustment that lets you aim the light up and down. Most speedlights give you the ability to aim it up, but not down, so the swivel helps in this situation.

One of the major benefits of this off-camera lighting is you can use multiple lights, so if you have two speed lights, then you can use one as a main light and the other as a fill light or a background light. Though there is a lot you can do with one light.

Of course, we are still using our speed lights, which in the grand scale of things are small light sources. Small lights tend to contribute to harsher shadows.

Size of the Light

Shadow hardness is determined by two factors:

• The Size of the Light
• The Distance of the Light

The size and distance both factor together to become a relative light size. A simple way to think about this is that the biggest light source we have, the sun, is 93 million miles away. In this case a really big light is so far away it becomes a small light source. Our speedlight’s small, business card sized light sources are very small lights, but we can get them close to the subject.

At the end of the day, the speed light even when close to the subject is going to be small.

The reason we have harsh shadows from small lights is the direction the light rays hit the subject. The sun being very far away, means almost all light hits the subject from the same direction. When you get a light close to a subject, the light rays start coming in at different angles which softens shadows. So for a given sized light, the closer the softer the shadows. This is backwards thinking since you would think the further away the less intense the light, but closer lights are softer shadows. Try it!

We need to be able to make our speed light larger. There are multiple ways to do it, but I highly recommend an inexpensive shoot-thru umbrella. They are generally around 3-4 feet in size and are made from a translucent white fabric. Using the light stand and swivel above you can now attach the umbrella to the setup (the main purpose of the swivel!). Now you can get really large lights close to the subject for very soft shadows.

The combination is light weight, very portable and very flexible which is why so many photographers use this setup.

Yea, but I don’t have these fancy speedlights and cameras?

Don’t panic. You’re not out of luck. There are plenty of other options from radio remotes and triggers to long cables which let you get your flash off camera. Several people, including myself have the Cactus V2s Radio Remotes to trigger off camera lights.

Basically put, a piece of art, in this case a photo is more interesting when the subject is not centered, but instead off centered 1/3 of the way into the photo.

Look at this graphic:

This is a typical 4×6 photo divided into a “Tic-Tac-Toe” grid. In this case the vertical and horizontal lines divide the photo into “Thirds”. One set, is a left, middle and right thirds, another set is top, middle and bottom. We will refer to these as the Rule of Third’s Lines. The for points where the lines cross each other, we will refer to the Rule of Third’s Points.

So as a rule, your photo will be more interesting if your subject appears at one of the 4 points or uses the lines to divide the photo.

Now, lets examine this photo. This is clearly a snap-shot. I took it and I admit, composing this wasn’t high on my list. I put my center AF point on the subjects eye’s and fired.

Our subject’s head is dead centered in the frame. There is waisted space on either side of him and over top of his head. A simple move to bring his eyes to the top rule of third line would have done wonders for this photo. It would have been even better had I moved his head to the top-left point with him telling his story into the frame. This wasted space, be it empty space, or a busy background is called “Negative Space”. Negative Space simply put is space that doesn’t contribute to the photo.

Now lets look at another example, this time a Landscape.

This time, I chose to use the Rule of Thirds to divide the frame into three horizontal bands. The snowy foreground, the lake and trees and the sky are balanced across the frame. None of the three main areas dominate the photo keeping negative space to a minimum. The position of the tree’s prevented me from putting them on the Rule of Thirds vertical lines but the photo is still kind of broken into thirds horizontally.

“Rules are meant to be broken”

As with any rule, they are more like guidelines than “thou must” hard fast rules. There are times where the Rule of Thirds simply doesn’t work. Some notable exceptions include shooting a sunrise over an ocean. If you put the horizon on the bottom 3rd, the sky better be very interesting or it will begin to degrade the photo. Put the horizon at the top third and the ocean will dominate and pull down the interestingess of the photo. In this case centering the horizon may be a better choice.

In this example:

The subject is centered vertically, but I’ve used the grate to split the frame into 3rds. I did not do a good job balancing the model vertically and as a result there is a little too much space at the top and her feet are a bit cramped along the bottom.

Had I spent a little more time with the composition, I could have placed the Rule of Thirds line at her knees and the top of her dress and made this killer.

Now this can be salvaged by cropping the photo. In this case, instead of it being a 4×6, a 5×7 would let me trim probably enough off the top to fix the photo.

Rule of Thirds works for portraits as well.

In this case, I’m a touch off, but by putting the eyes on the top rule of thirds line. Even so, her eyes are close to the points. You don’t have to be precise with being exactly on the lines or points, but use it as a guideline to avoid centering your subject.

Most head shot portraits will fit well within the Rule of Thirds. You are probably using it and not knowing it.

Use the “Rule of Thirds” as a starting point to your creative compositions. Other compositions can be even more dramatic and of course there will be times where centering makes the best since.

Many people wanting to learn photography are confused by all the numbers and acronyms involved in the craft and it can be quite intimidating.

Lenses are probably among the worst when it comes to cryptic meanings. Even the name that describes it, Nomenclature is a scary word.

