Chinese Red Lantern in Jiufen, Taiwan

Today, I’m going to walk you through the steps required for selective desaturation in Photoshop. If you missed yesterday’s phototip that introduced selective desaturation in the RAW process, you might want to check it out. Sometimes images will require a much more complex process to achieve the look and for those, it’s best to work on layers in Photoshop. Like everything in Photoshop, there are a few different methods that all end up with a similar result. Let’s take a look at two easy ways to accomplish the same thing. I want to isolate the main Chinese lantern in this, while having the rest of the image black and white. Here’s the original color image.

Chinese red lanterns, original image.

When we selectively desaturated the red gate yesterday, it was enough to simple boost the reds and set everything else to -100. If we do that here however it doesn’t look right at all. In theory you could go in with the adjustment brush and paint out all the other parts of red throughout the image but that would be very time consuming.

Selective desaturation in RAW requires a lot of work.

Start by creating a new layer (Cmd/CTRL J). It’s not strictly necessary to do this but it’s a good habit to get into. With the duplicate layer selected, apply a black and white conversion. There are many different ways to do this but to keep it simple, I’ve simply done a Hue/Saturation adjustment to fully desaturate the image.

Duplicate the layer with Cmd/CTRL - J

A quick black and white conversion using Hue/Saturation

Next, take the brush tool (B) and set the foreground color to black. Working on the hue/saturation layer mask (the white box) all you need to do is paint over the area you want to color to show through. The black brush will reveal the underlying color layer. If you stray a bit over the lines and bring in color from an unwanted area, simply set your brush’s foreground color to white to cover it up again.

Use the brush tool to paint in the layer mask - the white box.

Final image using this first method.

An alternative method to achieve the same result is to first make a selection of the area you want to remain colored. Once again, there’s more than one way to do this. For this image, I’ve just used the quick selection tool which I find works well for easily defined shapes such as the lantern. Once you’ve made the selection, the next step is to inverse it. That’s done through the Select menu (Selct > Inverse) or with the keyboard shortcut Cmd/CTRL – Shift – I.

The lantern roughly selected.

This causes the selection to flip so that the selected area is the part of the photograph that you want to make black and white. Now, simply apply your usual black and white conversion and your done. In this case I’ve just used the same Hue/Saturation method as before for simplicity. There are better ways to convert to black and white but that’s a whole new post. You may want to increase the saturation a bit in the lantern but for this I’ve decided to leave it with the orange-shade of red.

Whichever method you use, you’ll probably want to save the file as a PSD or TIFF with the layer structure intact before flattening and outputting for end use.

Chinese Red Lantern in Jiufen, Taiwan - final

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Red Gate

Selective desaturation is a popular look in some fields of photography. Also referred to as selective color, it’s the type of photograph where one element is in color and the rest, black and white. The technique is a bit of a love-hate thing – some photographers and viewers love it, others hate it. Personally, it’s not my cup of tea but I’m going to walk you through the steps anyway. Today we’ll look at doing it during the RAW stage. I’m using Lightroom for it, but it can be done just as easily in Adobe Camera RAW and probably Aperture (I’ve never used Aperture so I can’t say for sure).

Original image

When you have a relatively simple image such as this one with the red gate, the selective desaturation process is easier and quicker to do in Lightroom. Here I want to desaturate all but the reds, so I’ll start in the HSL panel and pull all of the sliders other than red to -100. Doing this causes my reds to lose a little punch so I’ll pump them up a bit while I’m at it, in this case I choose +32. I just moved the slider until it looked similar to how the full color version looked.

Saturation panel

A little red in the top right.

You might notice up in the top right corner, there’s a little bit of red in some of the plants. It’s so minor here that you could probably leave it and no one would notice, particularly on the web, but getting ride of it is simple, so let’s do it. Moving up to the Adjustment Brush, create a new brush with the sliders all on 0 except for the saturation which should be set to -100. Set your size and simply paint over any stray bits of color until it’s monochrome.

Adjustment Brush

That’s all there is to it. When you have a fairly simple selective desaturation to do, it’s quicker and easier to do it in the non-destructive RAW processing stage. Tomorrow I’ll look at more complex images for which we’ll be working in Photoshop.

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View of the Taiwan coastline from Jiufen

The September 2010 desktop calendar is now ready for download. Once again, it comes in a variety of sizes covering everything from large screens down to iPad and iPhone. As always, the links are below.

