Photoshop Piglets and Droplets, Oh My!

Yes, this post sounds like I've taken on children's storytelling with Pooh bear, but not so (though no diss on Pooh bear, as I love Pooh! Though Piglet is indeed my very favorite. He is a Very Small Animal, you know).

I've learned something and figured out something and just all around came to a revelation of sheer post-production joy.

1. Lightroom's sharpening kind of sucks. (*gasp!*) I know, I know. I had heard that Photoshop's Unsharp Mask was the way to go, but I just hadn't gotten around to really playing with it. Now that I have, I want to cry, because Photoshop does SUCH a better job at sharpening, and Lightroom's is SO lukewarm at best in comparison. The torment I've been putting my photos through! The tragedy! Thou shalt never be lazy about learning a new trick ever again.

2. You can automate the running of Photoshop actions on export in Lightroom via Photoshop CS3's "Droplets." I learned this from Scott Kelby's awesome book, The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers. I just got around to finishing it last night. This can be used, for example, to run a sharpening action in Photoshop before exporting photos from Lightroom.

3. Using the "Run Any Command" piglet from Jeffrey Friedl's Lightroom plugin collection, in conjunction with his Lightroom - to - Flickr upload plugin, you can execute a Photoshop Droplet upon Lightroom export, then automatically upload the resulting photos to Flickr. (Note: Jeffrey's also got upload plugins for Zenfolio, SmugMug, and Picasa Web, and I'm betting this process would work the same on any of them).

So, all of that is just too cool for words.

Here's how I got #3 working under Mac OS X Leopard:

In Photoshop CS3, record your Sharpening action (or any other action - noise reduction, etc). My sharpening action is based on Scott Kelby's advice, which is to create a Luminosity Sharpening action. There's actually an excerpt from his book on how to create his Luminosity Sharpening action. Don't forget to include the File - Save and File - Close commands in your recorded action.

Then, create a Droplet in CS3 (File - Automate - Create Droplet). Save the Droplet in your Applications folder. I called mine UnsharpMask.

Then, choose a photo in Lightroom to export. Do a File - Export and choose the Flickr export (or destination of your choice using Jeffrey's plugins). Enable the Run Any Command piglet in the Lightroom Export dialog (you may have to restart Lightroom). Type into the Run Any Command box:
open -a UnsharpMask

where UnsharpMask is the name of the Droplet  you created in Photoshop. 

The -a tells OS X to look in your Applications folder for the application to open.

Voila!

I am the happiest camper alive a) to see how wickedly good Photoshop's unsharp mask works, and b) to be able to not only automate the sharpening action, but to automate it in a way that fits right into my existing Lightroom workflow, including the use of Jeffrey's uploading plugins. This is seriously just way, way cool.

For the Windows users out there, a previous poster on Jeffrey's blog left instructions on how to do the same in Windows. That's what inspired me to figure out how to do it on my Mac. I haven't tested this, but here are the Windows instructions (credit to Mark Alston):

Make a .bat file that contained the following:

@ECHO OFF
C:\path\to\droplet_name.exe %1
exit /b 0

And then to use this batch file as the command to run in runanycommand.

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Project 365: June 10, 2008

This is from a shoot I did this past winter of a half demolished house near the new I-355 south extension. It was originally black and white film. I used a film scanner in photography class tonight to scan it into the computer for post processing.

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Project 365: June 5, 2008

My dad. I miss you every day.  

We don't have too many photos of the guy, as he was always behind the camera, not in front of it.

I scanned this photo from the original color negative, then restored it to get rid of dust spots and scratches (the negative is 15 years old and was not stored in a sleeve) and applied selective color.

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Fixing Cluttered Background

Photodoto has an easy tutorial for quickly fixing cluttered backgrounds. (Consider this a "note to self" post!)

Before and After

Here's a before and after of one of the shots I took in Homewood yesterday. It's one of the shots on the fence re: inclusion in my portfolio, and my reasoning for including it is basically that I like what I did to it in post-production.... however, that's really not a valid reason to include it, since in theory nobody should know it didn't come out of the camera that way!!

I did a lot of cloning in Photoshop, and messed with the saturation and vibrance a bit in Lightroom, straightened the horizon, and cropped it a bit. I was pretty shocked that so much color even existed in the photo!! That bright sunlight sure does wash things out.

