One of my favorite techniques I use when working in Color Efex Pro 4 by Nik Software is to apply Tonal Contrast to an image. This is one of the many filters that make up the suite of filters in this program, and I use it all the time to enhance my work. It gives images a powerful and dynamic look that makes the photo seem like it can jump right out of the computer monitor.

In the right-hand side of the dialog box (pictured below) you have several sliders that are simple to use and quite intuitive. You see the results immediately in the generous preview window (not shown) so you can decide how much or how little effect to apply.

You can see in the before and after shots of the Blue Mosque I photographed from my hotel room in Istanbul that the original picture (below) is good but the tweaked version (above) is outstanding. This one filter alone is worth the price of Color Efex Pro 4 because it’s a powerful tool and it can make your photography more than you could ever have imagined.

I like using the Nik filters so much that I wrote an ebook titled Creative Techniques with Nik Software. I demonstrate my favorite filters and ways of applying them that are very creative and that will produce endless numbers of incredible pictures with photographs that you’ve already taken. Here is a link to the ebook if this might interest you.

One of my favorite techniques I use when working in Color Efex Pro 4 by Nik Software is to apply Tonal Contrast to an image. This is one of the many filters that make up the suite of filters in this program, and I use it all the time to enhance my work. It gives images a powerful and dynamic look that makes the photo seem like it can jump right out of the computer monitor. Within the dialog box (pictured below) you have several sliders that are simple to use and quite intuitive. You see the results immediately in the generous preview window so you can decide how much or how little effect to apply. You can see in the before and after shots of the Blue Mosque I photographed from my hotel room in Istanbul that the original picture is good but the tweaked version is outstanding. This one filter alone is worth the price of Color Efex Pro 4 because it’s a powerful tool and it can make your photography more than you could ever have imagined.

I like using the Nik filters so much that I wrote an ebook titled Creative Techniques with Nik Software. I demonstrate my favorite filters and ways of applying them that are very creative and that will produce endless numbers of incredible pictures with photographs you’ve already taken. Here is a link to the ebook if this might interest you. Scroll down — it’s the second ebook listed.

http://www.jimzuckerman.com/ebooks.php

I’m very impressed with my first look at the free upgrade, Topaz 5. There are new
presets, many new features, and you can now apply more than one effect before you
hit OK. If you haven’t tried Topaz Adjust until now, I highly recommend it.
If you haven’t upgraded to Adjust 5 yet, it’s free and it’s well worth it.

http://www.topazlabs.com/downloads/index.php

The above photo was done with the preset ‘faded glory’.

At my frog and reptile workshops, I tell participants Photoshop is necessary
to clone out the reflection of the flash in the eyes of the animals. We most-
ly use a ring flash to provide the soft, diffused lighting that envelopes the
small subjects beautifully, but this leaves an unattractive reflection in the
eyes. In an animal like the red eye tree frog, this is obvious and very dis-
tracting. Using the clone tool, it took me about 10 seconds to clone out the
reflection in both eyes.

If you aren’t adept at using Photoshop or Elements, in my opinion you are doing
photography with one hand tied behind your back.

When I visit a place more than once, as I do when I lead photo tours, I try to come up with different ways of photographing subjects that I shot previously.  A case in point is the stone carving at the archeological site, Ephesus, in Turkey.  I photographed it in the shade two years ago, so this time I used off-camera flash.  This created texture and depth, and at the same time the rocks, dirt, and weeds that could be seen behind the ancient artwork became black and therefore unobtrusive.
I triggered the flash with a Pocket Wizard and had another person hold it at about an 80 degree angle.  I wanted to largely eliminate the effect of the ambient light, so I used the LCD monitor on the back of the camera to help me determine the exposure.  I increased the shutter speed and reduced the size of the lens aperture until the ambient light was only contributing a small amount and the primary light source was the Canon 580 flash.