Nomenclature def. — A system of names used in the classification of an art or science or other field or subject

Lets look at a typical camera lens name:

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED

Each piece of the name has meaning that you need to understand. Camera makers use this nomenclature to pack enough information for you to understand the lens’s abilities. Lets look at each piece.

Nikon — The Vendor. It could be Sony, Pentax, Canon and so on.

AF-S — This is a Nikon specific code for an Auto Focus (AF) lens that uses an internal motor called “Silent Wave” which uses ultra sonic sound waves to move the focus motor. If your a Canon shooter, your lenses will have USM in the name if they have the “Ultra Sonic Motor”.

DX — This is Nikon’s code for digital cameras with sensors smaller than normal 35mm lenses. We will cover all of these in detail below.

Zoom-NIKKOR — This tells you its a zoom lens which can cover a range of focal lengths, and all Nikon lenses are called NIKKOR’s.

18-135mm — This tells you the length (focal length) of the lens in Millimeters. Since this is a zoom lens it will have two numbers, the widest angle length and the narrowest angle length.

f/3.5-5.6 — This is how much light the lens will let in at its most open setting or aperture or F-Stop setting. When you see two numbers, it means that wide open setting will vary typically based on the focal length.

G — This is a Nikon specific code indicating that the lens does not have an on-lens control for the F-stop. Non G lenses have a ring that adjusts the aperture. G lenses have to be controlled from the camera body.

IF-ED — IF stands for Internal Focus and ED is Extra Dispersion glass (sharper than normal glass).

Here is a Canon example:

Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM

EF — Auto Focus

20-300mm — The Focal Length

f/3.5-5.6 — The Aperture

L — Canon’s specific code for their pro-grade glass

IS — Image Stabilization — the lens can help minimize camera shake

USM — Ultrasonic Motor focusing

You can see a lot of information is packed into these code strings. Lets look at another very basic simple example:

AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D

Much like above, we can tell its Autofocus (AF), its Nikon, and its a 50 millimeter lens. There is no range of numbers so this is a fixed or “prime” lens. Prime lenses are generally considered sharper than zooms and are usually cheaper, but are less flexible than zoom lenses.

A prime lens is the simplest lens to work with. It only has one focal length and its maximium lens opening or aperture is always a single value. In the example above, its an F1.8 lens which lets in a lot of light.

Lets break this down so we can understand what the numbers mean.

50mm is the focal length. That is the distance from the from lens element to the film plane is 50mm or about 2 inches. A 35mm lens would have a distance of 35mm. A 300mm lens would be 300mm long. Over the years, prime lenses are generally found in common sizes like 20mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, 120mm, 135mm, 200mm and 300mm. There are of course smaller and larger lenses.

For all practical purposes, these numbers by themselves are meaningless but when you combine it with the film (or digital sensor) size we can now determine if the lens makes things bigger or smaller than what our eyes normally see. Lenses that make things bigger are called “Telephoto” lenses. Those that make things smaller are called “Wide Angle” lenses and those that approximate what we see naturally are called “Normal” lenses.

The standard by which we measure most things are 35mm cameras. The number 35mm comes from the size of the film where each frame has an area of 24x36mm which is rounded down to 35mm for convienience. Other common film formats include medium format films which are generally 60mm square format. Also APS whch is a 24mm format (16x24mm).

Since 35mm is the most common almost everything we deal with in digital photography will be based on that format.

A 50mm lens is considered “Normal” for 35mm film. Actually anything between 35mm and 70mm is considered normal. Normal is actually calculated as the diagonal of the film size. Now to calculate that will require you going back to high school algebra so to avoid that trama you’re just going to accept that for 35mm film, 50mm is normal.

Anything 35mm or smaller is considered a “wide angle” lens and anything 70mm and larger is considered telephoto. That is if your shooting 35mm film (or a full frame digital camera like the Nikon D700 or the Canon EOS 5D). However most of us are using dSLR’s with sensors that are more the size of an APS file size. Nikon calls this their DX format. With the exception of the Nikon D3 and the D700 all other Nikon’s use a 24x16mm sensor which is almost identical to APS. These camera’s film sensors are 1.5X smaller than their 35mm counterparts. When using 35mm lenses on these DX bodies, you have to factor in this 1.5X multiplier.

Canon cameras with the exception of the 5D and the EOS 1ds line use smaller sensors as well, but they come in two sizes, either a 1.6X sensor in the Rebel and 10d,20d…50d line or a 1.3x sensor in the EOS 1d family. Because 1.6x and 1.3x are harder to calculate, the rest of this tutorial will use Nikon’s 1.5x factor for examples (which is close enough to 1.6x and most of you are not using 1d’s).

Now you go out and by that normal 50mm lens and decide to mount it on your Nikon D80, a 1.5x crop camera. The lens on that body behaves like a 75mm lens would on a full frame (35mm body). This means a 35mm lens becomes the normal lens on a 1.5x camera. 50mm and larger are telephoto, and 28mm and wider are wide angle. Back to the original example above, 18mm-135mm would allow you to zoom from a very wide angle to a medium telephoto distance. But the lens above has a DX in its nomenclature.

