To avoid my rather silly blunder, go to View –> Proof Setup –> and select Monitor RGB. Then, go to View –> and select Proof Colors. Finally, go to Edit –> Color Settings –> and for RGB row, click on the pull down menu and select the last sRGB option.

Here is a before and after of one of the photos I posted yesterday.  On a Mac screen, the difference is pretty subtle.

Before

After

It’s back to the drawing board with some more color profile fixing.  

ISO 500, 28mm, F/6.3, 1/200 sec

When my friend Melanie asked me to take some professional portraits of her, I jumped at the chance to go walking around the Capitol with my camera, a ridiculously-photogenic subject, and with the freedom to bring a light stand with me (if you’ve ever gotten confronted by the national park service while photographing at the monuments, you know what I mean). We were even lucky enough to have Mike, her boyfriend, come along to do the actual light stand lugging (thanks Mike!).

All of the photos were taken using just one flash, attached with a TTL cord. Somehow my remotes started having problems right before we were supposed to meet up for the shoot, thank goodness I had the TTL cord around as a back up plan.  The flash was mounted on a stand and an umbrella.  It was definitely a little more difficult using the TTL cord (akin to stretching the phone cord as much as I possibly could when I was in high school so I could get out of parental earshot), but Mike was nice enough to hold the umbrella every which way, even when it probably seemed a little ridiculous (“left please, oh wait, not that much left, maybe to the right, ok, maybe if you could stretch a foot taller and then left?”)

Anyways, all in all, it was totally fun– thanks Mel and Mike!

ISO 400, 85mm, f/8.0, 1/200 sec

ISO 800, 38mm, f/7.1, 1/100 sec

Here are some pics of the newest member of the family, Honey the Dog. She is a six year old pit bull, and totally amazing. She’s kind of a big deal =) Honey was at the D.C. Humane Society on Georgia Avenue for three months after her owner moved to DC from California and gave her up when the apartment building they moved to wouldn’t let him/her have dogs. In those three months, she has done all sorts of stuff…she has her AKC Good Citizen Certification, and she was in the Wounded Warriors program where injured solders learn skills, like dog training. More info about Honey’s amazingness is here.

So far life with dog has been interesting and totally unexpected. The biggest fear was that she wouldn’t get along with cats, but Honey doesn’t seem to care about the cats at all, they just sort of hang out. She can sit, stay, sit pretty, lay down, and give hugs, but for some strange reason she won’t chase a ball.  At all.  Or a bone.  Or anything I throw unless it’s a treat. When I throw a ball, the cats go running after it. And the cats keep trying to go after the dog’s food, which is hilarious since the dog is five times the size of each cat.

Sup. What you lookin' at?

Man and dog in coat.

Milk & Cookies: 90% Increase Contrast by 10

Unlike many things (um, Jersey Shore), the hype surrounding the Totally Rad Photoshop Actions are completely justified. They do amazing things in photoshop, and really all it takes is pushing the play button for your computer to go off and running. All you have to do at the end of running an action is decide whether you like it and also decide whether you want it as is, or whether you want to tone down the effect by decreasing the percentage opacity of the effect in the layers pane. It’s too much fun, and you can definitely go a bit overboard, like the leopard looking striped cat version below, but if you use a light hand and remember that less is more, the actions definitely add to your images while saving a ton of time.

Here are some versions of the same photograph (any excuse to post a Kashi the cat picture!) with the Actions Recipe below it.  Even more recipes are located on the Totally Rad Actions located here.  If you’ve never used actions before, they have a great, easy to understand tutorial on how to use and install the actions located here.

Here is the original:

Here are the photos with some actions applied, the recipe is below the photo:

60% bullet tooth. 40% fade winter

bullet tooth: 60%. Pool Party: 60%. Can of whoopass 8 (over the cat): 80%. Red channel fix: 50%

POS Lens: 100%. Dirty and Used Up Texture: 100%. Get Faded: 40%.

The last photo has texture applied, which is an interesting effect.  It’s definitely not right for every photo, but textures seem to add an interesting artsy effect.  In doing some textures research, I found a site by ShadowHouse Creations which provides really great textures…for free!

