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Verman
Jul 4, 2005
Third time is a charm right?

InternetJunky posted:

Any tips/advice would be most appreciated.

Make a mask, paint out the eagle. Use a semi hard round brush. You don't want to use a solid brush or the outline will seem to hard. You also don't want to use too soft of a brush or the edges will seem too feathered, no pun intended. Something in the 60-80 hardness range will probably work.

For the areas that you think are difficult (I feel like there is a pretty distinct boundary but Im also on a calibrated monitor), try using the pen tool to create a vecor mask. You can always soften the edge but the pen tool is a great way to mask things off very quickly. It will be able to recreate those natural curves of the wing tips that you wouldn't be able to freehand with your mouse and a brush.

If you are worried about it taking too long, it comes with time. Masking something like this probably wouldn't take me any longer than a few minutes to do either way, probably faster with the pen tool.

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Bape Culture
Sep 13, 2006

Also do a poo poo load of noise removal in post first?
I'd be cranking the colour noise slider and seeing what happened as that's what it looks like to me.

MrBlandAverage
Jul 2, 2003

GNNAAAARRRR

InternetJunky posted:

I feel like a retard, but I think I really need someone to dumb down how to mask properly. If there's a clear delineation between foreground and background I have no problem, but if there's not I'm in trouble.

Have your NR'd image on the top layer and the original on the bottom. Paint in the mask like you would normally do - first do a magic wand selection and fill it in on the layer mask. Then zoom in and refine by hand it for the parts like the wingtip where the magic wand won't do, which indeed can take a lot of time. You can hit \ (backslash) to show the layer mask as an overlay.

edit: I meant magnetic lasso in this case, not magic wand. Duh.

MrBlandAverage fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Dec 7, 2011

XTimmy
Nov 28, 2007
I am Jacks self hatred
Wouldn't the magnetic lasso fare better? Especially if you followed MrBlandAverage's advice with the denoise layer. That plus a bit of manual work.

InternetJunky
May 25, 2002

Thanks all for the tips and advice. I think I managed to get a decent result, even if it did take way too long. :)



Original for reference:

InternetJunky fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Dec 7, 2011

ass is my canvas
Jun 7, 2003

comin' down the street

InternetJunky posted:

Thanks all for the tips and advice. I think I managed to get a decent result, even if it did take way too long. :)



Original for reference:



Good job that's really nice!

teethgrinder
Oct 9, 2002

I'd be tempted to leave the water darker/less exposed personally (and I'm no expert), but drat the eagle looks fantastic now. Totally worth the effort.

XTimmy
Nov 28, 2007
I am Jacks self hatred
Bit worried about the color handling on my new laptop, when I look at an image in PS or LR it looks slightly flat and washed out, but 'correct' since I shoot mainly in Faithful, but when I open up the liquefy filter the colours are more vibrant and have a very slight red cast, this is not monitor specific. Exporting to Jpeg produces an image with the same inconsistencies. Can anyone help me figure out what's wrong, have I forgone some vital step in setting up the colour space of the computer?

XTimmy fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Dec 8, 2011

XTimmy
Nov 28, 2007
I am Jacks self hatred
Q =/=Edit

Evilkiksass
Jun 30, 2007
I am literally Bowbles IRL :(

DO A KEGSTAND BRAH
Do you guys tend to enable lens correction by default? or do you only enable it when you see a photo needs it?

HookShot
Dec 26, 2005

Evilkiksass posted:

Do you guys tend to enable lens correction by default? or do you only enable it when you see a photo needs it?

If I've been shooting with my wide angle lens then I apply the lens correction to every photo in the set, only on the basis that it's easier than picking which ones have been done at wider than 35mm and doing only those.

Splinter
Jul 4, 2003
Cowabunga!
Just got an SSD for my OS drive. Will I get better Lightroom performance by having a relatively small CameraRaw cache on my SSD (a few GB max) or a large cache on a fast mechanical drive (10-50GB)? My apologies if this is the wrong thread for this sort of question.

teethgrinder
Oct 9, 2002

Not the wrong thread, but you'll probably get a better or at least faster answer here:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3454120

I'm curious too.

Shmoogy
Mar 21, 2007
My take on it, which may or may not be accurate, but it's how I've been doing it:

Put 10gb~ into the cache, set lightroom to generate 1:1 previews upon import. This should be enough to store all the 1:1 previews for images you are importing and planning on editing. Unless you're going back and re-editing or looking at 1:1 previews of images you've edited, it doesn't matter to keep them in the cache, they will be generated on the fly and take a few seconds to load up-- I prefer having near instant 1:1s while I'm in the moment, doing edits.