This means that it is specially designed for the 1.5X cameras. If you were to put it on a 35mm camera, it wouldn’t let light hit the entire frame. Camera makers can build smaller, lighter weight and less expensive lenses for the 1.5x cameras if they don’t have to cover the entire 35mm film area. If you see a lens marked DX (in Nikons, Canon has another designation) then you really should not use it on a full frame camera.

Since your going to use it, you have to think of the numbers in a different way. 18mm * 1.5 is 27mm and 135mm x 1.5 is around 202mm (we will round down to 200). This lens on the 1.5x cameras will be in effect 28mm-200mm lens which is a medium-wide angle to long telephoto lens.

Now for something really confusing. If a 50mm lens is normal. A 100mm lens is a 2x magnification. A 300mm lens is a 6x lens. If you were to go buy binoculars from a store you would see them rated like 7X or 10X. In camera terms (on full frame cameras) a 7X binocular would be a 350mm lens and a 10X pair would be 500mm. That’s pretty straight forward. But if you were to go buy a video camera that has a 40X Zoom that would imply, in full frame terms the lens would be a 2000mm lens, but thats not the case. The lenses have a wide angle side and the multiplier starts there. This comes into play when you buy point and shoot digital cameras since their lenses are typically measured as a 10X Zoom. They go wider than normal. This means the telephoto side is 10X the widest side. In our example above, our 18-135mm lens is a 7.5X lens but its magnification above normal is only about 2.5X on a 35mm camera or 4x on a DX camera. Confusing isn’t it?

Instead of trying to use these X multipliers, its easier to understand what the mm’s numbers mean and what is wide and what is telephoto.

The next major part of understanding lenses in the aperture of F-stop. This is a number that measures how much light the lens lets through. The maximum F-stop number is calculated by dividing the focal length of the lens by the diameter of the lens Therefore a 50mm long lens with a 50mm wide lens would have a maximum F-Stop of f/1.0. Each full stop of light is 1.4X larger. So you will see standard whole F-stops of:

1.0 1.4 2.0 2.8 4.0 5.6 8.0 11.0 16.0 22.0 and so on

F1.0 lenses are very rare. Primes are generally the lenses with the widest openings and you will typically find them with apertures like f/1.4 f/1.8 etc (1.8 is 2/3 of the way between 1.4 and 2.0). Prime lenses are quite simple in many cases involving only one or two pieces of glass to form the lens. Zoom lenses are quite complex and to keep their sizes reasonable, there are some complex lens combinations at work. These complex lens settings can restrict the maximum amount of light. Most zoom lenses will have a variable maximum f-stop frequently in the f/3.5-5.6 range.

Usually in these cases at the widest lens setting the lens will be open to its widest aperture. So the 18mm-135mm at 18mm will most likely be an f/3.5 lens. But zoom out to 135mm and the widest opening will shift to f/5.6.

Its important to understand that your 50mm f/1.8 lens lets in over 4 times the light as a zoom lens with an f/3.5-5.6 aperture range. That is the difference in shooting at ISO 200 or ISO 800 or shooting with a 1/125th shutter speed and a 1/30th shutter speed. You will find pro-grade zooms that have fixed f/2.8 apertures. These lenses are typically in the $1500 price range, but they are typically as sharp as primes and let in quite a bit of light relative to the consumer and prosumer zooms.

Most all lenses can close down to smaller openings in the f/16 to f/32 range or smaller. This lens opening has a major control for out photo creativity. That is something known as Depth of Field. The smaller the opening (larger f-stop number) the more of the photo will be in focus. An f/11 or f/16 aperture setting will have a lot of the photo, say from 6 feet away to infinity in focus. An f/1.4 opening will only have say an inch or so in focus. If you want a blurred background for your photos, you want to have a more open lens. If your shooting landscapes, you want to stop down to a smaller lens opening. If your lens can only open to f/5.6 your going to have an inbetween depth of field.

But this is only part of the depth of field equation. A wide angle lens will naturally have more depth of field than a telephoto lens will. Thus a photo shot with a 300mm f/2.8 lens wide open at f/2.8 will have a very blurry background. This $4500 lens is treasured by sports photographers as it helps them separate their subjects from the typically busy backgrounds. Where as landscape photographers like wide angle lenses to get more landscape in, but they naturally have more depth of field.

First up we have to understand how metering works. Look at this diagram:

The light source, in this case the sun, is falling on the subject. The light then bounces off the subject toward the photographer where the camera measures the amount of light. In this scene, the light also bounces off of the tree, the sky and the ground and it reflects towards the camera as well.

In days of old when our camera’s did not have meters, we used hand held meters and read the light at the subject. Its called “Incident Metering”. This meter is the most accurate since it measures the exact amount of light at the subject and does not take the background into consideration.

When our cameras got internal meters, they were able to now measure the light reflected off the subject. These are called “reflectance meters”. They do a great job in most cases where the scene’s different tones all average out to a middle value and can be fooled.

