In Behind the photograph #001, Paul Watson shows how he processed a dramatic sunset photo. It is Photoshop specific but some of the techniques work in the GIMP too – that b/w burn layer tip is very dramatic!
Category Archives: Photography
Defy Gravity
Defy Gravity
This is my first time searching Google Video and I came across this cool Skateboarders In Cork video while searching for “Ireland”. I recognise some of the lads, and it was shot on location in Emmet Square (photo above was shot there), UCC, CIT (I think), South Mall, over near the Victoria Hospital and elsewhere. Very nice work.
Us.. more images
Ray D’Arcy announced earlier that the closing date for digital photos by email is now Wednesday night, not next weekend as previously reported. Good thing I had most of these finished last night!
Now it’s up to the judges.
Us.. images so far
Flight Over Water
Caught in mid-flight at the Lough, Cork
Post processing:
- Converted from RAW with gimp-ufraw
- Rotated and cropped a much larger image, this is why the extra mega pixels are handy!
- Cleanup with Dcam noise, sharpen with unsharp mask.
- Colour adjustment with colour mixer.
- Resize and unsharp mask again.
- Duplicate Layer. Bottom layer is blurred with a radius of 15 pixels, and brightened significantly.
- Set layer mode of top layer to “Overlay” to give the soft light/starry light effect.
Us Day
October 1st is here and Ray and co were on the radio this morning encouraging everyone to get out there and take some photos! They were originally meant to broadcast from 11 to 1, but they locked themselves in the studio until 2pm! The discussion did degenerate into talking about handbags but it was great anyway!
I bumped into Ryan but he went his own way after half an hour. To be honest, it wasn’t a great day for me – frequent showers meant I had to wear a jacket, but between showers it was reasonably warm. Add that to a late night last night and I was struggling to keep my interest going. I have a few good shots which I will submit to Today FM, and eventually they’ll appear here too, but as Ryan said, there wasn’t much happening in the city.
It’s looking like a nice evening so I may take a walk about later around Blarney, you never know what might happen!
Edit: There’s a possible 51 shots from my walk around town that I’ll edit and submit. I have to work on them properly, but Bibblelite does a great job batch converting RAW files to Jpeg, and getting the colour balance right. Dcraw and UFraw both have problems with auto-wb on the Canon 20D in my experience.
Later still… I realised today (Sunday), that ufraw doesn’t keep the exif data when I import RAW files into the GIMP. If they check that for date and time info they might presume I was cheating and posting older images. I could tell them, “RAW images on request” I suppose.
Dig!
Digger in Ballincollig
Industry Push and Pull
Industry Push and Pull – great piece on how things are chugging along in the photography industry. Digicams get bigger sensors, DSLRs have to compete, full-size 35mm sensors won’t always be expensive..
Run Doggy Run!
Dog in Blarney
Blending RAW images
This Flickr: Technique discussion talks about blending two exposures to maximise highlights and shadows.
It’s a simple but very effective technique, and of course if you use RAW files then you’ll already have an advantage over Jpeg.