RadLab basically acts as a filter, and when launched opens your image, and on the right hand side of the screen shows thumbnails of what your image would look like with the actions (or stylets) applied. Every time you apply a stylet, it updates all the thumbnails. AND you can then adjust the effects with several sliders after you apply each action. AND you can then save your “recipe” for use later on other images. AND after you apply the final recipe, you can always go back into RadLab and change it up (assuming you haven’t flattened your image). SERIOUSLY AWESOME!!! Check out the images below.

After clicking finish, you are brought back to Photoshop with a new layer containing the actions you’ve applied. You can then adjust the opacity of the layer, or double click on the smart filter (see below) to enter RadLab and tweak your settings, add new effects, or simply start over.

Here a few versions of my image with some of my favorite recipes applied…

For a bit more information and to check out all of Totally Rad’s awesome product line, click the link below.

Shooting at night can be very intimidating, because it will absolutely require artificial light. But once you realize your flash is your friend, and you take a little bit to get to know the little guy, you’ll love the new options available to you. So let’s talk night-time shooting. First, the goal is not to make it look like day-time. You want to light your subject, then bring in a good bit of ambient exposure to get those beautiful city lights into your photo. The biggest mistake I see people making is blasting their subject with their flash on their camera, or even off camera, but then missing the ambient exposure, making the background completely black. So how do you get your ambient exposure? Drag that shutter, baby! As we talked about in our workshop, you are going to affect your ambient exposure by adjusting your shutter speed. Let’s look at a few examples from my shoot the other day with Josh. Josh is a 2011 High School Graduate. He was great to work with, and totally brought it with his styling. And of course, it’s always nice when my seniors bring a friend or family member, because it means I have a voice activated light stand (I always put them to work!) . So on this particular shoot, I had his friend (and one of my former shoots) Angelica.

We got a fairly late start, and actually started shooting shortly after sunset, about 9:15pm. The first images were shot at the old Train Depot in Detroit. For me, when setting up my first lit shot, I follow the following steps

1. Assess the current scene and make a guestimate at my settings. In this first image, I started with my camera at ISO 800, f/4, 1/80 sec, and my flash was set to 1/8 power, and was placed in a Lastolite EZBox. Why did I start here? The sun had set, it was pretty dark. I knew I was going to need to be shooting at a higher ISO to get the train station exposed without slowing my shutter to extremely slow speeds. Because I had increased my ISO to 800, I knew I’d need lower power settings on my flash. So that’s where I started. Here’s the first image out of my camera:

2. Evaluate the test shot. After making my guestimates, and taking my first test shot, I turn the camera over, and evaluate the image. As you can see above, it basically sucks. It looks like I’m in the ball park for my ISO but I need a little bit more ambient exposure, and a little less flash exposure. To fix the ambient exposure (ie the train station, the sky, the grass behind Josh), I’m going to slow my shutter speed by almost two stops, to 1/25 sec. To change my flash exposure, I could either adjust my aperture or my flash power. Remember, aperture controls flash exposure. Not shutter speed, but aperture. However, I know that if I stop down my aperture, to say f/5.6 or f/8, that will also have an effect on my ambient exposure, thus requiring me to slow my shutter speed even more to compensate. So instead of changing my aperture, I’m going to adjust my flash power. I drop it two stops, to 1/32 power. By doing so, I arrive at the image below.

Final image out of camera, shot at ISO 800, f/4, 1/25 sec, flash power 1/32. Once you get your light right, your post processing time drops by about 99%. You can see the final image below after post processing, doesn’t look a whole lot different from the image straight out of camera.

The beauty of this process is, you don’t have to recreate it for every look. Once you have your settings, you’re set for the rest of the shoot. You may have to make subtle tweaks, but in general, you are able to run and gun. I’ve included several more images below, along with the settings I used to create them. In each of these images, I used the same light modifier, the Lastolite EZBox.

ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/80 sec, flash power 1/64

ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/80 sec, flash power 1/64

ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/160 sec, flash power 1/64

ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/20 sec, flash power 1/64

ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/160 sec, flash power 1/32

Sometimes it works. And, a lot of times it doesn’t…but you’ll never know unless you try. The shoot below is the result of one of those experiments, and likely one of my favorite shoots in a long time. Moral of the story? Experiment! You never know what might happen, it might be cool, it might completely suck, but either way, you’ll learn something from it.