Most cameras have multiple ways of measuring the light. Modern cameras will typically have three different options:

• Matrix or Evaluative
• Center Weighted
• Spot or Partial Spot

Matrix or Evaluative metering is probably the meter mode you use the most. It is the default meter mode on most modern cameras. In this mode, the camera reads data from multiple locations across the frame. Some might be as few as 5 locations to over 1000. These values are then compared to a list of scenes stored in the camera’s database. The engineers evaluated over 30,000 different shooting combinations and they compare the information coming from the different cells in the matrix of sensors looking for a match in the database and it determines the best exposure. In theory, this is smart enough to detect snowy or beach scenes or troublesome backlit scenes and adjust the camera accordingly. This should cause more photos to be exposed properly.

Center Weighted reads the center of the frame (typically the inside area bounded by all the autofocus points) and measures the light there. It also measures the light outside this area. Then it averages the two giving a bias to the center area, letting it factor into say 2/3 of the exposure and the outer area 1/3 of the exposure. This is based on the fact that most people who shoot photos are people taking snap-shots and those people tend to center their subjects. This is the method that most old film cameras use.

The Spot meter measures a very small spot of the view finder. This is a very precise measurement. For many camera’s that spot is about the size of the center autofocus point and is located in the center. More advanced cameras can read its “spot” from any of the autofocus points.

If your shooting in automatic modes, Matrix meters will generally give you the best measurement. Many cameras recommend that if you shoot manual mode to not use Matrix metering but it still gives the best measurement for an in camera meter.

Manually adjusting Exposure

The "250" in the display is the shutter speed, in this case 1/250th of a second. The 9.5 is the aperture, which is 1/3 stop above F8

Your camera has a gauge in its viewfinder. Older cameras might have a needle that slides up and down and when its level the exposure is “correct”, meaning the camera now thinks the camera thinks the camera’s settings will produce a middle gray exposure. More modern cameras will have a digital gauge in viewfinder that looks like +|–0–|- with a pointer underneath the gauge. Each pip represents 1/3 of a stop of exposure either over (towards the +) or under (towards the -) exposure. (some cameras will be in half stops and may show up to two stops over/under exposure). The exposure is “correct” when its at 0.

While pointing your camera at your subject, you adjust either the shutter speed dial up or down or you adjust the aperture up or down (and with digital you can even adjust the ISO up or down) until the pointer reaches the 0 point. Of course there will be times where you don’t want a zero setting, such as shooting sunsets, or the white background high key portraits and you can adjust the camera to over or under expose for the effect your going for.

When you recognize that the matrix meter is not going to get you the right exposure, its time to switch over to the spot meter and take advantage of it.

In situations where you are in control of the setting, say family portraits, you can have your subject hold a “Gray Card” which can be picked up at most camera stores. These gray cards are middle gray. You then aim your spot meter at the gray card and adjust the meter is centered. This should give you a very accurate measurment for the exposure.

Sometimes you can’t use a gray card in that case you try to find something thats lit with the same light as your subject. Outdoors you can use grass as long as its not washed out from the sun reflecting at you or you can use a light asphalt or darker concrete to get close. I’ve even used the referee’s stripes to meter off of geting a black and white stripe in the area of the spot.

So put it all together. You have light. You read it using the meter in the camera. You adjust the shutter speed or aperture up or down until the meter reads the right amount of light. Take a perfectly exposed photo. Sit back and enjoy the marvel and wonder.

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This would have been much harder in an automatic mode.

Around that time the concept of automatic settings started showing up in the cameras and photographer’s got the ability to make one adjustment and the camera took care of the rest.

Exposure simply put is making sure the “right” amount of light hits the film for a single photo. What “right” means is up to interpretation. You might want a dark moody photo or you might want a light misty photo. But if you control the exposure, then its your decision.

Exposure is controlled though three measurements:

• How sensitive is the film to light or Sensitivity
• How long the shutter is open to let light thru or Shutter Speed
• How much light does the lens lets through or Aperture

You may know “Sensitivity” as the camera’s ISO setting. ISO stands for the International Standards Organization so its really not a camera setting, but the ISO defined the values that describe the settings. But ISO is three characters so it fits well on camera buttons.

Before we can go on, we are going to have to get into some math. Its really not complex, so don’t freak out. Remember doubling and halving.

The amount of light hitting the film or digital sensor is called an “Exposure Value” or EV. A change in EV from one whole number to another, say 1 to 2 is called a “stop”. An EV of 2 is twice as bright as an EV of 1. An EV of 3 is twice as bright as 2, 4 times as bright as 1. This concept of doubling is very important. If you go the other direction from EV 10 to EV 9, its half the light.

The EV numbers are kind of like celsius temperatures where someone decided that 0 would mean freezing. In this case EV 0 is defined as the amount of light that would be properly exposed at 1 second shutter speed with an F1.0 aperture. An F1.0 lens in theory lets 100% of the light pass through. Some typical EV numbers: A household interior is around EV 5 to 7. A Bright sunny day is EV 15. You can read a more detailed description at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value wikipedia.