Before:


After:

Fixing Blown Out Skies

I was browsing through the DPS forums this evening and came across a super useful video tutorial on how to fix a blown out sky.

How ironic - I've got a photo with a blown out sky right in front of me! I think I'll try it!

(That's what I was thinking when I came across the tutorial). :)

Anyhooo it involves using a selective color mask to fix the highlights in the sky, and then applying one of three techniques to enhance the sky: a gradient, rendered clouds, or a cloud brush.

Here is one of my park bench shots from last weekend. (Yes, I realized after my post the other day that those park bench shots were a bit overexposed).

Before:


After:

Egret in Flight: Take 2

I've got this photo up in the Critique forum over at DPS.

I've added some motion blur to the shore line in the background. I still can't put my finger on what I don't like about this picture. I like the egret, and his pose, and that I can see his head from the angle I shot at. Maybe it's the colors? So drab...

I do like it a bit better with more blur in the background. Here's what I've got so far:

Photoshop Frame Actions

Recently, I was looking for some information on how to add a decorative border to my photos. Nothing fancy - just a black border... someplace I could possibly put a copyright notice or a web URL.

As usual, the DPS community came to my aid when I posted the Add a Border? thread.

I found that there are lots of free actions out there available for Photoshop that can add a nice border to your photos. I found one that I like, and then recorded my own action to:
1. Run the frame action, then
2. Add a text layer with my name and copyright info

I found Jodi's Multiple Choices Gallery Frame Action at ATNCentral.com. Scroll down a bit from that link to find Jodi's action. I liked it the best, but there are many others you could try! :)

Goose: Before and After

Let me tell ya... the people at the DPS forums are fantastic! Here's the entire thread on my critique and post-processing of a cat named Goose.

I posted that pic of Goose from the other day for critique on DPS. I knew it could be improved in post-processing, but had no clue what to do next. They gave me some tips, and - holy cow! Goose is one handsome devil :)

Goose - BEFORE:


Goose - AFTER:


Much improved, no?? I think so!!

The greatest part is, I had no clue how to do the things they had suggested, so I had to look it all up... I learned a ton just from messing with this one picture of Goose!

Here's what I did:
First, I worked on the blur on the background. I never knew you could feather a selection - so I feathered it at 30px around the top of his head and body to prevent that unnatural line I was getting before. I did a lens blur, and pretty much maxed out all of the blur values. I also de-saturated that area and darkened it a bit.

Next, I learned how to use the quick mask tool to make a selection out of the inside of his eyes, and then I just increased the brightness there (which amazingly brought out the green in his eyes! I was shocked - I had no idea that could be done!)

Then, I upped the yellows and reds in the whole picture to warm up Goose's browns a bit. I was really unsure here - I'm not sure if there's some magic formula as to how much yellow/red one should have in a photo, but I went for as warm as I could without making it look fake. (Did I go too far?)

Finally, I used the unsharp mask on his facial area. I think I ended up with a radius of 2 and about 40%. Honestly I have no idea what exactly this tool does. I do know that when I went too far with it, his fur started to look like sticks :) So I went far enough to make his fur a bit more defined but stopped when it started looking weird.

Oh - and I cropped the left side down to his paw. I like the tighter crop, now that I see it :)

Help with this tugboat!

One thing I've been fruitlessly working on today is an attempt to edit one of the photos I took yesterday.



I'm trying to get rid of the white car in the background on the right side, preserving the old house.

It's not going so well. I can't seem to clone the house in any way that looks natural, and in trying to fix my cloning, I seem to have made a blurry mess out of the bottom right corner of the photo, killing the clean line of the front of the tugboat. Basically, I clone stamped the house along the bottom right side, then did some smudging to try and make the clone stamps less obvious. Healing didn't work - it ruined the lines of the siding of the housing, making it look even more blurry.

Another problem I think is that there's a bit of white reflection on the front of the tugboat from the white car, so when the car is removed, the reflection looks weird, but again, deleting those white pixels kills the smooth edge of the front of the boat.



Any advice on how to fix this, or how to better go about starting from scratch?

I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS3, and also have the trial of Lightroom (for 15 more days!)