Richard Curtis's Blog

Adobe UK and the Royal Photographic Society have teamed up to provide a special lecture on the new features inside Photoshop CS6 for Photographers as well as a lecture on Macro and Art Photography. John Humphrey (www.johnhumphrey.co.uk) will lead the Macro and Art Photography session, and I will be presenting the Photoshop CS6 update, as well as being on hand for any related questions on anything Adobe/Photographic/Imaging or Creative Cloud related.

This special event will take place on January 30th at the Adobe UK headquarters in Maidenhead and is open for registration for RPS members and non members here. This event will be useful if you are looking to enhance your Photoshop skills and image manipulation craft, or are interested in learning more about Macro or Art photography or are even just thinking about exploring this field of photography.

This week we updated the Adobe Creative Cloud to include the new Training module. We have partnered with Kelby Media (http://kelbytraining.com/), video2brain I(http://www.video2brain.com/en/redirected.htm), Attain as well as own evangelists (http://tv.adobe.com/) to include exclusive training as part of the standard membership.

If you are thinking about the Adobe Creative Cloud, you can try it for 30 days, upgrade from previous versions as well as subscribe as a new member. For more information follow this link.

Adobe have listened to the user feed back about the Photoshop CS6 crop tool, we have been able to re-imagine the crop tool in this update to Photoshop CS6.

When the crop tool is selected, the crop handles are slightly bigger and the edge line is slightly thinner than the previous version. Also, the crop tool tool bar has been modified and is more user friendly.

The Ratio option now has the Width and Height, and is switchable using the two arrow buttons. Both values can be cleared using the Clear button.

When the WxHxResolution is selected in the combo box, the UI will change to include the resolution box as well as the width and height values.

Notice that the units selector has been included as a combo box on this UI bar.  

Notice that the tool overlays (like the Thirds or the Golden spiral) are more refined and thinner than they were previously.

If you have a new Retina screen Mac Book Pro (13inch or 15inch), and are a member of the Adobe Creative Cloud or have Photoshop CS6 stand alone then you can take advantage of this update to Photoshop CS6 & Photoshop CS6 Extended, and fully maximise your editing potential with this Retina enabled version of Photoshop CS6.

The differences are incredible, here is Photoshop CS6 before the Retina update

now the Retina enabled version

You are able to see the incredible difference between the two versions, just by looking at the icons. Over 2,500 icons have been completely re-created for this version of Photoshop, it looks beautiful.

If we look at a 100% view of the same image

in the Retina enabled version you can see that more pixels can be displayed at 100% then with the non retina version

You can quickly to zoom to 100% using the key stroke combination CMD+1, there is also a 200% available on the View menu.

If for some reason and possibly for a particular job you need to work in Photoshop CS6 at the original non Retina resolution, you can do. If you right clicking on the Photoshop CS6 application and choosing the “Get Info” option, available in the dialog box is the Low Resolution check box.

If you check this box, and close Photoshop CS6 (if it’s already open) and re-open, Photoshop CS6 will will open in the original low resolution version.

If you are a member of the Adobe Creative Cloud community, then today is the day of your first major update of Photoshop CS6. There are many goodies within this update of Photoshop, but firstly here is an “how to” of how to download the update.

You can receive the update in a couple of way :-

1. Click on the Adobe Updater icon on your Mac or Windows computer, this looks like a small Adobe logo with a number by it’s side.    . You should see an option to open the Updater, clicking this will show the updater dialog box (seen below).

Photoshop CS6 should have an update of 129mb waiting for you, you may see other applications that have updates as well. Ticking the check boxes by the side of the appropriate application will turn the updates on or off for that application.

2. If you are inside Photoshop CS6 itself and choose the menu option Help / Updates, the Adobe Application Updater (shown above) will open in the same way.

Once you have chosen the applications, you can click update button and the updates will be downloaded to your computer.

Thanks for joining us today for the Adobe Create Now event. If you would like to re-watch the recording of the stream, or watch it for the first time, then please press play any time.

December 11th is a key date in the calendar , come and be among the first to learn what’s come in future updates to Photoshop. See how you can take your design skills from print to online and mobile. Join us on Dec. 11th at 10 a.m. PST for the Create Now event. Don’t forget to RSVP here: http://adobe.ly/WECDYc.