Most cameras can be adjusted in 1/3 stops or EVs of light. So you will see settings like -0.3 or 0.7 where -0.3 is 1/3 of a stop less light, or 0.7 is 2/3 of a stop more light. When you turn the dial on your camera, each click is 1/3 of a stop. You need to be aware your camera adjusts in 1/3 stops but for the balance of this tutorial we are only going to deal with whole stops to keep it simple.

Back to ISO.

Films are measured in values like 100, 200 and 800. These are the numbers that the ISO defined to standardize film measurements. The basic bright daylight film you buy in the store is ISO 100 film. Many of your digital cameras best quality setting is ISO 100. You can buy ISO 200 film which is twice as sensitive to light as ISO 100. ISO 400 is 4 times as sensitive to light as ISO 100. Your digital camera’s ISO settings mimic film, so you can set your camera to ISO 100, 200, 400, 800 and in some cases 1600 (or higher!). Of course you have those 1/3 settings, so you can set the camera to ISO 640 (and you can buy ISO 640 film too)!!!

The key thing to remember is each time you double or half your ISO number, your doubling or halving the sensitivity of your film or sensor.

The other think to keep in mind, the higher the film speed (ISO), the more grain your photo will have. An ISO 1600 speed film has golfball sized grain where and ISO 100 speed film has almost undetectable grain. With digital this grain is known as noise. This is why you don’t like the photos from your cameras when you set it to 1600. They are noisy/grainy.

Now with film, you need to tell the camera how sensitive the film is and the whole roll stays at that sensitivity. More modern cameras can read the ISO setting from the film canister so you don’t have to set it. For digital users, you can change the ISO setting from shot to shot, so you can go from bright outdoors (ISO 100) to indoors (ISO 800 or 1600) without having to change film.

Remember numbers double and half because light doubles and halves.

Shutter Speed

The next camera setting that we are going to cover is shutter speed. This is how long the shutter is open to let light through. It is measured in seconds or fractions of a second. Like film speed, a halving or doubling of the shutter speed half or doubles the light…. sort of. You are going to need to remember this chart or remember one value and do some math!!!

Lets start with the most common shutter speed to start with, which is 1/60th of a second. Your camera will show this as “60″ on its displays. The reason we are starting with 1/60th is that its the minimum (slowest, longest duration) shutter speed that most people can hand hold their camera and avoid camera shake. More on that in a bit.

The standard whole stop shutter speeds for most dSLRs are:

30″ is 30 seconds which is something you might use at night shooting stars (the ” means seconds). You will notice the doubling / halving isn’t perfect. 1/8th should half to 1/16th, but its 1/15th. This is to help you remember the numbers rather than being precise with math, the same when you move from 1/60 to 1/125th of a second.

Change the shutter speed from 1/60 to 1/125 (60 and 125 on the camera display) and you have halved the light hitting the film. Go from 1/60 to 1/30 and you double the light.

A camera set to ISO 100 and 1/60 shutter speed is the same exposure as ISO 200 and 1/125th of a second. ISO 200 is twice as sensitive, but 1/125th is half the light. Its critical to understand this if your going to shoot in anything other than “P” or program mode (or the little symbol settings!)

Aperture

The third number that effects things is how much light comes in through the lens. Lenses have an adjustment called “aperture” which works just like your pupils in your eyes. The brighter, the smaller the whole, the darker the wider the opening. These settings are referred to as “F-stop”. These numbers kind of break the doubling rule because we are dealing with circles, but the numbers double every other value. So your whole F-Stops are:

So changing a lens from F5.6 to F8 halves the amount of light. Going from F5.6 to F4 doubles the amount of light coming through the lens.

See we are still doubling and halving. That means if your camera is set to:

• ISO 100 1/60 F5.6

and you want to change to a faster shutter speed, you have to change one of the other two settings to keep the same exposure. So lets say you want a shutter speed of 1/125th (one stop) you would either have to change the F-stop to F4 or change the ISO to 200. If your shooting film, you really can’t adjust the ISO between shots, only between rolls, so in most cases you will balance between Shutter Speed and Aperture to set the exposure.

Our equipment gives us some practical limits. Many of our lenses do not open up any wider than F5.6, so you couldn’t in this example change to F4. Also our ISO settings are for the most part limited to 100-1600 which is only 4 stops of adjustments.

This is all the complex hard stuff. Remember doubling and halving (except f-stops which double/half every other one) and to keep the same exposure, if you adjust one up, you have to adjust one of the other two down.

Now what does all this mean and why is manual better?

Well lets look at the effects changing these numbers mean.

We have addressed ISO sensitivity already. The higher the number, the more grain or noise you get, the lower the less. Sometimes grain makes photos look better, but for the most part, we want to minimize it. But if your being creative, you might want that grainy look.

Shutter speed affects motion blur. The shorter (or higher) shutter speed, the more the image is frozen. The longer (or lower) the shutter speed the greater the chance blur caused by movement.

We call this “Motion Blur” as opposed to the lens being out of focus. Motion blur comes from two sources: The subject moving and you moving. Lets address your moving first.

