Hi folks,
here we go again with another “The Story Behind” post :)

One of my premises for the new year is that I want to start again working with alternative processes. After a very long break, almost 8 years, I started last Sunday to create a bromoil image.
I really have enjoyed to create it, all the preparations and then the work itself.

A paint brush instead of a mouse, a sheet of paper instead of a screen… like a travel back in time… the process itself as a whole unit, making me being a part of it, with every brush move, with every break to look at it and every decision where to reveal more of the hidden beauty and make a unique piece of art… that’s something I enjoy again and again.

The preparation was a bit “modern” as I have created a digital negative to start working.

A good ressource how to create such negatives is the book
Digital Negatives by Ron Reeder and Brad Hinkel.

A digital negative, prepared in Photoshop, allows you to skip the dark room time developing the negatives-getting straight to a variety of printing processes including silver, platinum, and a host of other “alternative” processes.

The book also includes a number of fine art and practical process illustrations, such as how to create a Becquerel contact Daguerreotype from a RAW file.
I strongly recommend this book for every alternative process artist who is ready to move from litho film and pyro developer to digtial contact negative production.

Give it a try, you won’t regret.

The photographic medium I have used is also self made, Hahnemühle Etching paper and FOMA liquid emulsion to create the light sensistive medium.

The bromoil process is best explained here. It’s still valid, even after 100 years!

All in one, it was an exciting experience to combine the modern with the classic and achieve the result as shown above.

Featuring model is Kat Love.

I’m really happy :-)

Take care,
Vernon Trent

Happy new year everyone :-)

I hope you had a good slip into the new year 2009 and your party was cool with no injuries  :-)

Today’s post is also a brief tutorial, which is specially written for my friend Dave Aharonian, from Victoria, Canada.

He is a pro I had the honour and pleasure to meet during my stay at Joshua Tree, California last September.

So dear Dave, here you go, I show you how the above shot was made.
(click the image thumbnails to get bigger lightbox view)

We have Madame Bink at the “animal-party-house-wall” (remember, during the shot you have loaded your film in the kitchen :-))

Madame Bink

Then we have an image of a sheet of paper, which we use later as a “light structure”

light structure

And then we have another image, taken from an aquarium with some bubbles.

bubbles

We load these images in Photoshop and start with the work. We start with Madame Bink and do a clean-up, adjustments (light, colors, straighten) and some clone stamping to remove the bright light from the wall.  Then we flip the image 90° anti-clockwise. It then looks like shown below

image corrections and adjustments

Then we add the bubble image as a new layer and set the layer to “brighten” blending mode. It will look like this

Madame Bink and Bubbles

After that we convert the image to B&W using the blue channel. The blue channel conversion gives a uniform grey skin tone with deeper blacks.

B&W conversion (blue channel)

After that, we add the paper image as new layer and set the layer to “soft light” blending mode. It gives the image a kind of light shades, like the light that goes thru waves at the surface.

lightwaves

Finally we add another layer and choose a light warm greytone to give some calmness to the image

Final image (warm grey toned)

Voilá, that’s all. Simple, isn’t it?  :-)

Cheers,
Vernon Trent

I often see in a lot of forums that people are complaining about image quality after uploading their photographs to online galleries and such. They complain about “muted colors” or “they look tad washed out”.

The “secret” is behind the rendering engine of the used internet browser.
Most of them are just able to reproduce the sRGB colorspace.
If your workflow contains editing/processing in a different colorspace, then you might follow the steps mentioned below. (Software used: Adobe Photoshop CS2)

After you are done with all your image processing or corrections, click in the menu bar

Edit – Convert to profile

in the dialog box choose destination colorspace sRGB IEC61966-2.1
conversion options
module adobe (ACE)
relative colorimetric

and tick the 3 options
(if your image has only one layer, flatten image has no function, so only 2 options available)

Hit OK

Note: It is normal that the colors change, specially if you convert from Adobe RGB to sRGB.

After that, resize the image e.g. 900 x 600 px

Resample method: bicubic sharper

Sharpen if needed.

Save for web (ctrl-alt-shift-s)

In the dialog box, there is an option upper right (ICC profile)
Set the option to include the icc profile in the file.

Save and you’re done.

Cheers, Vernon Trent

Printing digital photographs or making photo books becomes more and more popular, whether it’s a gift for good friends, a presentation of your work or prints for an exhibition.

