Today’s show is your chance to win an iPod Shuffle! In addition we’ll take a step into Layer Land again and look at how to change Brigthness and Contrast of your images using Layers.
“Old Barn” (click image for larger version)
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My suggestion for a tip: It’s the most obvious one in the book - allways carry your cameray everywhere you go all the time.
If you cannot carry your SLR get a smaller lens (e.g. 50mm 1.8 - they are usually very small) or buy a compact. You can get an excellent one for less than £150, E200, $200. They fit in your pocket and you wont cry too much if it gets lost or stolen.
Personally I carry a Nikon D70s with an AF 1.8 50mm
here’s a good trick to slightly lighten dark (shadow) areas in a picture without brighten the light parts of it too much (or at all):
Open your picture
duplicate the picture to a second layer
the following things are done to this second layer only:
- decrease the saturation completely so that the second layer is now grayscale only
- invert the layer (now it’s a negative)
- soften the layer (with Gaussian Blur) - you need to experiment with the settings
- now set the layer-blending-mode to “überblenden” (maybe it’s crossfade or blend in english software?)
now you can control the effekt with the opacity of the layer.
Boris,
thanks for your tip, the mode you’re referring to is the “overlay” mode as far as I know.
Yes, there’s a whole bunch of cool tricks that can be done using layers
In today’s show you recommended using Manual mode to shoot panoramas, so that all the images have the same exposure. My Canon A70 - and therefore probably every small Canon camera - has a “Stitch Assist” mode that 1) shows nearly half of the previous image in the viewfinder so that the next image can be overlapped accurately, and 2) Uses the exposure settings of the first image for all subsequent images, until you exit Stitch Assist mode. It really is a tremendous help.
– Joseph S.
Thanks for the tip, yeah, those poin-and-shoots are getting smarter and smarter!