I remember from my days of playing and writing music how I would hit writers block. The same thing happens at times in photography. I can get caught up in the business side of things and forget to let myself enjoy why I started to do Photography as a career, for photography! My computer crashed, I had enough, so I built a new one! Excited to see the difference my building a computer ten times faster than the last I went through some old photos to find one to edit.
The cool thing about going back is this, over the time since you took those picture you learn some new post production techniques. My last computer could not rotate my canvas in photoshop, I can now. this really helps with getting that precision when painting on a tablet as you can rotate the canvas and allow your hand move naturally. You will notice artist with paper will move the paper rather than twisting their arm in funny directions to draw. So I decided to find a picture I could do some work on that needed some rotation as I draw with my tablet. I also have been developing some new dodge burn techniques, rather than using the photoshop D/B tools I have been making a layer with a neutral grey, and painting white or black over top using some brush presets. The outcome is a more natural looking dodge/burn while preserving detail.
The technique is very easy to do.
1. Hold the Alt key and make a new layer. It will prompt you with some options.
2. Set the options to this.
- Color: Grey
- Mode: Soft light
- Check the Fill with soft-light-neutral Color (50% grey). Click OK
4. August you opacity and flow on your brush according to how dark or light you would like to paint. I like 30-40% as an avrage. I will go up or down from there as needed.
5. Switch to black foreground to darken (burn), white to lighten (dodge). You can use the x key to do this
6. Paint the areas you see fit :)
Here is the picture I worked on, there was a small forest fire in the area I live over a year ago, this was one snap shot. Kate likes it because it reminds her of a fantasy land where a tree person lives.
Thanks for reading.
Mike.
