June Gloom
I’m tempted to leave this blog entry’s title as the default Apple title “Long Day of Longboarding” because its at around this point that I start to think that longboarding might be the most enjoyable thing I could do today.
Photography. I’m playing with a really intriguing new project but I’m having a hard time getting it off the ground. There have been too many logistical issues that have gotten in the way and I’m starting to feel that maybe it’s a little too big to handle right now. It would involve stitching numerous images together to appear like they were one image and that always proves to be more complicated than it sounds on paper.
I got Photoshop CS3 recently. I’m still trying to decide if I think it was a purchase worth making. The feature that I didn’t know about until recently was that you can embed RAW images into files as smart layers. That’s a very cool little feature that I’m surprised they aren’t hyping more. That will certainly affect my workflow.
Speaking of workflow, I finished a brand new Photoshop script last week for retouching portraits. The script smoothes digital grain, sharpens edges and sets up my manual layers with tags and groups. I estimate that the script will reduce my retouching time by an average of 25 minutes per image.
I also devised another procedure that uses the find edges command and blending options to give a very subtle emphasis to detail in areas of shadow and highlights. The first half of the script essentially isolates parts of the images that have fine detail in the shadows and then uses a black layer to etch fine black lines (at about 25% opacity) and then the second half does a similar command but works on areas of highlights and brightens them with a layer of white (set to about 50% in overlay mode). The result is a very subtle increase in contrast that separates shades in the part of the histogram where contrast curves and fill lights will often blend them together.
Work’s good. I’ll be taking a break for my own projects in the middle of July. Until then I’ll try to keep everyone posted.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