Most of the labs and printing plants have automated processes for printing, but these processes need the right “input”, that means, your files should meet some requirements, such as resolution and colorspace. Modern machines can fix some issues with the resolution and colorspace but in the end there is no warranty that the output is that what you really wanted. So in the next steps, we’ll go thru the tasks you need to do, to deliver the right “input” and get the right “output” :-)

The screenshots below are made using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and are similar to most of the “modern” photo editing software, however the terms may be different but the workflow is the same.

1. Open your file
2. After that press “ctrl + alt + i” to get the image size dialog

untick

* scale styles
* constrain proportions
* resample image

then type the desired dpi (300) in the resolution field and hit OK

Now the file is been set to 300 dpi without resampling the pixels. Please make sure that the file is big enough for a real print (look at the size cm/in)

3. Assign colorspace

Some cameras assign their own colorspace to the files, so it’s always good to check if the file has teh right colorspace and apply the right one if there is a different colorspace embedded.

Menue: edit – convert to profile
The dialog box shows the destination space and the settings you should use (red stroked box)

Hit OK

(if your image has more layers, then it will be automatically flattened)

4. Save the image

Press “ctrl + shift + s”, the save as dialog box appears

Choose a name (different than your initial file, so you have always a backup), include the colorspace in the file and press “save”.

The next dialog box appears to set the tiff options. Set image compression to “LZW” and leave the other settings as shown in the box.

That’s all. :-)

As a sidenote, you may check the sharpness of the file. Because some of you use the camera “built in” sharpening process, or prefer to sharpen when developing the raw files and others may sharpen when the file is being post processed, I haven’t put the sharpening in the workflow shown above.

The “Sharpening 1×1″ will be part of my next post. Stay tuned.

Cheers, Vernon Trent

The work mentioned below can be done with any image editing software which supports layer techniques and layer blending modes. Adobe Photoshop is my choice but you can do this with Gimp or PaintShop Pro as well. Please keep in mind that in Gimp or PaintShop Pro the blending modes have different names. Please consult your manual or grab the internet for appropriate instructions.

Note: click on the thumbnails to get full size images (lightbox)

OK, let’s start.

1. We load our basic image

2. After duplicating the layer, we do a brightness/contrast adjustment. In this case I took the contrast +30 and added +10 brightness, so the image is not too dark.

3. Now we duplicate the adjusted layer and desaturate it with ctrl+shift+u.

After that, we set the blending mode to overlay and set the opacity to 50%

4. Well, we normally could finish here but let’s tweak the image a bit more. We add a new layer, set the blending mode to overlay and use a big soft brush with 20% opacity and paint with black color the edges, in fact we paint a slight vignette to focus the main subject. As the result, the waterdrops are now more accentuated.

5. The color friends stop here and the B&W friends follow me with the next steps. We add a gradient layer and choose the black/white gradient.

6. After that we add another layer. This time we choose the levels layer and adjust the mids and blacks to boost the overall contrast.

Now your image is ready for print. If you intend to publish online, then flatten the image, assign the sRGB color profile, resize for web, sharpen and you’re done.

A working file with all the steps above is attached as a zipped layered tiff.

Have fun processing. Feedback is very much appreciated. :)

Cheers, Vernon Trent

I know Flickr since a couple of years now and I have never registered an account because it was very slow for my taste. Since the Flickr is integrated to Yahoo, there is a function to link your YahooID to Flickr and then move the content to the Yahoo servers in your country. The result is a fast Flickr surfing! Well, under these circumstancies I gave myself a kick in the butt and registered an account.

I’m a certain user of Picasa since the very first version (before Google :-)) and all my images are managed by this piece of software. My goal was to find something like an interface from Picasa to Flickr. OK, you can upload pictures via mail to Flickr but this is not elegant enough for my taste. So I started to grab the net for something simple and found the picasa2flickr applet for Picasa software.

The installation was quite simple and after the applet was authorized to your Flickr account, you can upload files from Picasa to Flickr by just click one button. Cool!

Once your file is ready for upload, you’ll get a screen for further image informations, such as tagging, album choice, public or private, etc.

The applet works with the Picasa Version 2.7 Build 37.23 which can be downloaded here (download link is on the upper right side).

For the applet and the instructions how to implement the whole stuff into your Picasa please follow this link.

My Flickr Stream and The Berlin Meetup Photographs.

Cheers & have a great weekend :-)

Vernon Trent

All steps shown below do not require any special 3rd party filters or other gimmicks, just the built-in features delivered with Adobe Photoshop and an intermediate level of knowledge about using Adobe Photoshop.

