Souders
Studios is a commercial house of photography in Denver, Colo. Rick
Souders' food and beverage imagery appears worldwide in advertising
print campaigns, cookbooks, annual reports, and the Internet. His most
recent book is "The Art and Attitude of Commercial Photography"
(Amphoto Books). To see more of Souders' work, go to www.soudersstudios.com.
Download the original article from Professional Photographer.
The benefits of photographing anywhere but your studio
By Fuzzy Duenkel
Your clients reveal themselves where they're most comfortable, in their own homes with familiar surroundings—so why drag them into the foreign territory of your camera room? Try making a house call.
Here are three more images illustrating the places where inspiration might lead you outside your studio.
Hallways often provide an interesting lighting mix. With
cross-lighting, it's usually best to have the subject turned to
directly face one of the lights. Halls with bare walls allow for
creative montages.
Traditional art concepts
If you want to give your photos a painterly touch, whether you use
Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter, or both, knowing some traditional art
concepts can help.
For instance, there are millions of random colors in an average photo, so the more you limit the colors, the more your image will look like a painting.
That’s why just cloning an image, where you paint brush strokes using the colors from the photo, really doesn't make the photo look painterly.
Instead, choose a color scheme in which the colors are related to one another and repeat throughout the painting, creating what's called color harmony.
A simple rule for choosing colors is to pick one color and its complement, meaning the color opposite it on the color wheel. If you want to add more colors, I find including the complement pairings gives the image a pleasing look.
This is a commissioned portrait I painted in Corel Painter IX from a snap shot taken by the child's father.
When turning a photo into a painting, one of the things to keep in mind is that a painting has a chosen color scheme, unlike a photo, where the colors are random. I chose a red-orange/blue-green color scheme for the painting as these colors are complements, or opposite one another on the color wheel.
By Kathy Falls, PPA Certified, M.Artist, MEI.Cr.; Photography ©Dan Falls
With the new digital tools available, it is now possible to copy old glass plates, negatives and transparencies with great results. There are a few principles in the process that you must follow.
But with a little practice you can be well on the way to saving those old negatives!
The materials to use: Adobe Photoshop CS or CS2, a digital camera that can shoots in RAW format, a Logan A-6A Slim Edge Light Box (www.loganelectri.com) that is balanced at 5400K, an ExpoDisc (www.expodisc.com) for creating a custom white balance, white gloves.
To begin with, I used the Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro camera with a macro lens. I chose the Logan A-6A Slim Edge Light Box. model because it is color balanced at 5400K and closely matches the balance of film (5500K). I purchased my light panel from B&H Photo Video (www.bhphotovideo.com 1-800-947-9950), but Logan light boxes are available at many art supply and photographic stores. I really like this panel because of its even light, and the 5x7-inch size is easy to handle.
Create custom palettes in Corel Painter IX
Creating custom palettes in Corel Painter IX is useful for choosing brushes without having to go into the Brush Selector menus.
Unfortunately, you can’t name the brushes in the custom palettes. So if you have several variants from one Brush Category, you will have a bunch of indistinguishable icons in the custom palette.
Instead of putting all the brushes on one custom palette, create a custom palette for each brush and name them individually.
The trick to painting hair
When turning photo portraits into paintings in Corel Painter, photographers frequently wonder how to paint hair. The trick is to keep in mind three traditional art concepts:
1. Simplify. The difference between a photo and a painting is that a painting has less detail. The natural tendency when you first start painting is to paint every strand of hair you see. Instead, simplify. The way to simplify brings us to the second art concept.
2. Paint areas of light and dark. Instead of painting each strand of hair, identify the areas with the highlights, midtones and shadows, and paint those.
3. Use the colors in your color scheme. Another difference between a painting and a photo is that a painting has a chosen color scheme. Paint hair using the colors in your color scheme instead of the colors that are in the photo.
Painting ©2005 Karen Sperling
In this full-color, easy-to-use book, award-winning designer and best-selling author Colin Smith teaches the fundamentals as well as the more advanced features of Photoshop. Smith shows how to use traditional drawing and painting tools ranging from pencils to airbrushes, how to add and manipulate text, retouch photos, create special effects, and more. A bonus "Behind the Scenes" gallery demonstrates the Photoshop techniques used by professional artists. Read more of Smith's Photoshop tips at www.photoshopCAFE.com.
"How to Do Everything with Photoshop CS2" by Colin Smith, publisher McGraw-Hill Osborne, ISBN: 0-07-226160-9, $29.99 USA
Composites
By Karen Sperling
When I turn a photo into a painting in Corel Painter, I often composite the photo, adding elements from other photos if necessary, before painting. If you want to combine photos, do the compositing as your first step.
