Esther T. New: Photographers Don’t Have to Scat (IP EP-184)

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Pre-Roll: Brent Rents Lenses: This episode is brought to you by a fella named Brent who rents lenses. His website is BrentRentsLenses.com. Brent is always happy to provide the advice you need when you need it. Use offer code “improve” at checkout for 15% off your first rental.

Questions of the Week:

Jenny Wu: When I’m roundtripping, Photoshop saves the image as a TIFF before going back to Lightroom. Am I losing the flexibility of a RAW file at that point?

Kevin Jordan: Can you guys convince me why I need to spend $400 on an expensive tripod? Having a tough time understanding why I would need to spend that much. What’s the difference?

Jim’s Spiel

It’s okay to not scat

Connor

Face Detect Liquify in Photoshop.

This is still the same liquify as before, however it now has the ability to detect facial features. I have only glanced at the features so far, but I am mildly worried about the effects this feature will have on the way retouching in perceived amongst common people.
Retouching should be subtle and look natural, I worry people will very quickly over do this

Sandy

It’s kind of sad to think about all the money I spent on photography materials that I never used or that didn’t last.
What I SHOULD have done is save my money, and found ways to create my own light modifiers.
There are a lot of resources online that show you how to make your own light modifiers out of pvc pipe and sheer fabric.
If you would like me to send you a PDF to Tinker Tubes (some more advanced light modifiers you can build), email me: sandy@sandydorau.com with the subject line “Tinker Tubes”.

Jeff: Time/Sky replacements are so much fun to do.

Just published a photo tonight where I transformed a shot taken at mid-day, full on bright shot and did a sky replacement with a sunset that same day. The image is on Facebook here.
Turned two fairly boring, unusable shots into a single fun shot
Used luminosity masks to select the drab, boring, no clouds sky with a sunset taken the same day that had great sky and clouds but had a terrible foreground. Still had to touch up the selection and usually I use the refine edge tool (now called “Select and Mask” as of the latest Photoshop CC release) but my scene didn’t work well with that either because the difference between the blues of the mountains in the distance and the sky was too little. So took some manual effort to clean up the layer masking to make it look believable
Had to darken the mid-day shot in a couple different ways because the corners felt too bright
Had to mirror bits of the sky in the water reflection to make it more believable

Doodads of the Week!