This month’s photograph is looking towards the north coast of Taiwan and the East China Sea.

2560×1600 1920×1200 1680×1050 1600×1200

1440×900 1280×1024 1024×768 – sized for iPad iPhone

Old bunker on the Taiwan coast.

A photograph has three essential components, those being the frame, the positive space and the negative space. The frame is easy enough to understand – it’s what the image is bounded by. The positive space is the subject of the image itself and the negative space is most simply described as the empty space around the subject. Usually we think of what’s in the photograph as being the most important but what isn’t there can often be equally important to a photograph.

Negative space as a concept comes from the art world, and when it’s translated to photography, there’s a little disagreement about what is and what isn’t negative space. To some, negative space needs to be completely empty and free of texture, features and elements. To others, texture et al is okay as long as it doesn’t draw the eye and become a key component of the image. I’ll let you make up your own mind as to which definition you prefer.

The use of negative space can be a key compositional tool that evokes a sense of scale and size, of loneliness and solitude, and can also work to help anchor the subject and redirect attention to it. Negative space can provide balance to an image as well as context.

A lot of photographers look to always fill the frame with the subject, or if this is not possible, to crop the photograph after the fact so that the final image gives the appearance of a filled frame. In some cases, this works well but variety is the spice of life and you’d do well to experiment a bit with negative space. Play around with it and see how it works and begin to develop an intuitive feeling as to when to use it. Pay attention as you go and get a sense of when too much negative space begins to take away from the photograph rather than strengthen it.

The environment that the subject exists in is often just as important as the subject itself and negative space gives the photographer a way to incorporate that. Give it a try.

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Taiwanese nuns chanting in a temple during the Chinese Ghost Festival

As many of you know, the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers (IGVP) launched recently. I am a keen supporter of this initiative and very excited about what the future holds for IGVP. One of the areas in the profile section of the site is the Peacemaker Interview, a series of eight questions that give visitors some further insight into the photographer’s mind and ideas. Below you’ll find my responses to the questions. I do encourage you to go to IGVP if you haven’t already and join.

What does visual peacemaking mean to you?
I’ve always believed that different cultures and ethnicities have more in common than they have differences. When the focus is on the differences, conflict is what ultimately results but when we see that in essence, we all want the same thing – love, happiness, security – peace naturally follows. Being able to share the world’s cultures through photography helps bring the world a little closer and creates a little more peace.

What motivates you to be a peacemaker?
It’s ingrained in me. For as long as I can remember, stretching back into childhood, I’ve been a supporter of peace, and an opponent of violence, both physical and emotional. Being a peacemaker to me is as essential to life as breathing.

Have you ever felt stereotyped?
I have red hair – that alone comes with a number of stereotypes, and I’ve heard them all so often that I barely even notice any kind of stereotype directed at me now. I guess being an expat in Asia, being married to someone from a different culture and not following a 9-5 career are also stereotypes I’ve come across.

How does your camera get you to reflect on your world and your life?
I see more through a camera than I do without one. When I’m photographing something that I’m passionate about, I’m existing completely in the moment. My camera is often a passport into other lives as I get to see and experience things and meet people that I ordinarily wouldn’t have an opportunity to. More importantly, seeing, meeting and experiencing that shows me the value in everyone and everything.

What do you like to photograph best?
Anything that lets me see and understand a different culture or subculture. A lot of modern subcultures are just as widely misunderstood as are “exotic” cultures on the other side of the world.

What technical aspect of photography do you find most challenging?
Most of the technical side of things comes fairly easily to me now by virtue of having learned photography in the pre-digital, all manual days. There is however sometimes a situation where I know what I want but can’t work how exactly how to get it from my mind to the finished product. That is usually when I’m experimenting with some kind of concept though and the whole process is a learning experience.

Is there a particular group you feel is misunderstood or stereotyped that you’d like to document common humanity amongst?
Unfortunately, there are too many groups that are misunderstood and stereotyped. Choosing just one is difficult. As a human being, I see all groups and cultures as equally valuable.

Do you have an idea worth sharing?
Instead of thinking of people as being from this place or of that group, start thinking of them simply as people. Then you’ll find the common humanity with out even trying. We’re all children of the Earth.

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View from my bedroom window shot on an Android phone.