The new powerful Highlight/Shadow and Clarity features in Lightroom 4 will enable much more information to be extracted from both the Highlights and the Shadows of your images than ever before. The most significant change over and above the exciting new algorithms is that both areas will be worked on independently, a shadow enhancement will not affect highlights and visa versa. The results that are achievable will help you extend the natural dynamic range of the scene and create more compelling images, and will provide an easy way to reach your vision. The two sliders also have a negative as well as a positive value range providing balanced creativity. This image was taken on manual exposure with the Fuji X-Pro1 on an overcast day, the type of day that results in an image with a heavy shadow area and subdued highlights, however knowing that the Fuji has a huge dynamic range would make it possible to recover both areas of the scene.

As you can see in the histogram, there is a little clipping in the shadows but not in the highlights, we just need to extract the full dynamic range, extract the shadow detail and recover any highlights that exist.

The enhanced highlight and shadow sliders are shown below and are used to extract the content from both areas of the scene.

Focusing on the highlights (remembering that we are most likely going to expose for the highlights in the camera). Sliding the highlight slider all of the way to the left will enable the highlights to be extracted.

In the shadows (notice that the original photograph is not showing any shadow information (except in the histogram). If we move the shadow slider all the way to the right, Lightroom 4 is able to extract additional information and recover some of the clipping from the shadow area, and not affect the highlights.

The other control that has been enhanced in Lightroom 4 is the Clarity slider. This slider will control the amount of midtone contrast and can be found under the Presence section of the Basic panel. Moving the clarity slider to the left will reduce the midtone contrast and can create a smooth finish/dreamy effect (shown below, this can be effective on female portrait shots and can smooth out skin), to the right, will increase mid tone contrast and create a mock sharpened image.

Experimenting with the three sliders and by reducing and increasing the values in each may provide the creative effect required, however, Lightroom 4 is also able to enhance the image further.

The Gradient filter and the Local Adjustment brush have been significantly enhanced to include all settings that are available in the Development Module’s Basic panel. i.e. The temperature slider can now be used with the Gradient filter and/or Local Adjustment brush, in this scene to control the temperate of the sky.

Selecting the Gradient filter and dragging it over the image, will reflect the changes in the Gradient panel. In this example the temperature has been reduced to create a blue cast to the sky, the tint slider can also be changed. Notice that the top section of the Eiffel tower has also been affected by the change in temperature, this is easy to revert by using the Local Adjustment brush to override the Gradient filter changes. The Local Adjustment Brush is very effective in changing the settings at a localised level, i.e. in this scene, revert the temperature to before the blue sky was modified with the Gradient filter. Also, the colour of the metal structure of the Eiffel tower can be changed by applying effects using the Local Adjustment brush to paint where appropriate. i.e. to change the structure to be yellow (as shown in the image below).

N.B. When painting on this particular image we don’t want to affect the sky, setting the “Auto Mask”  to on for the brush (will protect the sky (that has already been modified) due to the difference in tone, see image below). Painting is much easier with a Wacom tablet (like the Intuos 5) as Lightroom is pressure sensitive with the Wacom and can be naturally brushed, compared to a mouse or something like an Apple trackpad that is either on or off, where the control of pressure is managed by the panel below and doesn’t feel as natural.

Once the Local Adjustment brush has been selected, click on the image and place an anchor pin. This pin will be a place holder for the mask and effectively apply the changes that are specified in the Local Adjustment brush panel.

The visibility of the pin(s) is controlled by the “Show Edit Pins” selector, the mask that is applied is visible by turning on the Show Selected Mask Overlay, or by pressing the “O” key whilst in the Local Adjustment brush tool (shown in red below). Initially the brush will paint on the mask.

“Auto Mask” is clearly working by detecting the edges on the tower and the tower base. Once the painting has been applied, the adjustment sliders have been modified, and the mask is not visible you can see the adjustments that have been made. If the mask is too much and needs to be re-shaped or altered, pressing the ALT key will turn the tool into a minus sign and will remove the mask by painting out brushed areas.

The final image with Highlight/Shadow/Clarity and the Local Adjustment brush adjustments applied can be seen below.

You can see how in just a few steps we have completely redefined the image and created something new and compelling.

Recently I have been using the Photoshop CS6 adaptive wide angle on images that i thought were not usable due to the barrel distortion. The new Adaptive Wide Angle filter in Photoshop CS6 has fixed a some old images and been able to transform into images that would otherwise never see the light of day.