Don’t think that professional photographers know exactly what settings to use in a situation like this.  We don’t.  Since we can’t know exactly what we will like until we see it, we simply use trial and error until it looks good.

Photoshop can solve problems that would have been impossible just a few years ago when we all shot film. A case in point is the picture of the beautiful mosaic I took a couple of days ago in the ancient site of Ephesus in Turkey. There is a group of houses that have stunning mosaics that date from the first century A.D., and the modern walkway that tourists use to observe the artwork isn’t positioned to be photographically friendly. Instead of being able to look straight down on the mosaic, which would be ideal, the people in my photo tour and I had to stand on stairs about 15 feet to the side. As a result, the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the sensor) was oblique to the mosaic on the floor. This caused the rectangular shape of the design to appear skewed, and it looks like a trapezoid complete with a diminishing perspective, as you can see in the original image, below.

The photo at the top of this blog shows the changes I made to make this look as it should. The yellowish color comes from a huge translucent roof put in place to protect the ancient houses from the elements, and the oblique angle from which I had to shoot created an unattractive distortion of the mosaic.

Here are the steps I took in Photoshop to correct these problems.

1. In Adobe Camera Raw, I moved the ‘temperature’ slider toward the blue to mitigate the yellow cast. This totally corrected the color.

2. I opened Image > adjustments > levels and increased the contrast.

3. I opened Image > adjustments > hue/saturation and added saturation to the color.

4. To correct the shape of the rectangle, I used Select > all and then opened Edit > transform > distort. This placed a box around the photograph with handles, and I dragged the corners of the image to distort the trapezoid into the rectangle it should be.

The picture now looks as if we are looking straight down on the floor mosaic from a ladder.

Finally, I used Image > image rotation > 180° to turn the image upside down so it appears right-side up.

I don’t use a fisheye lens often because usually curved vertical and horizontal lines don’t appeal to me. This kind of distortion is fun to play with for a short time, but it gets old very fast.

A particularly unique situation in which a fisheye lens is perfect for the job, however, is when you photograph something round. For example, in the above image of the circular chandelier and the domed ceiling of a mosque in Istanbul, I shot with Canon’s 15mm fisheye. The graphic composition looks much more dramatic than had I taken this with an equivalent focal length in a rectilinear lens. I own the Canon 14mm ultra wide angle lens also, and even though it is a bit wider, it wasn’t able to compete with the fisheye in producing such a dynamic picture.

When you shoot something round with a fisheye, the extreme distortion that makes fisheyes well known seems to be absent. You can’t make a round object ‘more round’, so there is no apparent distortion. It is obvious, though, that the subject doesn’t quite look like we see it with our eyes. The perspective looks expanded and dramatized, and it’s a unique interpretation of the subject.

In photographing the beautiful architecture, I was careful to position myself such that the center of the chandelier was perfectly in line with the center of the dome in the ceiling. Had I been even slightly off, the picture would not be perfect

This beautiful grist mill is located in Jericho, Vermont, and I photographed it on my recent photo tour to New England. The original sky was white, and since I found that to be less than ideal (white skies are very distracting because our eyes are drawn to the lightest part of a photo first), I wanted to introduce some clouds. A blue sky wouldn’t be appropriate since that would imply direct sunlight, and this scene was illuminated by overcast conditions.

Therefore, the only thing that made sense was to put in a sky of gray clouds. The problem, of course, was all that vegetation. That made it very difficult to use my usual technique of cutting around subjects with the pen tool. The magic wand tool was useless in this situation.

The only way to make this into a believable composite was to use a layer mask with the gradient tool. Here is the procedure:

1. Open a cloud photo (the same size as the grist mill shot), choose Select > all, and then Edit > copy. This put the cloud image in the clipboard, Photoshop’s temporary holding place for one photo at a time.

2. Activate the grist mill image and use Edit > paste. This placed the cloud photo over the mill and the river.

3. Choose Layer > layer mask > reveal all (or click the small icon just to the right of the f/x icon at the bottom of the layers palette — this is the shortcut).