It’s close to impossible today to buy a cell phone without a camera and interest in using the inbuilt camera in creative ways is growing all the time. Chase Jarvis is one of the biggest advocates of this with his Best Camera app for iPhone’s but cellphone photography or phoneography is by no means restricted to iPhone users. Camera quality in phones improves with each generation, and the growing popularity of smart phones brings with it a host of other options for the phoneograher. As well as the aforementioned Best Camera app, you can get Photoshop on a mobile, there are numerous apps that allow use of filters, immediate posting to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so forth is easy to do. Any way you look at it, the possibilities offered are endless.

Like a lot of photographers, I don’t, as a rule, carry my DSLR everywhere. When I’m heading out to the market, or going out for dinner, jumping on my bike for some exercise or taking my wife to work, I don’t want to be carrying a big heavy camera with me on the off-chance that I see something worth shooting while I’m there. I do carry a phone with me however, and that doubles as the camera I have everywhere.

By far, the most important part of photography is the desire of the photographer to make the image. If you love making photographs, then the technical details, gear and specs aren’t all that important. Your desire, your vision and your passion is what drives you and a cellphone camera – or indeed any other type of camera – can see those creative needs met. As they say, it’s not what you have but how you use it.

Orchids - the first photo I took on my Android phone

You can get away with a lot more with a cellphone. An image that if shot on a DSLR would be criticized on some technical merit is likely to be praised if on a cellphone. The expectation of technical quality is a lot lower and this can often be a refreshing and freeing change. You’ve essentially got a license to experiment when you’re photographing with a phone camera which, for the artist in you, is liberating.

One key point in conclusion is that you definitely don’t need an iPhone in order to make photographs. Although there are more apps available for it, and a lot of people refer to iPhoneography, any cellphone with a camera is usable.

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Living in the cloud.

Modern photography results in enormous amounts of digital data being produced. This runs the full range from the RAW image files themselves through edited versions through catalog and database information and more. As you accumulate more and more photographs, you need a safe and secure method of storing them. This applies to those who produce photography for a living, those who do it as a hobby and also those who simply want a few snapshots to remember a holiday or birthday party. I’ve looked at the basics of digital asset management (DAM) previously and so today am going to discuss it a bit more by way of a review of the newest publication from X Equals – “Living In The Cloud”.

Before we get into it, I want to remind you about Selina Maitreya’s The View From Here. Selina brings 3 decades of portfolio consultancy experience and wisdom to this MP3 series that’s a must-have for anyone either contemplating becoming a working photographer or professionals looking for a little extra inspiration. Normally $199, it’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

Cloud computing is essentially internet based computing. Instead of needing to own and maintain servers, hard drives and other gear, cloud computing allows secure, redundant sharing of resources, storage space and data by way of remote systems.

Living In The Cloud features five parts that guide you through the whole process of setting up and using cloud-based storage. The chapters in this publication are

• Cloud Storage
• Setup
• Configuration
• Deployment
• Final Thoughts

The first chapter introduces the general concept of cloud computing. Amazon S3 is the vendor of choice in this guide, although the authors make the point early that it’s not the only player on the scene. The chapter continues by answering questions about data transfer, total cost of ownership and service level agreements.

Chapter 2 gets into the details of getting started. For most people, cloud computing is a new concept, and here the X= team guide you through a step by step process for getting yourself setup. Screenshots of the setup process with Amazon S3 are included with helpful explanations about the various steps involved. Once sign up with Amazon is done, it’s time to set up an account at a client side service to enable the easy transfer of files. Jungle Disk Desktop is the service of choice here, and step by step instructions for creating an account are included.

Configuration is next and once again helpful screenshots and explanations are included to assist you in setting up your Amazon S3 “bucket” or online disk. This is done through the aforementioned Jungle Disk. You can configure things such as encryption, local drive mapping, backup and more.

Moving on, we come to deployment. This is where you manage your production data and archival data by way of backup vaults. You can choose what to backup and when to do it. You have the ability to make scheduled automatic backups. There’s the ability to have backup reports emailed to you or have them sent via RSS feed. Backups, while necessary for data safety and peace of mind are only really useful if you can then access that data. The guide also takes you through the steps for doing a “Restore” which gives you an interface to move your backed up data from the cloud to your computer.

Final thoughts rounds things off with a few additional pointers as well as some extra cloud storage resources if you want an alternative to Amazon S3.