Now the whole image is a bit softer, but there were certain parts of the photo that I want to keep sharp, mainly the hair, the eyes, and the eyebrows. To make sure these parts aren’t blurry, I added a Vector Mask, and from here, used a black paintbrush to paint over the areas that I want to keep sharp. To do this, go to Layer –> Vector Mask –> Reveal All. Select the paintbrush tool, select black paint, and then paint over the parts that you want to be sharp.

Finally, fix any skin imperfections. Click on the 7th icon down in your toolbar on the left and hold down until you see the Patch Tool show. Using the patch tool, encircle the area that you want repaired, select the Source button on the top bar, and then drag the encircled area to clean patch of skin. This tool is amazing.

Here is the below and after. No huge changes, but enough to make her look her best and draw attention straight to her amazing eyelashes.

www.Electricpig.co.uk

It’s hard to describe the frenzy that ensued on the wedding message boards when Polaroid announced that it was discontinuing its instant cameras and stopping production on film….there was some serious despair over the prospect of far less interesting wedding guest books, and more then a few entrepreneurial types making a killing on any old polaroids and film they had laying around.

The dark days are over…in an unexpected move, Polaroid is bring back its line of instant cameras and film, and providing some very snazzy looking new models.  The full press release is here.

The moody lighting in this was done with the Honl Photo Speedlight 1/8 Grid.  It’s a plastic piece that looks like a honeycomb — a common DIY is to take a bunch of evenly sized black plastic straws, glue them together and then put them in front of the flash.  Strobist has instructions for the DIY version here.  It was a bit tricky controlling the direction of the light and there were more than few trial-error error shots to get the light to beam on the logo without having the kickback glare of light hitting white paper….it could definitely be better, if I was going to do it over again, I would use a lightstand rather than holding the flash in my left hand as high as as I could while taking the picture. 

Please excuse the rather unkempt nails (sometimes sharp details are a bad thing!).   This pic takes advantage of the great macro capabilities of my G-9.  I have definitely not stopped being totally amazed with what this little point and shoot can do.  One of my favorite photography bloggers has jumped on the Canon G bandwagon and has the newest G11, with a discussion of the macro capabilities here.

Checking out some of the geese hanging out by the pond.

And my absolute favorite shot of the day!

Had a wonderful time doing the engagement shoot and wandering around Meadowlark with you both, Jackie and Mark, congrats on your engagement!

To create the different versions of photos using Lightroom, you need to create Virtual Copies. To do this, choose Photo in the main menu toolbar at the top of the screen > Create Virtual Copy, or press Control + ‘ (Windows) or Command + ‘ (Mac). From there, you can create a copy of the photo that can be manipulated in any way.

In the natural, vivid color version, I use Lightroom to recapture the vivid color that usually shows up in the camera’s LCD panel. Have you ever had that happen to you–when you look at your camera, and the colors look amazing, but then you look at the digital image and the photo looks dull because the colors are flat? You can fix this by going into lightroom, and in the toolboxes on the right side of the screen, scroll down to the Camera Calibration Section, and there is a pull down menu labeled “Profiles.” From there, you can select the profile that suits your photo–options include portrait and landscape. This re-inserts the brighter more vivid colors into your photograph that you originally saw on your camera’s LCD panel.

In this black and white photo, I first converted the photo to grayscale. After that, I increased the contrast slightly using the contrast slider (it’s best to avoid too much contrast, otherwise it tends to age the person in the photo by giving them deeper wrinkles and skin blemishes), increased the clarity slider (which sharpens details and is also located on the toolbox on the right side of Lightroom), and slightly increased the exposure.

In this last image, I added an aged look to the photo. First, I decreased the Vibrance slider by 25 (in the lightroom toolbox on the right), which desaturates the colors without making skin color look zombie like (if you use the Saturation slider, zombie skin is ineveitable). Then I manually changed the temperature of the photo which shifts the white balance of the photo.  In adding an aged look to the photo, I shifted the balance slightly to the right, which makes the photo warmer.  After doing this, I also slightly increased the exposure to increase the person-sitting-in-a-sunbeam look.   

If you’re interested in checking out Lightroom, there is a FREE BETA (!) available from Adobe at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/. If you’re using previous versions of Lightroom, be forewarned that your photo catalogs will not update in the beta version of Lightroom 3, so proceed with caution if you don’t want your existing catalog to be emptied.