For instance, I wanted to add flowers from another photo I took to the original photo from a wedding I photographed with a Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro digital SLR and a Nikon 24-120mm lens from Alkit.
Painting ©2005 Karen Sperling
Impressionist style
Painting ©2005 Karen Sperling
This is a painting I created in the Impressionist style in Corel Painter IX from a photo by Zarek. I wanted to put the little girl into a chair in a garden, so I composited the original photos before painting it.
A Wedding Photographer's Dream: How to effectively organize and edit your photos
By Paul Ellis
Shooting digital photography is both a blessing and a curse. For example, following a wedding party from 5am until late in the night can easily leave a trail of photographs numbering in the thousands; even more so when you factor in a second shooter and an assistant. Throw in the ever-demanding goal of trying to capture all the moments, unexpected delights, and emotions of a wedding day and you end up with a lot of hits and misses. The wedding may be over, but your work has just begun. Reviewing all of these images to identify the keepers, toss the rejects, and ultimately make the client happy are not easy tasks. The end of the shoot marks the start of the tedious post-production workflow process.
This “how-to” will help explain how ACD Systems’ new professional product, ACDSee Pro Photo Manager, can facilitate easy organization and editing of your photos after the shoot.
Seeing Stars
A quick way to add a special painterly touch to your photos and paintings with Corel Painter IX is to paint in stars using the F-X category’s Fairy Dust variant. You can just pick a color and paint, but for a more interesting result, add the stars in varying intensities by adjusting the Resaturation and Bleed sliders.
With some color already in the background, I chose the Fairy Dust variant, and I turned Resaturation down and Bleed up in the Property Bar and painted some strokes, creating very subtle stars. Then I raised Resaturation and lowered Bleed slightly and painted again, which brought in the stars with more color. I proceeded to raise Resaturation, lower Bleed and paint until I had varying degrees of stars.
Why one photographer loves the sun
By Steve Bedell, M.Photog.Cr.
For years, photographers have extolled the virtues of taking portraits on overcast days or during the magic time that occurs near the beginning and end of every day. On cloudy days, the contrast range is reduced, allowing you to capture detail throughout the image, from the brightest area to the deepest shadow. Near sunset, you also get a reduced contrast range, with the added benefit of directional lighting, a wonderful bonus. And while I won't argue that the first and last light of the day offers perhaps the best lighting conditions, I can tell you that I actually prefer sunny days to cloudy ones when shooting. Let me 'splain.
Caption (above right): Sun bouncing off a yellow building across the street created my main light for this image, with trees also blocking overhead light. Open sky behind her also creates a little kicker light on her hair. This is one of my favorite shooting situations. Model: Alyson Perreault
Continue reading "Lighting Technique: Make the best of a bright day" »
Concluding in April, Professional Photographer magazine ran Making Eyes, a three-part tutorial on eye enhancement in portraiture from Jane Conner-ziser. Click here to download the custom set of brushes Jane uses in Adobe Photoshop. To use the brushes, navigate to your Photoshop application folder > Presets folder > Brushes folder. Place the file JanesRetouchingBrushes.abr in the Brushes folder. From Photoshop, choose your Brush tool and click on the Brush Preset dropdown menu in the Options bar. Click on the reveal triangle to the right of the Master Diameter slider and choose Load Brushes.... In the Load window, navigate to the Brushes folder where you placed the file, choose janesretouchingbrushes.abr, and click Load. The brushes will appear at the bottom of your current brush preset selection.
Charcoal shading
Shading is one of the nicest ways to add a painterly effect to photos and paintings in Corel Painter.
I like to use the Charcoal category's Charcoal Pencil 3 variant as my shading brush. I have altered it slightly, lowering the Grain slider in the Property Bar to 12, which puts more texture into the stroke.
Click the painting for a larger view. Photo and painting of Laurence Gartel ©2006 Karen Sperling.
In the May issue of Professional Photographer, color management columnist Andrew Rodney references his column from Sept. 2004, "Soft proofing explained." For your convenience, we provide it here for download (PDF).
In this and future months, Professional Photographer magazine offers you free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School. To kick off the feature, we've got two great lessons.
Senior Portraits Using Litediscs Outside
and
Please use the Comments section below to let us know if you found the lessons valuable and to offer topics for future lighting tutorials.
Blending the "Smart" Way
Corel Painter IX.5, a free download from the Corel site for owners of Painter IX, has some nifty new palettes for speeding up the steps for turning photos into paintings.
The new Smart Blur feature streamlines the process of blending, which many photographers use to give faces a painterly look. Blending involves painting stroke-by-stroke with one of the Blenders' category brushes. Now Smart Blur does the blending for you. Here is a photo by Mary Wynn Ball before and after Smart Blur was applied.
"Secret" oil-painting brush revealed!