Living in the Cloud is a very useful eBook that I can recommend to any photograph looking for data redundancy. I keep multiple backups of my data, but with the exception of the images that are in my Photoshelter archive, I haven’t taken advantage of cloud storage yet. As I’ve had one hard drive failure already this year, and recently while upgrading some computer gear I saw two of my backup Lightroom catalogs become corrupted – fortunately I had a third backup that was okay – some form of cloud storage is very attractive to me and with the steps detailed in Living in the Cloud, it’s very easy to get started.

That was the 239th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Long exposure photography is most often associated with nighttime images or those captured around sunrise and sunset. When there’s less light available, the shutter needs to be kept open for longer exposure times. Shooting at these times of day, long exposures are necessary in order to record the scene. Sometimes however, it’s desirable to have a long exposure during the daylight, with scenes featuring water being particular favorites for this kind of photography. The problem is that during the day there is usually an abundance of light, so how are you to use long exposure at times when the conditions don’t require them?

Before we get into it, I want to remind you about Selina Maitreya’s The View From Here. Selina brings 3 decades of portfolio consultancy experience and wisdom to this MP3 series that’s a must-have for anyone either contemplating becoming a working photographer or professionals looking for a little extra inspiration. Normally $199, it’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

There are a few different methods we can approach this. Probably the easiest for most photographs, and one that doesn’t require any investments in gear, is illustrated in the photograph below taken at Emerald Peak waterfall, in a Taiwanese national park. When I photographed this, it was a bright sunny day. To make things more difficult, I shot it at 10.45am in the middle of summer, which is nowhere near dark enough for nighttime. It’s not a really long exposure – only 0.8 seconds – but it is long enough to achieve the same effect. The location offered a bit of tree canopy shelter from the sun which meant slightly longer exposure times. It was definitely light enough though for handheld photography, so the tree cover alone was not enough. I dialed in an ISO of 100 and selected f16 for my aperture. To give it some final help in lengthening my exposure times, I also used a polarizing filter which eats up a couple of stops of light. All of these factors came together to allow the longer exposure.

While 0.8 second is a longer exposure than usually, it’s still not a true long exposure. To go longer, you need some additional equipment, in the form of neutral density (ND) filters. An ND filter is simply a neutrally tinted (meaning it won’t affect the color balance of the scene) dark filter that you attach to the lens. They serve to cut down the light entering the lens, meaning that exposure times need to be lengthened to achieve the correct exposure. The following picture is one from last weekend. This was taken at 12.50pm on a very bright summer’s day. This is probably the worst time of all for most kinds of outdoor photography, however in this case I had no choice – a client wanted a particular location scouted last weekend and it had to be at low tide, which unfortunately occurred at lunchtime. For the photograph below, I’ve used the polarizer once again, but I’ve also stacked a Cokin ND8 neutral gray filter on. This is not a true neutral density filter, but for my purposes here was close enough. This combination enabled an exposure time of 3.2 seconds at an aperture of f22 and ISO100.

3.2 seconds is getting longer, but sometimes you want to go even longer. This being the case, you need to pull out the big guns and that’s what I did for the next photograph (a toned version of which opens this post). I used a B+W 110 ND filter for this which cuts a phenomenal 10 stops of light, enabling much longer exposure times. The image here had an exposure time of 20 seconds but I also added almost a stop of exposure in Lightroom. I did shoot longer exposures – up to 100 seconds – but the wind was a little too strong and there’s some slight movement of the tripod that’s noticeable in exposures longer than about 20-30 seconds.

It goes without saying you need a sturdy tripod, some kind of remote shutter release and a lot of patience for this kind of photography. When using something as strong as a 10 stop ND filter at small apertures, it’s going to be practically impossible for your camera’s autofocus to work, so I’d advise focusing before attaching the filter. Switch off the AF so that your focus point remains locked and then attach the filter. Working out exposures times can be done by using a table or some math, or simply trial and error. With digital you can immediately see the results on the screen, so check the exposure histogram and adjust as necessary. For times over 30 seconds (or whatever the longest programmed time is on your camera), you’ll need to use the B setting and have some kind of timer. I used the stopwatch on my Android phone but the screen wasn’t easy to see in the bright light, so I ended up just roughly counting in my head for the longer ones. If you’re doing a 100 second exposure, a second or two out is not likely to be a problem. Finally, watch out for vignetting on wide angle lenses. I find around 24mm to be a good starting point. If I go all the way out to 17mm on my 5D Mark II I get some noticeable vignetting.