It takes a hell of a lot longer to do imports though, especially on my MBAir, but it's worth it. (I try to cull before importing to lightroom, but if it's not a large amount of images, I just import them all and go afk). Having the cache on SSD makes a huge difference.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Splinter posted:

Just got an SSD for my OS drive. Will I get better Lightroom performance by having a relatively small CameraRaw cache on my SSD (a few GB max) or a large cache on a fast mechanical drive (10-50GB)? My apologies if this is the wrong thread for this sort of question.
Import to a directory on SSD, move to spinners once you're done.

I just keep the last month's worth of shooting on SSD or so. If I know I'm going to re-edit stuff I move it back before I start.

Tyorik
Dec 31, 2007
I'm gay for Michael Phelps.

But everyone's gay for someone - right? RIGHT?
So I'm having an issue with an image I'm working on. There's a lot of yellow dust in South Korea and it creates this artificial fog that reflects sunlight really badly, so it tends to overexpose shots. Well, I thought that the shot was ok but when I got back and opened it up the sky blew a bunch of things out. I'm not super good at PS, but I'm hoping there's a way to save some of it

Tyorik fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Dec 16, 2011

CarrotFlowers
Dec 17, 2010

Blerg.

Tyorik posted:

So I'm having an issue with an image I'm working on. There's a lot of yellow dust in South Korea and it creates this artificial fog that reflects sunlight really badly, so it tends to overexpose shots. Well, I thought that the shot was ok but when I got back and opened it up the sky blew a bunch of things out. I'm not super good at PS, but I'm hoping there's a way to save some of it



You can try masking out the sky and reducing the exposure on the parts that are blown out. Or if you have Lightroom, use the adjustment brush to reduce the exposure of those as well. Depending on how badly it's blown out, you may not be able to recover any information from there, but you can try.

Tyorik
Dec 31, 2007
I'm gay for Michael Phelps.

But everyone's gay for someone - right? RIGHT?
Well I think you're right about the sky being pretty much done for, but it looks like there's still some information left on the roof



How can I go about accenting the roof with what little I have to go on?

Shmoogy
Mar 21, 2007
I suck at photoshop, so I would do this in LR: Exposure brush painting the roof nicely, change exposure value until you see something thats usable. If it looks like poo poo, there isn't much I would be able to do, maybe somebody has a more sophisticated way of attempting recovery.

Evilkiksass
Jun 30, 2007
I am literally Bowbles IRL :(

DO A KEGSTAND BRAH
If your whole sky is 100% gone, have you considered cloning some new sky in?

Tyorik
Dec 31, 2007
I'm gay for Michael Phelps.

But everyone's gay for someone - right? RIGHT?
Yeah I'm going to clone a new one in. Mostly I need the roof situation taken care of, the sky is no big deal.

bobmarleysghost
Mar 7, 2006



Or just go black and white!

TheLastManStanding
Jan 14, 2008
Mash Buttons!

Tyorik posted:

How can I go about accenting the roof with what little I have to go on?
You imported the cr2 in 8 bit mode. If you import it in 16 bit you'll have way more information to work with.

Tyorik
Dec 31, 2007
I'm gay for Michael Phelps.

But everyone's gay for someone - right? RIGHT?
Well poo poo.

Tyorik
Dec 31, 2007
I'm gay for Michael Phelps.

But everyone's gay for someone - right? RIGHT?
Ok, so I did what I could and here's the result so far:


Work in Progress by Ebola Cereal, on Flickr

I've never done anything advanced like this and personally I don't think it looks quite right, so let me know what I should do if it sucks.

Edit: So I think I figured out how to get some detail back in the roof, I just can't figure out how to paint on to the base layer from a duplicate. I tried creating a layer mask and painting to it, but I don't really know how to do it.

Tyorik fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Dec 17, 2011

Krakkles
May 5, 2003

How could I get this sort of color palette on my photos? Don't say Instagram :mad:

Sockington posted:











bellows lugosi
Aug 9, 2003

Magenta shift, low contrast

weapey
Jun 11, 2003

stomp stomp stomp
Quick Photoshop Elements registration question.

I've installed the trial, and find its pretty much perfect for what I want as a beginner. It's cheaper to buy a copy off Amazon then off Adobe however, so can I just buy a retail version and register my downloaded trial with a retail key?

Evilkiksass
Jun 30, 2007
I am literally Bowbles IRL :(

DO A KEGSTAND BRAH

weapey posted:

Quick Photoshop Elements registration question.