Note: click on the thumbnails to get full size images (lightbox)

We start with the collection of the “requisites” for our composition. We’ll use the shots as shown below:

2 shots from Porto, a bankhouse and the promenade near Pont Louis

A Chevrolet Bel Air, shot taken in Bern, Switzerland

and finaly, a shot of myself, taken in studio in a blue screen environment.

I wanted to have this composite big enough for a poster, so I choosed the canvas size of 40 x 60 cm at 300 dpi.

As the next layer we drag the promenade shot and desaturate it

After that we drag the chevy on the left corner. Using a soft brush with 10% opacity and blending mode set to “soft light” we paint the car lights of the chevy (painting with light). With strg+u we do a partial desaturation of the chevy layer app. 30%.

We switch back to the promenade layer and add a lens blur to simulate a DOF referring to the chevy in the foreground. I used 24%.
Now we place the bank house and use the perspective function to match the perspective to the promenade. When this is done, we desaturate the layer completely using “strg+shift+u”.
Like shown above, we apply the lens blur to this layer as well.
The background is almost done but it needs some correction. Using layer masks we erase the hard borders and edges to become a “fluid surface” between the three layers.

In the next step we load the studio shot and remove the blue background color.
After that we place the new layer on the composition

We add a new layer with strg+shif+n and fill it with black color. Using a soft brush with 10% opacity and blending mode set to “soft light” we paint some lines and then apply radial blur to the layer. We have now created a kind of fog

and apply the “screen” blending mode to the layer.

At this moment we add another layer and increase the lights of the car by painting with light.

Now comes the most interesting part, the typicaly “sin city” rain. We add a new layer and fill it with black color. Go to Filter menu and choose Noise->Add Noise.
Now depending how much rain you want, adjust the amount slider (35% seems to okay). Set distribution to gaussian and activate Monochromatic. Then change the blending mode to disolve. Using the motion blur filter, try to adjust the rain drops trails to your needs

After applying the blur filter, change the blending mode of the layer to “linear dodge”. We add an additional layer draw some diagonal lines and process it like the fog layer mentioned above without applying the radial blur filter and set the blending mode to “screen”.

With these two layers we have now the rain and kinda helicopter lights
With a “S” curves layer we increase the contrast and make the whole composition a bit darker

As the last step I used a hue / saturation layer to give a slight blueish touch. Below you see the whole composition in photoshop with all the layers
and the final image

I hope you can follow the steps easily and use the workflow to create your own “Sin City” ideas. Feedback is very much appreciated.

Thank You, Vernon Trent

P.S.
A big “Thank You” to Mal for editorial reading and telling me that it is “perfect”. English is not my native language, so you can imagine how my ego raised. :-)

So here you go :-)

First of all we should specify the content and define the composition. Then we should get all the elements we need to compose the image.

Project: A kneeling sworded knight in front of an “artistic” window based in a “church-like” environment, surrounded by magic and dramatic lights.
*hah* :-)

(On all images shown from here on, click on thumbnail to get full size)

1. A shot in a blue screen environment, raw mode is better to controll the blue for a better masking.

2. Everything dramatic is accompanied by heavy dark clouds, so we take some clouds

3. Now we need the building and the place for the window. This has been rendered with Bryce using a wire frame model and adding stone textures and some lights to the model. After 10 mins of rendering, here’s what we’ve got.

4. The sunset light should shine thru the window, so we need some warm rays of light. Use a brush to paint some rays in yellow, orange and some white. Use then the motion blur to get the soft look.

5. Now we create the “artistic” window from images taken by V.T. :-)

6. OK. Now we have all the stuff ready to be composed. We start Photoshop and create a new document, A4 size at 300 dpi white background color and 8 bit.

• place the clouds at the desired position (see no. 2)
• then we place the builing as new layer (see no. 3)
• having that, we now drag the lights layer in the right position and set the blending mode to screen. the lights are bright now *oh, a higher sign* :-) (see no. 4)
• we place then the window and set the layer effects to “shine” (see no. 5)
• at least we place V.T. in the right position and do some adjustments on lights/shadows (menu image/adjust/lights and shadows).
• after that we add a new gradient map layer b/w to get a b/w image
• now we add another curves layer and change the curve on the blue channel to get a blueish tone

DONE! :-)

Curious about the result? See below :-)

Big thanks to BrownZ for help.