3. Make sure the foreground/background color boxes at the bottom of the tools palette are black/white, respectively.

4. Choose the gradient tool. Drag the cursor from the bottom of the clouds to the top. The lower portion of the clouds will disappear leaving the top portion visible. If there are too many clouds, start dragging the cursor about 1/4 up from the bottom of the image. Experiment with exactly how you drag the cursor until the clouds look good. In this case, I started dragging about 3/5 up from the bottom.

5. Click on the brush tool, and now you can brush away clouds that cover parts of the subject that should be free of them, such as, in this case, the mill itself.

There are many things to think about when you take pictures, both technical and artistic. When you are shooting under the pressure of time (such as things are changing fast and if you hesitate you’ll lose the shot), it makes sense to simplify the things you have to consider. Even when photographing static subjects like the waterwheel in Guildhall, Vermont, I prefer to concentrate on the composition, the light, the depth of field, and the background, and I try to eliminate unnecessary considerations.

That’s why I always use daylight white balance for all of my outdoor shooting. It produces the best color at sunrise and sunset, and if I find myself taking pictures in shade or after the sun went down, as was the case with this waterwheel, the pictures will have a slight bluish cast that I either accept (which I do most of the time) or I tweak the image in Adobe Camera Raw with the ‘temperature’ slider. It takes only a moment to warm up an image if that’s the look I want, and that saves me from diverting my attention from the important task of getting the picture in the first place.

To often, the laws of optics conspire against us photographers, and to get what we
want artistically we have to outsmart these annoying limitations.

For example, on a photo tour to Kenya in 2007, our group spotted this beautiful
leopardsleeping in a tree. It was a great shot — except for the fact that the
large branchthat was about 5 or 6 feet in front of the cat wasn’t sharp. I was
using a 500mm f/4telephoto, which meant that depth of field was very shallow. I
was shooting wide openbecause the light level was low, and in the vehicle a tripod
is impractical. Out of focus foregrounds are usually very distracting, so I solved
the problem by taking two pictures.

First I focused on the leopard and took a photo, and then I focused on the
foreground branch and took a second shot. I tried to be as precise as possible
in not moving the lens from the time I tookone shot to the time I took the
second one was snapped. The camera and lens rested on a bean bag, so while
it wasn’t a perfect match, it was close enough.

When I got home, I used Photoshop to combine the two images, below. I metic-
ulously cut and pasted the sharp branch (using the pen tool in CS5) over the
out of focus branch. Now both the foreground and the background are tack sharp
and the picture works. It represents what I saw with my eyes.

Expressing motion in a still photograph can be done in several ways. One of my favorites is to ‘drag the shutter’ when using flash. This refers to using a slow shutter speed to purposely blur movement. At the same time, the flash fires which creates a sharp rendition of the subject that appears to be superimposed over the blurred image The effect looks like a double exposure in a way, and when it’s successful the result is quite dynamic.

It’s impossible to predict exactly how the image will look, so you have to experiment with the length of the shutter, the movement of the camera, the choice of lens and, if you use a zoom lens, you can change the focal length during the exposure to get streaks of color. It may take many attempts to get an image you like, but it’s fun, creative, and always surprising.

The two images here were both taken at carnival — in Venice, Italy and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I typically use shutter speeds in the 1/4 to 1/15th of a second range. Sometimes I move the camera during the exposure as I did in the Venice shot, and other times I rely on the movement of the subjects such as the two dancers in Rio. Just to see what will happen, I will also zoom the lens for an added sense of action. I rely on the flash to provide definition and detail in the subjects, and the long exposure time creates the color and the abstraction.

I use shutter priority for this technique plus ETTL (or i-TTL) on the flash. In shutter priority mode I experiment with various shutter speeds until I like the abstraction, and the ETTL function provides a correct exposure automatically. If the image turns out too light or too dark for my taste, I will then use the flash exposure compensation feature to tweak the image until I’m happy.