One of my favorite oil-painting brushes in Corel Painter is not filed under Oils but hiding in the Blenders brush category—the Water Rake variant. As a Blender brush, the Water Rake blends colors in an image in the form of oil-paint strokes.
You can also use it to paint color. To do so, set the Resat slider in the Property Bar to 33%, choose a color in the Colors palette and paint. The brush stroke resembles an oil painting technique.
The image at right shows the strokes as I began to turn a photo into a painting in the style of artist Pino Daeni. On the left is a detail of one of his paintings. You can see that the Painter strokes on the right are a good facsimile of the ones in the painting on the left.
Corel Painter IX.5, the latest version of Painter, has new tools that speed up the process of turning photos into paintings, making them ideal for the professional photographer who wants to offer his or her clients painted portraits. These tools let you automate the blending and painting process so that you can produce unique portraits without having to close your photo studio for three months while you paint them.
This tutorial shows you how I turned this photo by Mary Wynn Ball into a painted portrait.
Photo © 2006 Mary Wynn Ball; Painting © 2006 Karen Sperling
Continue reading "Tutorial: Creating unique paintings with automated Tools" »
An excerpt from Kevin Ames' "Photoshop CS2: The Art of Photographing Women" (Wiley Publishing, Inc., avail. Sept. 2006)
All photos ©Kevin Ames
In our August issue of Professional Photographer, we printed an abridged chapter excerpt from Kevin Ames' informative and instructional "Photoshop CS2: The Art of Photographing Women." The following is a collection of sidebars, tips and notes that we couldn't include due to space limitations.
In this and future months, Professional Photographer magazine offers our readers free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School.
In this lesson we show how you can rig your portrait gear to save time and make lighting those school portrait jobs (or any set of similarly posed individual shots) a snap. All the preparation you need to make this lesson work for you is a quick and cheap trip to a hardware store.
The "String" method refers to simply attaching a length of string to each piece of gear you use to shoot your portraits.
Go to the String Method lesson at Web Photo School.
Painting watercolor hair
In Corel Painter IX.5 I used Digital Watercolor’s New Simple Water and New Simple Blender to turn this photo by Scott Stulberg (left) into this Winslow Homer-style watercolor painting (below).
Caption: Photo ©2006 Scott Stulberg
I made some adjustments to get brush strokes that blend more like watercolors, based on some discoveries by watercolorist Nomi Wagner. I changed the Stroke Type from Single to Rake in the General palette (Window > Brush Controls > General palette) and moved the Opacity slider to 20% and the Wet Fringe slider to 50% in the Property Bar. (You can also highlight the fields where you see the numbers, type in the values, and press return/enter.)
Caption: Painting ©Karen Sperling
I also accessed the Angle palette (Brush Controls > Angle palette) and moved the Squeeze slider to 39% and the Angle slider to 199 degrees.
The secret to painting hair is just to suggest it rather than paint it strand by strand. Painting the girl’s hair was a three-step process.
In this and future months, Professional Photographer magazine offers our readers free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School.
Project Runway is one of the hottest shows on television and New
York Fashion Week begins Sept. 8. What better time to brush up on the
haute couture of photographic technique by exploring the use of
delicate, soft, flattering light?
This month's lesson covers the advantages of using stylists, setting up a white background sweep, setting up and positioning lighting elements, and using lighting ratios to knock out the background naturally.
Adding drop shadows in Corel Painter
By Karen Sperling
Painter has an automatic drop shadow tool like Photoshop, but I find a manual approach works better. Read on to see how to do it.
Caption: Photo ©2006 Mary Wynn Ball. Backdrop ©2006 Laurence Gartel.
Professional Photographer magazine offers our readers free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School.
Fall is here, bringing a riot of rich, natural color. Do you want to push your color palette beyond khaki, denim and black? In this lesson, learn how to determine what color to use, how colors interact with other colors, and how to control saturation.
Topics Covered:
Go to Contrasting Colors for Vivid Results at Web Photo School.
Professional Photographer magazine offers our readers free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School.
Using a softbox gives your subject the soft treatment, but sometimes you want more contrast. Because the umbrella is a bounced light the results have more punch. This lesson uses two Photoflex 45-inch umbrellas (the white ADW and silver ADH) and demonstrates the versatile look they can add to your photo shoot.
Topics Covered:
Go to Using Umbrellas in High-Contrast Fashion Shoots at Web Photo School.
Continue reading "Using Umbrellas in High-Contrast Fashion Shoots" »
Painterly Brushstrokes with a Click
By Karen Sperling
Corel Painter IX.5's Auto-Painting palette in the Window menu has many useful tools for turning photos into paintings. One technique for using the Auto-Painting palette is to deselect all the boxes under Randomness and then paint with the Artists’ Sargent brush.