I’m not sure if there are any real rules out there, so I kind of just make them up as I go. I definitely rely on my LCD to tell me if I’m in the ball park on my exposures. When backlighting (at least the way I do it), your histogram is pretty useless. Depending on the time of day, you’re going to have a lot of blown highlights behind the subject. But who cares. It’s cool. Blowing crap out out is totally ok, as long as you do it intentionally…

So, what I do is put the subject between me and the sun (or other light source). Then, expose for the face (or slightly under). What will happen is the light will wrap around your subject and create a bit of a hazy look and effect on your photo. If you get too much haze, try stopping down your aperture (moving your aperture to a higher number) or shortening your focal length. Longer focal lengths will create more haze, shorter will give you less…I’m sure it’s due to the compression effect of longer focal lengths (and expansion of shorter focal lengths), but if anybody can explain it better, please feel free to chime in…but um, do it on my facebook page…blog comment spam was making me insane, so I shut them off .

Now example time:

This is the image I shot while with the group. The first is the image straight out of camera, the second is after I increased my “blacks” value in lightroom slightly to decrease the haze in the image…it was a bit too hazy for my taste. My camera settings for this image were:

ISO: 200
Shutter: 1/1000
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 85mm

One of my favorite photographers and instructors, and the person from whom I have learned 99.9% of everything I know about lighting, is a gentleman by the name of Zack Arias. He has no idea who I am, nor that I WORSHIP him. I absolutely love his work and consider every word he mutters to be scripture. OK, so enough about me and my desire for a bromance with Zack. I bring him up only because he once said something that has stuck in mind and has become the gospel of my photography. I don’t remember his exact words, so I’ll paraphrase. It was something along the lines of “light the eyes. If you find yourself rebuilding eyes in photoshop, then you have failed at your job as a photographer.” It might not have been quite so dramatic, but that’s what I got out of his statement. Light the eyes. Get them sharp. Do it at the point of capture. So we’re going to describe below a few tips on how to get beautiful eyes. Not through photoshop techniques, but at the point of capture. Then I’ll give a small tip on giving them a final pop in post if desired. However, as with all post processing techniques, take it easy! It doesn’t take much to severely over do it. If it looks good while your editing it, reduce it by about 75% and it will likely good to the rest of the world .

As stated earlier, the first step is to get some great light in the eyes. How do we get the eyes lit? We have several tools and techniques at our disposal, I’ve listed a few below

1. Open shade – if you have a nice bright day, find some great open shade, and take your subject to edge of the shade. The best kind is when you have a single point of entry for the light, like a garage, or alley
2. Shoot down on your subject and let the sky fill the eyes with light
3. Use a reflector to bounce light into the eyes of the subject. Don’t have a reflector? Look around for any white or silver reflective object. A white shirt, a sidewalk, a garbage can lid
4. Off camera flash (this is the one most people shy away from because it seems more complicated, but if you’ll take a little bit of time to learn some basic lighting techniques, it’s one that will never, ever, ever leave you hanging)

The second step in getting beautiful eyes is you’ve got to make them sharp. No amount of post processing or sharpening in Photoshop will make up for an un-sharp eye. It will just look like an over-sharpened blurry eye. Unfortunately this means you’ve got to have good glass. If you don’t have a nice sharp lens, a great (and fairly inexpensive) recommendation would be a 50mm f1.8. You can generally purchase these new for around $100. But get the best 50mm f1.8. If you shoot Nikon, get a Nikon lens, and if you shoot Canon, then well, I’m sorry, but we can’t be friends…jk, you get the point, buy a Canon lens. Get the best glass you can. That’s just my opinion, but I guess that’s why your here, right?

How do you make a sharp eye look sharper? A shallow depth of field. Shoot those eyes at f2.8 or wider. If you nail your focus, they eyes will be sharp, and the rest of the face and image will fall out of focus, making they eyes appear even sharper. However, if you miss your focus, then the opposite happens (and worse)…if the eyes are out of focus, the whole image appears to be out of focus. It’s all about the eyes, people.

Finally, what are some final tweaks to put the finishing touch on a great eye in post? Ultimately my goal in post is not to make a sharper eye, but to get a little more depth. Personally, I don’t want to change the color, or saturation levels, but rather get darker, richer shadows and lighter highlights. This is a tip I learned from Scott Kelby at a training he gave at Photoshop World in Boston a couple years ago. I’ve given a brief example below.

Finally, the last recommendation or tip is to sharpen your images for the web. There are dozens of methods and tutorials out there for this, but every image I upload to the web (including the images you see on this tutorial) have been sharpened for the web. Hopefully this was helpful. Good luck, and happy shooting!!!

OK, so let’s get down to brass tacks. How to get an image with an awesome blue sky. I personally am a big fan of getting it straight out of camera…I’ve tried making a white or gray sky blue in post process…and honestly it takes WAY too long, and more often than not, looks worse than if you handed the image to your three year old and told him to color it blue for you. So how do we get it, and once we do get it, how do we enhance it?