Here is a shot that I took recently of the Northern lights in Iceland, however the weather station is suffering from barrel distortion and isn’t straight. Normally I would correct the straightness in the camera and make sure everything is lined up in the frame, unfortunately it was so dark & cold, it was impossible to do so (at the end of this article i will talk about photographing the Northern Lights as well and some in camera settings to capture this phenomenal activity).

To use the Adaptive Wide Angle filter to re-work this image, choose the menu item Filter / Adaptive wide angle .

Firstly the horizon needs to be pinned to the horizontal plane of the scene, otherwise, when the weather station is corrected the image will try to re-position itself and the horizon will move.

The cursor is placed within the black section of the scene, then dragged to the other side of the image to align the horizon (see below)

This will correct any barrel distortion at the base of the image based on the type of camera and lens combination used to take the photograph. To pin this part of the image to the Horizontal (now that the barrel distortion has been corrected), hold the shift key at the same time as clicking the blue correction line, then choose Horizontal.

This will make sure that any other modifications to the image won’t pull the image off the base horizontal plane.

To correct the weather station or any other vertical object/plane, it is best to look for a vertical point of the object, but sometimes not possible. The middle post of the weather station is ideal in this image. Holding the Shift key down and drawing a line from the bottom of the post, all the way to the top will automatically correct the post to the Vertical axis.

(Notice the colour of the line is now different to the previous one, as we have corrected both barrel distortion and the vertical axis). The same thing is performed to the other side of the image ,just to make sure the image is still in perspective once we have finished.

Press OK on this Filter.

Notice that when Photoshop CS6 corrects the image, the canvas is automatically extended, this provides more creative options.  This scene is not to complex, therefore the image does not need to be cropped. Photoshop CS5 introduced a way to create new pixels using the Content Aware Fill technology feature to rebuild the areas of the scene that are empty.

Take the Magic Wand tool and select an empty space, then choose the menu option Select/Similar, Photoshop will select other areas of the scene that are also empty. As we want Photoshop to rebuild pixels, texture and tone we need to give it some more information to work on (remember that Photoshop will use parts of what we have selected to gather information about the missing pixels, so we will expand the selected areas using the menu option Select/ Modify/ Expand and use a value of 2 pixels.

Then choose menu option Edit / Fill / and make sure that Content Aware is selected in the combo box

Press OK.

Sometimes Content Aware Fill can bring in unwanted items into the newly generated areas or can create repeating patterns. One way to remove this unwanted pixel data is to use the Clone tool and clone other pixels in from similar areas of the image.

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When taking photographs of the Northern lights here are a few things to consider and experiment with.

1. Find a very dark area with no ambient light sneaking in the sky (between mountains is a good start). Near a road can be interesting as you have front and rear light trails to play with. Also, lakes can be amazing as the lights are caught in the reflections.

2. Use a sturdy tripod, if it’s windy you may need to weigh your tripod down to keep it stable.

3. Choose your lens (wide angle is good as the Lights can be all over the sky). Set the focal length of the lens to where you need it (i used an 18mm (24mm) on the Fuji xPro-1 above). Also, set the F-stop of the lens to as wide as possible to let as much light in a possible in any one second (F4 or below is ideal), then manually set the focus on your lens to infinity (usually represented by the infitinity symbol (to small circles joined in the middle).

4. Set the ISO to 100 or 200.

5. The exposure will be between 30 and 50 seconds, your camera may support Tv (time priority), however you may need to use the BULB setting to go over 30 seconds.

6. I would strongly recommend a locking cable release to start and hold the exposure, or use a 2 second delay with or without mirror lockup mode enabled to reduce the amount of vibration and shake.

7. You may not be able to see anything through the view finder so you will have to guess on what you are shooting (hence why the adaptive angle is a great tool to use in post).

8. Don’t forget to look around the sky, the Northen Lights are very unpredictable, if there is nothing going on in the front of you, there maybe something going on behind you. Also, if the lights are white in the sky (i.e. not very active (maybe a 2 on the activity scale),don’t panic, the camera will see the vivid colours and will record the different appropriately.

9. For a different effect and breaking rules, try hand holding the camera and go for something shaky….

Here in my final image, which I have converted to Black and White as opposed to colour to show the form of the lights.

Today’s Adobe webinar as part of the Create Now series we presented Photoshop CS6 for the Photography Community, where we talked about the new Filters (Blur/Tilt & Shift/Gradient), colour lookup tables as well as the new video feature in the Standard edition and much more. Please find the link to the recording of the session here and we look forward to meeting you again soon.