Photo ©2006 Felicia Tausig
Painting ©2006 Karen Sperling
Give your portrait an infrared look with delicate digital hand painting (includes downloadable Photoshop action and Flash tutorial)
I've always been intrigued by the melancholy beauty of certain photographs shot with infrared. The only issue is you either have to convert a digital camera to shoot infrared or use infrared film. This is both cumbersome and costly. Enter Photoshop.
Whilst researching infrared techniques in Photoshop, I found many that worked well replicating infrared for landscapes, but not with portraits. After much experimentation, I created an action that has the speed of an 'action' along with the ability to customize crucial steps, so photographers can tweak it to suit their own photographs.
Photos ©Peter Roberts
Continue reading "Tutorial: Digital Infrared and Hand Coloring for Portraits" »
Press Release—Kingston Technology's ‘Icons of Photography’ Web site this month features award-winning documentary photographer Colin Finlay, offering tips on making the most of existing lighting. “As a photojournalist I’ve learned to use whatever is available to me to capture my images—this includes lighting. I rarely have the luxury of bringing portable strobes on assignments, even my commercial advertising jobs,” Finlay notes. “Keeping the lighting simple is something I always tell students, whether in the studio or on location. Doing this minimizes complications and forces you to look at your subjects from varying angles and perspectives. Many of my best shots were produced because I was forced to move around a subject and change my perspective; the light was stationary and I was the one that needed to move. It is a great exercise and one I am constantly sharing with students.”
Continue reading "Documentary photographer Colin Finlay shares lighting techniques" »
4-Minute videos debut the December 1 in the Tamron Pro Learning Center
Press Release—If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a how-to video must be as good as a book, especially if it compresses the knowledge contained in a 45-minute lecture into a concise, well-focused, viewer friendly 4-minute format you can download to your iPod or computer. That’s the exciting concept behind the incisive, entertaining, and informative new podcasts posted in the Tamron Pro Learning Center at www.tamron.com.
Hosted by leading photographers, each one gives clear step-by-step pointers on shooting everything from surfing to portraits to macro in Central Park. The information is presented in simple, direct language with verbal hints and tips immediately illustrated by concrete visual examples. Watching one of these podcasts on the screen feels more like being at a hands-on photo workshop in the field than sitting in the classroom. And by mixing video footage with outstanding still photographs, each technique becomes crystal clear. It’s easy to hook up with this incredible learning experience—just make sure you’ve got QuickTime on your 'pod or PC, click on podcasts at the Pro Learning Center and take a few minutes to download the videos.
Professional Photographer magazine offers our readers free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School.
Achieving a pure white background may seem simple, but it's not so hard to foul it up. A new photographer usually goes too far in one direction or another when attempting to create a perfect white background.
A) An insufficient amount of light on the background creates a shade of gray.
B) Too much light on the background turns the subject matter 'milky' and saturation is lost.
This lesson shows you the techniques necessary to control your white backgrounds.
Topics Covered:
Go to Achieving a Pure White Background at Web Photo School.
Professional Photographer magazine offers our readers free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School.
Modifying the standard approach to portraits can add more life and interest to your shot if you know what you're doing. When it comes to shooting glamour, rules should be considered guidelines.
The most interesting glamour shots out there are taken by photographers who have veered from the rules to come up with their own bag of tricks for shooting.
This lesson will show you a couple of simple modifications you can make to a standard portrait lighting setup to enhance the appeal of your images.
Topics Covered:
Professional Photographer magazine offers our readers free lighting tutorials from Web Photo School.
There are many things to consider when you leave the studio to shoot portraits outside: weather, time of day, and the background to name but a few. With its LitePanel system, Photoflex offers a way to take the control you have in the studio with you on location.
Topics Covered:
Go to the Shooting on the Beach with litePanels lesson at Web Photo School.
All Images ©2007 Jeremy Sutton
The art of making "San Francisco Heart" with Corel Painter X
[Due to space constraints, we could not include every step of the Collage Portrait tutorial that Sutton wrote for our March issue of Professional Photographer. Here, for our readers, is the complete version of that tutorial.]
I created San Francisco Heart, a collage portrait of San Francisco, using the recently released Corel Painter X . The principles, strategies, workflow and techniques shared here can be applied to creating a collage portrait of any subject—a person, family or couple; a vacation destination, event or city. My goal is to inspire and empower you to create your own personal collage portraits.
The term collage portrait refers to a portrait painting of a subject in which there is usually one main foundation image interwoven with a multitude of subsidiary images, some more subtle than others, but all relating to the subject and contributing to the whole in a harmonious and meaningful way.
San Francisco Heart was inspired by my experience of living in San Francisco and wanting to express my appreciation of the beauty, diversity, creativity, excitement and richness of this City by the Bay.
Read on or DOWNLOAD a PDF of this tutorial.