I’m going to post three images I’ve shot in the past few weeks. They are straight out of camera. Zero retouching. One of the images was slightly under exposed, so I did give it a 1/3 stop bump in lightroom, but other than that, what you see is what came out of my little black box. I’ll break down each image, where the lights were placed, and what lighting I used.

First, let’s talk about a few basic rules of thumb (that I’m kind of making up, but they seem to work for me…so again, if you have better info or techniques, please share)

1. Use a fill flash. Almost always. If you want a great blue sky, you’re going to have to expose for the sky, which will under expose your subject. You’ll have to use another light source to light up your subject.
2. If you use off camera flash, place it directly opposite the sun – for example, if the sun were at 10 o’clock, place the flash at 4 o’clock. If you don’t have off camera flash, try using a reflector (your skies won’t be quite as deep blue, as you’ll need to adjust your exposure, but it will be better than nothing) or popping up your on-camera flash and using it as a fill
3. Start with a narrow aperture, f/11-f/16. Adjust your shutter speed to bring in the color of sky (probably around 125-200). Add your flash, and tweak the flash settings and your aperture to properly expose your subject. I shoot with my flash set to manual and at about 1/4 power, and adjust my aperture. If it’s way off, then I’ll adjust the power settings on the flash unit.
4. Experiment. A lot…

Image 1

Aperture: f/16.          Shutter: 1/250.           Flash: Nikon Speed Light 1/4 power.          Light Modifier (ie umbrella, softbox, etc): None

This image was shot with the sun at camera 10 o’clock, flash at camera 4 0′clock. It was about 6:45pm. Bright sky, harsh shadows, full sun. I basically followed all the rules above. I used no modifier on my flash because I needed as much punch as I could get out of the speed light to overcome the harsh sunlight.

Image 2

Aperture: f/16.          Shutter: 1/250.          Flash: Nikon Speed Light 1/4 power.          Light Modifier (ie umbrella, softbox, etc): None

This image was taken on June 17 and was shot exactly the same as the previous image, just an hour later and with with one exception. I decided to add a third light source at camera 2 o’clock. You can see it popping off there on the ledge. I added it to give the subject a little rim lighting and make him pop just a little more from the background. Why? I don’t know. I just thought it might be cool. Remember the last rule above? Experiment…

Image 3

Aperture: f2.8.           Shutter: 1/2000.          Flash: None

This shot was taken at 7:55 PM on June 3. I basically broke all the rules stated above. Again, I remind you of the last rule…experiment. The sun was lower in the sky, and behind me, at approximately camera 7 o’clock. It was still pretty bright outside, and we were in full sun, as you can see by the shadows around her. The first problem with this type of scenario is a squinting subject. It’s very difficult to have your subject looking toward a bright sky and not have them squinting. However, this was overcome by me being below her at the bottom of the stairs, so she was looking down toward the ground, rather than the sky. This however, presents another potential problem – dark pits in the eyes area. This was overcome by having her on the white cement, which acted as a gigantic reflector, opening up any shadows. Her white dress helped as well. So in the end, I was able to expose for her face, and because of the sunlight and great fill light provided by her environment, I was able to have a fast enough shutter speed to get a great exposure for the sky as well.

Once you’ve got blue in the sky, the post process tweaking is simple. I personally use Adobe Lightroom for the majority of my workflow. If you’ve got some nice color in your sky, with a few minor tweaks of your Hue, Saturation and Luminance (HSL) sliders and you can put the final touch on those skies. Just be careful, it doesn’t take much to kill what could have already been a great sky.

So hopefully this was helpful. Please feel free to post any questions and or comments or tips in the comments section. Thanks and good luck!

• Creating a Template
• Creating and Using Actions

So, first can I rant for a minute? I HATE nothing more than to go to a site or blog, then sit there for 20 minutes while the images load…optimize people! Optimizing file size is really quite simple, and adds just one small step to your workflow (maybe two depending on the final size of your image). In order to dispell the notion that you might lose image quality by reducing file size (as long as it’s done correctly), I’m going to show below two images, one before and one after – both are the same size (600 x 900 px), but one is optimized for file size…betcha can’t see a difference!

Before

After

So any guesses on what the difference in file size is for these two identical images? The “Before” images weighs in at nearly 550 KB, while the “After” is a measly 150 KB!