A wide angle lens shows less motion than a telephoto lens does. To avoid more math, accept the fact. If your shooting at 300mm you will see much more motion in your shots than shooting at 24mm. There is a standard rule of thumb that you should have a shutter speed that is faster than 1 divided by the size of the lens. Thus if you have the standard 50mm lens on your camera, you need a 1/50th shutter speed to hand hold the shot (which is 1/60th since we are only working with whole stops!!). Your 300mm lens therefore needs 1/300th (rounded up to 1/500th).

If you’re more shaky than most, then you might need a higher shutter speed, or if your more steady, you can cheat and use slower shutter speeds. But its a good guideline. That is until digital came along. Many of our cameras sensors are smaller than 35mm film. Most Nikons are 1.5x smaller. The Consumer Canon’s are 1.6x smaller, while the EOS 1 family is 1.3x (full frame cameras aside). To keep math easy, I’m staying with 1.5x. So your 50mm lens on a Nikon D80 is effectively a 75mm lens. So to hand hold a 50mm lens on a 1.5x camera you need a shutter speed of 1/75th (which rounds up to 1/125th). That means you need to take this rule of thumb and up it one shutter speed if you want to eliminate blur from your shaking!!!!

Your motion blur is almost always unwelcome and you need to keep this minimum shutter speed formula in mind. Unless you have a Vibration Reduction / Image Stabilization lens, you should put your camera on a tripod if you have to have a slower shutter speed. These VR/IS lenses generally let you hand hold exposures 2-4 stops slower than non-VR lenses. So if you are of average shakiness, and you need a 1/60th to hold a 50mm lens, then you can typically hand-hold 1/8th to 1/15th of a second with a VR/IS lens. Keep in mind though, VR/IS lenses are for your movement. They don’t do squat for your subject’s movement.

Notice the little bit of blur on the skate, pony tail and hands give this a sense of motion.

Subject movement can be desirable or not. Lets look at a couple of examples. Taking a photo of a helicopter at a high shutter speed will freeze the rotor blades and the helicopter will look odd just sitting there in the sky. In this case, you want a lower shutter speed to allow the rotors to blur, but not so low that the helicopter itself blurs and the photo will look much better.

Shooting a car racing around a track with a high shutter speed makes the car look like its just sitting still, where as a slower shutter speed will let the wheels turn during the exposure giving some sense of life and movement to the photo.

Shooting sports, people think you want to freeze action, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes some blur in the hands and feet convey motion to the viewer and can make for a more dramatic photo. But a lot of times you want to capture your child playing and you want a high shutter speed to do this.

So how much movement freezing you want is up to you and if you control the shutter speed you can make those decisions.

The lens opening controls how much of the photo is in focus. With an aperture/f-stop of say F2.0, very little of the photo will be in focus, maybe only a few inches. This is called “Depth of Field”. Sometimes a blurred background while the foreground is in focus is desirable. You need a lens that can open wide, say F2.8 to do this. Sometimes you want a lot in focus. You need a high Fstop of say F11 to get that effect.

Keep in mind the closer you are to the subject the less will be in focus, the further away the more depth will be in focus. Shooting a closeup portrait at F11 will still have a blurred background where a F2.0 fstop may only have the eyes in focus.

Shooting manual gives you control over motion, depth of focus and grain and how you mix those determines the look of the photo.

But wait, thats not all. If you call now, we will also include….

You’re saying “something is still missing” and you’re right. You get the doubling and halving and the effects they cause, but what does it all mean?

If you look at any given scene you shoot, there will likely be some dark things, some bright things and some things somewhere in the middle. If you were to look at everything in the photo and average dark, light and in between you would find that in most cases it averages out to the middle values.

Our camera’s have meters that look at the scene and determine what this average middle value (and since we don’t care about color here, just shades of grey), the camera wants to declare a photo properly exposed when there is enough light hitting the film/sensor will cause everything in the scene to average to middle gray.

In most cases this works and this is the basis of your camera’s automatic settings. Lets quickly look at the settings and what they do:

P or Program:

This mode, the camera figures out what ISO your camera is set to, then tries to adjust the shutter speed and aperture for you to the safest settings. Its going to make sure you have enough shutter speed to hand hold the lens and then if there is enough light, work to get an average depth of field to get enough in focus. If its really bright, it will push the shutter speed up, if its dark, it will try to open up the lens fully before having to cheat on the shutter speed.

You end up with very average photos in P mode. I never use this mode.

A or Aperture Preferred (Av in Canon terms):

This was the first automatic mode to show up on cameras. You set the lens to how much light you want to let in, the camera then calculates the right shutter speed based on the ISO setting. You only have to control one thing. (Note, I shoot in this mode for my general photography). You have some control, but the camera is still trying to get to that average middle gray and you might be forced into some shutter settings you don’t want.

S or Shutter Preferred (Tv or Time Value in Canon terms):

In this mode, you pick the shutter speed, the camera sets the lens opening. You can concentrate on how much movement you want in the photo or how frozen things need to be and the camera makes the rest of the adjustments. I rarely use this mode. The one time I find this useful is if I’m trying to use flash outdoors and I need to guarentee the shutter is open long enough for the flash to fire.

