“At B&H’s Optic 2018, photographer Keith Carter talks about myths, magic, and mojo. He believes that the best way to elevate your photography is to tell the truth as you know it through your photos, and he stresses that there are great lessons to be learned by revisiting history. We can learn a lot about how to shoot well – even in this digital age – by studying classic photos that pre-date digital photography.”
Find out more about Keith Carter here.
Read our conversation here.
Read quotes by Keith Carter here.
View 12 Great Photographs By Keith Carter here.
“At B&H’s Optic 2018, photographer Seth Resnick discusses color, enhancing creativity, and processes you can employ to make better images and improve your photography. He stresses the importance of being aware of the details in your environment and mentally taking note of what you see BEFORE you start shooting with your camera.”
Learn more about Seth Resnick here.
Find out more about our Digital Photo Destinations Workshops here.
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Enthusiasm.
“Enthusiasm is the electricity of life. How do you get it? You act enthusiastic until you make it a habit.” – Gordon Parks
“Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.” – James A. Baldwin
“Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.” – Norman Vincent Peale
“If you have passion, there is no need for excuses because your enthusiasm will trump any negative reasoning you might come up with. Enthusiasm makes excuses a nonissue.” – Wayne Dyer
“I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts, their talents, their insights, their enthusiasm and their inspiration to work together.” – Queen Elizabeth II
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
“A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm.” – Charles Schwab
Read More
Steal Like An Artist
Show Your Work
How To Keep Going
Austin Kleon shares his accumulated wisdom from his three books Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, and How To Keep Going.
View more Creativity Videos here.
Austin Kleon (Steal Like An Artist) shares a preview of his next book How To Keep Going addressing an important challenge that all creatives face – persistence.
His list of 10 things to do include …
My newsletter Insights goes out Monday.
This issue features valuable techniques for making Photoshop selections and masks.
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Almost anything will become easier to select if you adjust it first. Photoshop uses color contrast to make many selections. So, if you increase the contrast in an image you make it easier for Photoshop to make those selections.
Using Photoshop’s adjustment layers you can temporarily increase contrast far beyond what you normally would. Be aggressive. Don’t worry about making the image look good; focus instead on making it easier to select the area you want to affect. After the selection is made, simply delete the adjustment layer and continue adjusting the image to improve its appearance.
There are three elements of color and so three types of contrast to choose from – luminosity, hue, and saturation. Which type of contrast you choose depends on what you want to select.
To increase luminosity contrast, choose Curves.
To increase saturation contrast, choose Hue/Saturation and/or Vibrance.
To increase hue contrast, choose Levels to neutralize a color cast and possibly use Hue/Saturation to increase saturation.
Temporary adjustments in Photoshop can make a majority of selections and masks easier to make.
Before
After Neutralizing Color
Mask
Before
After Increasing Luminosity Contrast
Mask
Before
After Increasing Saturation
Mask
Read more about Selections & Masks.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
When you want to make a selection based on hue, start with Photoshop’s Color Range. (It’s located in the Select menu.) It’s an invaluable selection tool that’s easy to master.
The heart of this tool is the default setting for the Select drop-down menu – Sampled Color. Once you learn to use it, you’ll find you’ll use it often. For Sampled Colors, it’s an oversight to activate the slider for Fuzziness (the number of related hues included) and not Range (targeting specific lightnesses). Hope, no request, that Adobe activates both Fuzziness and Range sliders for all drop-down settings. For now, you can overcome this limitation to some extent and customize any range of color with surprising precision by using the icons on the right of the dialog box Eyedropper Tool, Add to Sample, and Subtract from Sample icons as well as the Invert checkbox. It is also the only setting that activates the Localized Color Clusters check box, which essentially adds a radial gradient around the point you sample a color from. You can master this tool in a few minutes.
You’ll probably find that you’ll use the other settings in Color Range’s Select drop-down menu sparingly, some not at all.
Skip them. The color choices in the Color Range drop-down menu – Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues, Magentas – are almost useless. They’re not as accurate as you’d like them to be and they don’t offer Fuzziness or Range sliders to control them with. It’s all or nothing, usually nothing.
Use them occasionally. The Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows options have improved by activating both Fuzziness and Range sliders. Curiously, if you Invert the Highlights setting you get a slightly different result than simply choosing Shadows setting and vice versa. But don’t worry, the Fuzziness and Range sliders will give you all the control you need to compensate and much, much more. Color Range’s selections of luminance yield different results than making luminance selections by loading channels as selections (See my article Masking Luminosity.); for better or for worse, they tend to produce fewer gray values and so they yield more generous selections with quicker less smooth transitions into surrounding values, as if you added contrast to a channel selection.
Consider it. While it offers only the control of the Fuzziness slider and not the Range slider but adds a Detect Faces feature, Skin Tones can be quite useful – at times. It is clearly biased towards Caucasian skin tones as it picks up whites before darker browns but it does a good job of avoiding very saturated warm hues. If Skin Tones fails, use the default Sampled Colors instead and choose a custom base color you’d like to start with.
Forget about it. Be careful about the Out Of Gamut feature. It works based on the profile loaded for an output device, usually an offset press. It’s designed to help you prepare files for printing by selecting and subsequently desaturating colors that are too saturated to be printed accurately. Using color management and good output profiles is a better way to control gamut compression.
Finally, if you want a larger preview of the selection/mask being generated, the Selection Preview drop-down menu offers four settings that will change the appearance of the image window Grayscale, Black Matte, White Matte, and Quick Mask. In most cases, the generously sized icon in the Color Range window will be all you need.
Photoshop’s Color Range is an indispensable selection tool that continues to improve. When you want to make a selection based on hue, start here.
Read more about Selections & Masks.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Original
Increased saturation in high ranges of saturation only
Red and blue added to high ranges of saturation only
Wouldn’t it be great if you could selectively adjust colors based on how saturated they are in Photoshop? You can! How? With a free plug-in, Adobe provides called Multiplugin; it hasn’t been updated since Photoshop CS5 but it still works with current versions.
Why would you want to do this?
Do you have images where semi-neutrals not saturated enough, but you don’t want other colors to get too saturated? Select the less saturated colors before adjusting them. Do you have images where you’d like to reduce the saturation of very saturated colors without affecting other levels of saturation? Select the more saturate colors before adjusting them. You can even select colors with medium saturation, separating them from both the high and low range of saturation. Using this technique, you can produce subtle color effects that aren’t possible with any other method.
You might ask yourself, “Isn’t relative saturation adjustment what Vibrance does?” Yes and no. Yes. Vibrance does saturate the less saturated colors more than the more saturated colors and it prevents clipping in the most saturated colors. No. Vibrance offers no control over which ranges of saturation are affected; it can only adjust saturation but not lightness or hue, and it limits how strong an adjustment you can make – it won’t produce effects as strong as Hue/Saturation.
Saturation masks aren’t for saturation adjustments only. This simple selection/mask can be used with any color adjustment tool in Photoshop, greatly expanding your ability to adjust color. Imagine adjusting the lightness and/or hue of high, medium, or low ranges of saturation independently of one another.
Semi-neutrals not interesting enough? Try selecting the low levels of saturation and shifting their hue. Cool them with cyan and/or blue. Warm them with yellow and/or red. Or, try a Renaissance painting technique and add brown.
Throughout the history of photography, most people didn’t think about color this way because they didn’t have the ability to do it. Now you can. It’s well worth your time to explore this new way of seeing, thinking about, and adjusting color.