I've installed the trial, and find its pretty much perfect for what I want as a beginner. It's cheaper to buy a copy off Amazon then off Adobe however, so can I just buy a retail version and register my downloaded trial with a retail key?

yes. If you are a student, you should also look into Student / Teach edition pricing.

dexter6
Sep 22, 2003
Hi Everyone -

I'm new to post-processing, but I'm realizing that's what it's going to take to get my photography to the next level. I'm shooting with DSLR in raw, but my post-processing currently consists of importing into iPhoto and doing very minor enhancements.

I've read the first post but I'm wondering what you would recommend to someone in my position? I'm not sure running out and grabbing Lightroom/ Photoshop right now is my best option since I know nothing about using those programs.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

some kinda jackal
Feb 25, 2003

 
 
Photoshop and Aperture both have 30 day trials so you can play around with each, get to know the workflow, play with some of the tools. That's what I'd recommend immediately since it costs zero dollars off the bat.

Aperture might be more useful in your situation since you can probably import from iPhoto, but statistically speaking I think most people in here prefer Lightroom. Even Mac users, I'd wager.

Bape Culture
Sep 13, 2006

dexter6 posted:

Hi Everyone -

I'm new to post-processing, but I'm realizing that's what it's going to take to get my photography to the next level. I'm shooting with DSLR in raw, but my post-processing currently consists of importing into iPhoto and doing very minor enhancements.

I've read the first post but I'm wondering what you would recommend to someone in my position? I'm not sure running out and grabbing Lightroom/ Photoshop right now is my best option since I know nothing about using those programs.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Download the LR trial and have a play around.

EFB etc :(

Falco
Dec 31, 2003

Freewheeling At Last
There have been a lot of sales lately on Lightroom if you're a student or teacher. Keep your eyes out for a sale. In my opinion anything under $80 or so is a pretty killer deal for a great piece of software.

burzum karaoke
May 30, 2003

dexter6 posted:

I'm not sure running out and grabbing Lightroom/ Photoshop right now is my best option since I know nothing about using those programs.

No one knows how to use them until they learn. Get them.

dexter6
Sep 22, 2003

aliencowboy posted:

No one knows how to use them until they learn. Get them.
So I've got the free trials of Lightroom and Photoshop installed. What would help me get started is:

1. Knowing what a typical "flow is"ie. "What are the basics that I should be able to in Lightroom and Photoshop"
2. What are the best video tutorials for walking me through some of these things?

Thanks again for the help!

m4mbo
Oct 22, 2006

I'm looking to buy a book which will take me through advanced image retouching for portraits.
Specifically I'd like to learn how to retouch skin. At the moment I'm trying to get my head around using curves layers to dodge and burn tiny tiny details away at 400% I feel there must be better ways without resorting to blur filters.

Any advice?

Cockwhore
Jul 10, 2005
a quintessence of dust

dexter6 posted:

So I've got the free trials of Lightroom and Photoshop installed. What would help me get started is:

1. Knowing what a typical "flow is"ie. "What are the basics that I should be able to in Lightroom and Photoshop"
2. What are the best video tutorials for walking me through some of these things?

Thanks again for the help!
you can start here:
http://tv.adobe.com/m/!/product/lightroom/

Falco
Dec 31, 2003

Freewheeling At Last

dexter6 posted:

So I've got the free trials of Lightroom and Photoshop installed. What would help me get started is:

1. Knowing what a typical "flow is"ie. "What are the basics that I should be able to in Lightroom and Photoshop"
2. What are the best video tutorials for walking me through some of these things?

Thanks again for the help!

Yeah the tutorials on the Adobe website are pretty great. They really helped me learn some new tips and tricks.

ass is my canvas
Jun 7, 2003

comin' down the street

m4mbo posted:

I'm looking to buy a book which will take me through advanced image retouching for portraits.
Specifically I'd like to learn how to retouch skin. At the moment I'm trying to get my head around using curves layers to dodge and burn tiny tiny details away at 400% I feel there must be better ways without resorting to blur filters.

Any advice?

You could look up frequency separation. It's the closest you'll get without all the work.

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eggsovereasy
May 6, 2011

Martytoof posted:

I think most people in here prefer Lightroom. Even Mac users, I'd wager.

I have both and there are parts of each I like. I think the interface and hotkeys are better in Aperture, but Light Room has better features (like the gradient adjustment brush :swoon:).

I wish I could have Light Room features with Aperture interface.

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