Then there is the M mode or Manual.

The white background would have been gray in an automatic mode.

In Manual YOU are responsible for both the Shutter Speed and Aperture settings (and the ISO setting for that matter). You’re saying “Why would I ever want to do that since I can control depth of field and motion using the automatic modes?” That’s a good question and there are two main answers for that.

1. The camera meter is frequently fooled. A really bright spot will make the camera think its brighter than it really is, causing the photo to be too dark. Or your shooting someone in a room with dark paneling on the wall. The camera will see that dark wood and make the photo too light.

Since our scenes are not always “middle gray” you need to be able to recognize these situations and be able to adjust for it. A classic problem is your kids are playing in the shade of a tree and you want to shoot that, but there is a lot of bright grass in the background and it tricks the camera and you get a dark photo.

Since You have the ability to look through the view finder and see what is really there, you have the ability to fix this problem by adjusting the settings.

2. You might want a photo to be brighter or darker than the camera wants for creative reasons. You want one of those “High Key” all white portraits of your kids? If you leave it up to your camera, you will get a nice gray photo. By shooting in manual, you can adjust the camera to what you want to accomplish and not take what the camera thinks you want.

There are more than these two reasons but those two are the main ones and the rest can be classifed into either of those.

Some other examples of where Manual is better:

• Studio Photography — your camera meter can’t measure studio strobes and you generally have to have a special hand held meter to get the light settings and then you dial the camera to the right settings.
• Shooting in a gym — the light falling on the players is fairly even in most cases, but dark bleachers, white walls, dark away jersey and white home jerseys will almost guarantee that you won’t have a middle gray photo, so meter off of something mid-toned and set your camera manually and shoot the game without having to worry about if your camera has a bunch of away jerseys against dark bleachers throwing the camera off.

Finally shooting in manual makes you have to think about these three settings and once you understand them and can shoot successfully in manual mode, then you will be able to move on to dealing with flashes and such.

Questions? Thoughts?

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The source image....

This week I had the honor to be the photo judge for a photo blog called I Heart Faces (http://iheartfaces.blogspot.com/), a blog dedicated to portraiture.  This week’s theme was “Wonder” and after sifting through nearly 400 photos in both an adult and kid’s category, the top ten in each category was selected and the winners will be announced on Saturday.

But the blog has a cool feature called “Fix it Friday” where the blog owners post a photo and challenge members to fix it.  This week I decided that the “Fix It” would make a good post, so here goes.

Step 1. Convert to sRGB
The photographer was working in Adobe RGB color space.  Most professionals prefer to work in Adobe RGB since it supports a wider range of colors (gamut), but if your primarily working on photos for the web or your likely to print your photos at a local mini lab and don’t want to mess with color Management, an sRGB workflow (sRGB is the color space for web browsers) while not allowing the maximum colors, keeps things simple and easy.  Think of it in music terms.  Adobe RGB is like Vinyl LP albums and sRGB is like CD’s.  The keen ear, not offended by the scratches and hiss of an LP will find a fuller sound from the LP’s and the CD’s are clipped a little.  But most people prefer to not have the scratches and hiss in favor of the clean sound.

My photoshop setup detected the Adobe RGB file and gave me the option to convert it when I loaded it.  If I left it Adobe RGB and you looked at it in your browser the colors would look muted.  Since this is heading to the web, sRGB conversion was a no-brainer.

Step 2. Crop to 8×10
You can see in the original, that the photo is centered horizontally, and there is a little space above the subject’s head.  Not caring for the empty or negative space on either side of the subject,  I decided that a vertical crop was in order.  I couldn’t reasonably get the photo to a rule of thirds crop and keep it horizontal and I’m not sure I would have liked it anyway since it would have just shifted the negative space from one side to the other.  I also like to crop to print sizes, 4×6, 5×7 or 8×10 since I have to assume at some point I will want to print the photo.  For this one, an 8×10 crop let me crop the photo fairly tightly.  This put the subjects eyes on a rule-of-thirds line.

Step 3. Blemish Removal
Using the Rubber Stamp or Clone tool, I cleaned up a couple of blemishes and cleaned up some other skin coloration issues.

Step 4. Bright Eyes – Dodged whites, overlay layer – iris lightening 50%
Next, I attacked the dark eyes.  Using the Dodge tool (12% midtones, soft brush a little larger than the area to lighten) I lightened the whites a bit.  Then it was time to tackle the irises. To solve this, I add a new layer above the background, set the blend mode to “Overlay” and check the “Fill with 50% gray” check box.  Then pick a paint brush a little smaller than the iris and with the color white, paint on the overlay layer around the iris’s making sure to stay away from the outer and inner edges of the iris.  This will typically be too bright and sometimes can have an odd color shift.  So I typically set the overlay layer to 50% opacity to not go overboard with the eyes.  You can adjust to taste.

Step 5. Flatten
Then flatten the image.  I find that the overlay layer gets in the way for future actions.