So, how does one achieve this modern day marvel? First, determine how wide (in pixels) your images are on your blog. There is absolutely no reason to upload images that are larger than the blog will allow. If you do, you are letting some tree full of internet elves resize your pictures for you…and trust me, they don’t care what your file size is, and the result will most definitely be sub-optimal. There are several ways of determining the width of the images on your blog, but the easiest is to take a screen shot of your blog, paste it into a new photoshop document, and crop it down to a horizontal image in your screenshot. Once you’ve cropped your image, just press Cmd+Alt+I (Ctrl+Alt+I on a PC). The width and height will be displayed at the top of the dialogue box that opens. The most important number to note is the width. Any image you upload with a width greater than the maximum allowed by your blog will be resized by gypsies. Don’t let it happen! From this day forth, you will resize your blog images to that maximum width.

Now for the final step – optimizing file size – the step that will win you awards in heaven and earth (OK, maybe not, but it will make you way cooler than everybody who skips this step). Once you have your image resized, click File>Save for Web and Devices. A dialogue box will open with several options. All you need to do is select the preset “JPEG High” then click Save. Ta da…you’ve just saved all your fans precious moments of their lives waiting for your images to load…and maybe even saved their souls from the devil by preventing the foul words that might have spewed from their mouths while waiting to view your masterpieces.

Now if you’re real smart, you’ll create an action that will do all this for you…play around with the information you learned in the last tutorial to save yourself a little time in this area as well!

For the second phase of the blog collage tutorial, we’ll be discussing how to create a set of actions to quickly place images in your blog collage templates.

Create your Templates

Before we begin, it will be necessary to have at least one template created. You can learn how, or download my template, from the first tutorial in the series by clicking here. Because we built our templates using adjustment layers, modifying the templates to create new ones is a very simple process. I recommend creating a variety of templates, just be sure to remain consistent in the way you name your image placeholders (img 1, img 2, img 3, etc).

Creating the Action

The action we are going to create will a) open the correct template, then b) place the images in their placeholders.

If you have never used Actions before in Photoshop, you’re missing out on a HUGE time-saver! Actions are basically a set of recorded steps that allow you to automate your workflow and replay it with the click of a button, making everything you do more consistent and much more quick.

1. To access your actions palette, click Window > Actions
2. At the bottom of the actions palette, click the folder icon to create a new action set
3. Name the set “Blog Collages” and press OK
4. With this new Blog Collages action set selected, click the new action button (looks like a paper with the bottom left corner folded up)
5. Name it “Blog Collage 01″ and press Record. At this point, your action is being created by recording everything you do
6. Click File > Open and navigate to your first blog collage template. Select it, then click Open
7. Click on the “img 1″ layer to select it, then Cmd+Click (Ctrl+Click on a PC) on the “img 1″ thumbnail to create a selection around the placeholder (this will center your image over the placeholder)
8. Click File > Place and select the first image you’d like to place in your collage, click Place, then press the Enter to complete the placement
9. ***Important*** Next to the action steps (on the left-hand side) you should see a check box and a small blank box. For the “Place” step you just created, click on the blank box. You should now see a box with three small dots in it. This will allow you to choose the images each time you run the action, and not just place the same image each time it is run
10. Press Cmd+Alt+G (Ctrl+Alt+G on a PC) to create a clipping mask (don’t worry if your image is cropped incorrectly right now, you’ll resize it later)
11. Follow steps 7-10 for the rest of your image placeholders
12. Press Stop (the small square at the bottom of the actions palette)

Congratulations! You’ve just created your very own action. You can now resize your images by clicking on the image layer, then pressing Cmd+T (Ctrl+T on a PC). Remember, the images are smart objects, so any changes you make are non-destructive.

Now the beauty of this is you don’t have to go and recreate the action for every template you have.

Duplicate the Action

You can create duplicates of this action and modify it very easily to run on your other templates.

1. To duplicate the action, just drag the action over to the “New Action” button at the bottom of the actions palette and drop it.
2. Double click on the new action to rename it.
3. Double click on the “Open” step of the action to specify the correct template to open
4. Add steps by clicking the Record button at the bottom of the Actions palette and then following steps 7-10 above.
5. Delete steps (in the case that your new template has less image placeholders than the first) by selecting the steps you want to remove and dragging them to the trash (at the bottom of the actions palette)

The concepts from these tutorials can also be easily applied to storybook templates, greeting cards, announcements, etc. Also, try to modify the action to be used with templates you have purchased.

Next week, I’ll complete the blog collage series by discussing some ways of optimizing your image filesize for the web. Feel free to email me with any questions on the tutorial at travis@bokastudios.com.