If you’ve enjoyed these photographs, you can license them, or buy them for personal use or as a fine art print.

That was the 238th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Looking toward Xin Beitou station - an outtake shot during an assignment.

The debate on providing images for free is not a new one. John Harrington, photographer and author of Best Business Practices for Photographers (a book that is a must-have for any professional or aspiring professional photographer), recently generated a large amount of discussion with his post at Blackstar entitled 12 Excuses for Shooting Photos for Free – And Why They’re Bogus. For the record, I pretty much agree with everything he mentioned in that post. You wouldn’t expect your doctor to work for free, or your mechanic, teacher, secretary, 7-11 clerk or anyone else. So why do people seem to think photographers should work for free?

Before we get into it, I want to remind you about Selina Maitreya’s The View From Here. Selina brings 3 decades of portfolio consultancy experience and wisdom to this MP3 series that’s a must-have for anyone either contemplating becoming a working photographer or professionals looking for a little extra inspiration. Normally $199, it’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

As a working photographer, first and foremost, I need to earn a living. Photography, particularly travel and cultural photography, is not the highest paying vocation in the first place, so expecting me to shoot for free is, quite frankly, insulting.

As a working photographer, I need to purchase professional grade equipment that is up to the task. Professional photographers shoot tens of thousands of images annually, and the camera equipment needs to be suitable for the job at hand.

As a working photographer, I need to market myself. Websites, portfolio books, promotional mailers etc all cost money.

As a working photographer, I need to invest in my own knowledge, skills and education. Workshops, books, seminars and training is essential to stay up to date.

As a working photographer, I need to keep my computer hardware and software upgraded. Lightroom, Photoshop, my Photoshelter archive, redundant data storage, professional-grade monitors and computers all cost money.

As a working photographer I need to take care of all the other expenses that come with running a business. Rent, office equipment, utilities, postage, courier fees, insurance, tax, travel and transport expenses all need to be paid.

So I ask again, why do people seem to think that photographers should work for free?

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Lotus

A couple of weeks ago, Rodney Washington released his eBook “Eye On Marketing – 41 Days From Struggle And Confusion to Clarity and Profits”. I bought my copy soon after its release and I’ve now had time to read it and take it in. This eBook comes at an interesting time. The global economy is still trying to claw its way back to a healthy status, more and more people are looking to take the first steps toward a photography business while at the same time, more and more traditional avenues to a photography career, namely newspapers and magazines close down. Washington’s book encourages the reader to take action and make the positive steps that will bring success. It may involve a new way of looking at your current business, it may be venturing into areas you’d previously avoided or it may be something else entirely but by taking action, you can find success.

The book says “41 Days From Struggle And Confusion to Clarity and Profits” and the format is laid out in kind. There are 41 steps laid out with suggestions for you to follow. It doesn’t really matter what market you’re aiming for, the concepts outlined can all be adapted to suit your clientele. Each “day” concludes with an action checklist, that summarizes the things you can and should do in order to bring you that success. Unlike a lot of other how-to type guides, Eye On Marketing is heavily geared toward action and the comprehensive action steps make it easier for you to put them into practice.

In the first 7 days alone, topics covered include getting referrals, social media (Facebook/Twitter), and blogging with a couple of different days dedicated to each. These are fundamentals for building your photography business and if you haven’t already set these up adequately, now’s the time to start.

Eye On Marketing

As well as discussing things you can do, Washington talks about the things you shouldn’t do. There are a number of points throughout the text that advise you on possible things you are doing that are actually losing you clients and business. The action steps related to these issues give you ways that you can turn things around.

A lot of photographers find that the marketing side of things is where they run into problems when trying to promote their businesses. Eye On Marketing spends a few days talking about this, covering topics such as getting over the fear and reluctance of marketing to creating strategies to guide your promotional efforts. These areas in particular will be very beneficial to a lot of photographers who are already in business but are looking to expand.

As well as the content included in the eBook, there are some bonus chapters on offer as well as some audio content. The advice and tips in Eye On Marketing” will, if followed, give your photography business a boost, so pick up a copy today.

That was the 236th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.