Basic Corrections Added

Step 6. Equalized (3 channel white balance)
Looking at the Levels tool, the histogram shows that the tones don’t make it to black, nor do they make it to white.  An easy fix, called equalization stretches the tones to range from black to white giving the image a little more contrast.  But in this case, I took a peak at the histogram for each color channel, Red, Green and Blue (you can pick the color channel from a drop down on the layers tool (CTRL-L or Apple-L) or you can use the short cuts CTRL-1 for the Red channel, CTRL-2 for the Green and CTRL-3 for the Blue channel. CTRL-~ gets you back to the combined RGB view.

Well the Red and Green channels needed more stretching than the Blue channel, so using the White point dropper I visited each channel, dragging the dropper from the right side of the histogram box until it touched where the histogram bottomed out on the light side.  This is a very quick color correcting white balance method, presuming there are whites in the photo!  I then went back to the combined channel view and slid the black point dropper in until it met the histogram.  This did wonders for the color.

Now I have a good photo, suitable for printing or uploading to the web.  But lets take it further and see what we can make out of it.

The Result

Step 7. Screen layer 50%
I was in a particularly high-key mood today, so I decided to lighten the image.  After playing with some contrast curves and not liking what I saw, I felt it was time to try this tried and true method.  Duplicate your background layer and set the blend mode on the new layer to Screen.  This is like over exposing the photo by a full stop and it doesn’t blow out highlights.   In this case, it was still a bit too much.  I used the opacity to adjust to taste, and as it worked out 50% made me happy.

Step 8. Alabaster Portrait Action from Action Central.
Next I tried a couple of canned actions that I have. First up was Urban acid, so working on a duplicate copy of the image, the Urban acid script ran and the results were pretty good, but I still wasn’t feeling it.  I went to another script I have called “Alabaster Portrait” that I got from Action Central (http://www.atncentral.com).  And after running that script, I was very happy with my results.

I started with the Lab conversion using the Luminence Channel

In part 1, we learned multiple ways to convert a color digital photo to black and white.  But frequently that result isn’t good enough.

Images frequently, such as our sample, have a very flat contrast.  That is, there are not a lot of black blacks and not a lot of white whites.  This is actually a good thing.  Most pro photographers want to shoot flat image in camera and will set their camera to produce the flattest images possible because its easier to add contrast in post (production) than it is to take it out.

Looking at the histogram for the image (the Levels tool or CTRL-L or Apple-L on Macs will display the histogram). You can see the curve of tones does not reach the 0 black point or the 255 white point.

You can perform an operation called equalization where you use the black and white tear-drop shaped drag controls and slide them inward until it meets the point where the histogram curve bottoms out.  This in effect takes the image tones and stretches them so that they span the range of 0 to 255 giving us a white point and a black point.  This is an easy way to add pop to images (including color).  Be aware stretching the color or tone range causes Photoshop to insert gaps into the tones to spread what might be packed over 220 total tone value and stretch to 255.   This is a little destructive to your image.   Many people prefer to use “Adjustment Layers” to leave the original layer alone.

Adjusting levels too much clips the highlights and shadows too much.

If you get too aggressive with your equalization, you will begin “clipping” your image.  In the example shown here, I was too aggressive on the white point and you can see areas of the photo starting to blow out and become unattractive.  Likewise on the black side, if you clip too much, you start loosing shadow detail and get large areas of solid black.  If thats the effect your going for, then great, but most of the times, you want to avoid this and just bring the drag points in to meet the histogram.

That said, frequently images will have really bright spots, such as the sun shining off of a chrome bumper.  These are generally small areas that are called “specular highlights”.  They are expected to be blown out.  You will recognize them in the histogram curve as the tones drop to the bottom then suddenly spike as you near the 255 value.

Properly adjusted highlight levels.

If you have specular highlights, its okay to slide the dropper left until it meets the real bottoming out of the tone histogram since the spike has no detail anyway.

The next step is adjust the contrast to get the effect your looking for.  For this, I recommend the curves tool (or a Curves adjustment layer!!).  With curves you can selectivally adjust the shadows, midtones and highlights as necessary.  Applying a simple and subtle “S” curve, pulling the shadows a bit darker and pushing the highlights up is an easy way for you to add contrast and do it with control.

There would be a strong templation to use this tool or levels to brighten the over all image but you risk blowing out highlights too much.

A slight S curve applied for contrast.

We see a lot of photos where the subject has a milky white skin, yet the darks are nice and rich.  One way to accomplish this is to duplicate your source layer, so that you have two copies stacked on top of each other.  The set the layer blending mode for the new layer to “Screen”.  This will lighten the photo and it may very well lighten it too much.  You can adjust the opacity to taste.  Then if your black areas lightened up too much you can use the erase and erase the blacks on the top layer to let the darker bottom layer show through.

Now from this point, depending on the eyes, you might need an eye lightening technique or if you want a vignette you might want to burn

Adding a Screen layer is a great way to brighten an image.

the edges of the photo or add some textures to finish the shot.

The finished photo on the left and the original conversion attempt on the right.