Let me start off by saying, I’m an efficiency nut! Anything I can do now to save myself time down the road is a huge priority. I think sometimes my wife wants to kill me, because I sit down next to her as she works, and the whole time I’m saying, you know…there’s a better way for doing that. She’s only tried to strangle me twice, but I know she’s thought about it a lot more! So I figured, if I’m doing all this stuff to be more efficient, why not share it with the world. You see, if I make you more efficient, maybe we can all be out shooting more…

So the first thing that came to mind was blog collages. (In reality, you could use these concepts to create lightning fast templates for storybook albums as well.) So the background: Jean asked me to put together some templates for her to use on her blog, and I thought this was something everybody may like to learn. We all love collages. The problem is, it’s such a hassle to put them together. There are templates out there you can purchase, but in reality, with just a few minutes, you can piece together your own templates and create an action that reduces the time you’ll spend creating the collages to a matter of seconds. And best of all, you’ll be using smart objects to create the collage, so if you decide you want to make changes to the images (ie resize, change to black and white, or even swap images) you can do so non-destructively!

I’m going to break this tutorial down into 3 segments spread over the next three weeks.

1. Creating the template
2. Creating the Action
3. Optimizing file size for the blog

Each segment, I believe, will help you become more efficient in your workflow and more proficient at Photoshop. In addition, I’ll give you a download for the template we’ll be discussing and the action that goes along with it.

Creating the Template

The first step is deciding what size document you would like to create. If you’re creating this collage for your blog, the document size should have the same width as your blog images. For example, my blog images are 900 px wide. The height of your document will depend on how many images you want to create, and what orientation you would like them. When creating the document, I don’t worry too much about the height, as I can adjust it later as needed.

The document I’ll be creating in this tutorial is 900×900 px. Once you have decided on your document size, open Photoshop and click File > New (or Command+N on a Mac, Ctrl+N on a PC).

Enter the Width and Height and be sure you are setting pixels (not inches, or points, etc). I leave the resolution set to 72. However, that number is irrelevant, since we are establishing the document size in pixels rather than inches. Click OK to create the document.

In this next step, we’re going to be creating image placeholders for the template. Grab you’re Rectangular Marquee Tool, and drag out a selection on your document where you would like to place your first image. Don’t worry about being too precise, as we can adjust the placeholders at the end.

Once your selection is made, click the Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of Layers Palette (looks like a white and black circle). Select “Solid Color” from the list. Pick a color (doesn’t really matter which). And press OK.

This should have created a new layer and filled the selection with the color you selected.

Now repeat for the other image place-holders you would like to create. I typically choose a different color or shade for each layer so I can see where each image will go. See below for an example of my document:

The next step is to rename (and I like to reorder) the layers. Double click on the text next to the layer mask on each layer and rename to “img 1”, etc. This is an important step in order to have the action work correctly.

At this point, you can adjust the image placeholders as needed by simply clicking on the mask (the small thumbnail on the right hand side of each layer) and resizing. There are several methods for resizing. I typically just click on the move tool (the black arrow at the top of the tools palette) and make sure I have the “Show Transform Controls” box at the top of the Photoshop window checked. You can also resize by clicking on the thumbnail and pressing “Command+T” on a Mac or “Ctrl+T” on a PC. Want to change the color of the image place holder? Just double click on the thumbnail (the one on the right hand side of the layer) and choose another color from the dialogue box.

Now save the document as “blog-collage-01.psd”. Ta-da! You’ve just created your first template. However, the real efficiency comes when we combine smart objects and actions with these puppies. Keep reading to see how to best use smart objects with the template, and come back later for part 2 of the tutorial…Creating the Action.

Placing Images as Smart Objects

The action we’re going to create in the next tutorial will simplify this process, but until then, I’ll demonstrate how to place a Smart Object in the template and create a clipping mask to fit the image within the place-holder.

First, click on the “img 1” layer, then “Command+Click” (or “Ctrl+Click” on a PC) on the layer mask. This should create a selection around the layer. Next, click File > Place…Navigate to the folder where you have the images you would like to use for your collage, and select one, then press enter.

Your image should now be placed in the document, centered over the “img 1” place-holder. Press enter again, then press “Command+G” (“Ctrl+G” on a PC) to create a clipping mask. This fits the image to the image place-holder. You can now resize or move the image all you want, and anything outside the place-holder, will be hidden from view. Also, keep in mind, you can adjust or resize your place-holders as well without changing your images…play around with the template as you use it and get comfortable with how all the layers work together.

Follow the same procedure to place images over the remaining image place-holders. Once you are finished arranging your images, click File > Save As and save the document as a jpg file for the blog. (You’ll also want to optimize the image for the web, however, that will be discussed in a later segment). Your image is now ready to be uploaded to your blog!

As promised you can download the template I created for this tutorial along with an action that automates the image placement by clicking HERE.