There are the usual places to view fireworks; out in the open, sitting on the bay with tens of thousands of people, or you can get creative and find your own little spot all by yourself. Jeff’s decision this night led us down to the Coronado Golf Course. He did some planning to find the best private view by taking in to consideration where the boat would be anchored in Glorietta Bay that was launching the display. He then carefully considered the foreground. There are few places as lush and beautiful as golf courses and Coronado’s 8th hole green is set up perfectly for a fireworks display over Glorietta since it has everything, palm trees and lush vegetation, a nice clearing, and best of all: a tranquil pond right in front for some nice reflections.

So we hauled our chairs and photo equipment down on to the links and setup at our location (right off the green of course as not to damage the dance floor.) Within a few minutes we realized how rewarding this private little location was. Are there better locations? Probably, but there’s something about large crowds I try to avoid if possible.

So here’s a checklist of things to consider when shooting fireworks:

What you’ll need

A SLR or any camera you can put in manual mode to adjust aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.
A sturdy tripod
A remote shutter release
Creative thinking for your location

ISO

Use a low ISO like 100-200. This will give you the cleanest noise free images.

Shutter Speed

Since the beauty of fireworks are the light trails they make, it’s best to use a longer shutter speed. Think somewhere around a couple seconds, but because fireworks all vary in size and duration, the best technique is to use Bulb Mode so you can have the shutter open for precisely the time you want. That way you can start the exposure right before the fireworks burst and stop it when the trails disappear. For this you’ll want a remote shutter release which explain later.

Aperture

A good aperture for fireworks is between f/8-f/16.

Manual Focus

Set you focus to manual and make sure it’s set to infinity.

Focal Length

Typically you’ll want to shoot at a wider focal length, but there’s nothing wrong with cropping it in a little tighter with a longer lens in an artistic and abstract way.

Use a remote shutter release

This helps for shooting with Bulb Mode and keeps you from having to touch your camera causing shake during long exposures. You don’t need an expensive one, just make sure it’s compatible with your camera. I think I paid $12 for mine and it works like a charm.

Use a sturdy tripod.

This is an absolute must for long exposures unless you have something else you can set your camera on, but you have a better chance for shake and damage to your beloved equipment by setting it on something not meant for holding cameras.

Creative thinking for your location

Shooting just fireworks is kind of boring. Add a nice foreground or something to tell a story. Be creative.

That’s pretty much it. Remember always to practice respect when using locations for your shoot and leave everything the way you found it. Especially golf courses.

Mid-day is rarely a good time for photo taking outdoors unless you’re shooting black and white, but life doesn’t always occur during the magic hour either so there has to be some type of compromise. Everybody has photos like these in their collection whether they use a $50 point-and-shoot or a 5k DSLR: images with a lot of haze and no punch to them at all. I decided today to browse through some images that would normally not be included on my site just to show you how to add a little more life to them.

As you can see, there’s a lot to be desired in this image. Bad light, haze, boring. I’m not going to go as far as to say there’s really any true rescue for this image. It’s never going to be worthy of much, but it can look better than this quickly and easily and I’ll show you how.

The first thing, and what will make a dramatic impact on this image is one click away. Click Image>Adjustment>Auto Contrast and it will add a lot more punch and clarity. It builds a histogram of the image and spreads the values out so the broader tonal-range is being used. This is very helpful for photos that have been taken in bad lightning conditions. This quickly makes images look more crisp with one click.

It made my image a little dark so I then opened up the Levels dialog Image>Adjustments>Levels and dragged the white arrow to the left.

My image is now looking better, but my sky is washed out and I want to balance out the overall photo so I’m going to add a faux neutral density filter to the top section to slightly darken the sky. This is an optional step and you could skip this if you want. Create a new layer for your gradient layer. I then start by making sure black is my foreground color, then I click on the Gradient Tool (G). and make sure the gradient is set to Foreground to Transparent as shown here.

Now using the gradient tool I click and drag down from the top of the image to just past the horizon.

This makes the top half of my image look like night time with the sun only shining on land. Only LSD or Armageddon could produce an environment like this so lets take this down a notch.

Simply reduce the opacity on the gradient layer to your liking and you have a better image than you started with. Could you do more with Photoshop? Yes. Could it be better? Yes, but this image isn’t worth spending a lot of time on anyway. I just wanted to show you a quick and easy way to improve images where you have no choice of the conditions you are shooting in.

This took two minutes to complete so now you can get back to watching Hoarders.

What you’ll need is a camera you can control manually, a tripod, a cable release or timer, at the very least a semi-wide angle lens, and some serious cojones, balls, courage, machismo, chutzpah, or whatever your word for it may be. You may even call it absolute stupidity since we serve as electrical antennas when out in the elements during a lightning show. Always remember that any time you’re outside in a thunderstorm, you are risking your life. If it’s possible to be inside some type of shelter this would be ideal, but sometimes that’s just not possible. It’s also just fantastic, I might add in the most sarcastic of ways, that astrology books say I’m at risk of death by fire, explosion, or being struck by lightning.

So here we are sitting in the pool, enjoying some margaritas and tequila shots when the weather started getting a little weird. You could feel the electricity in the air and before long some rather ominous clouds could be seen on the horizon. As soon as I saw lightning I got out of the pool, grabbed my camera and since I didn’t have my tripod with me, found a hollow inverted pole I set my camera on so I wouldn’t have to worry about shake. At this point the lightning was far enough away that I wasn’t nervous about being wet and out in the open. This first shot was taken at this location. I had to take over one hundred shots before I was lucky enough to catch this since there was so much light I couldn’t use long exposures yet. This was taken with my Nikkor 18-200VR lens at ISO 100, f/22 – 1/3 of a sec at 18mm. I shot this at f/22 because there was a lot of foreground objects I also wanted in focus, but I could have also gone wider. Hey, I’d been drinking.

As the storm approached and the thunder grew much louder, we decided to get in doors. We grabbed a quick bite to eat and headed upstairs to near the top floor where my brother and Tina had a balcony with a perfect view. This time I had my mandatory tripod since it was starting to get dark. One of the first shots is the intro photo for this blog post. This shot was taken with my other lens, the Tokina 11-16 ATX at ISO 100, f/11, 7 seconds at 13mm.

Here’s a guide for reference, just adjust your shutter speed for correct light:
For dangerous lightning that is very close – 100 ISO, f/16-f/22
Relatively close, up to a mile – 100 ISO, f/11
Distant lightning 3-5 miles – 100 ISO f/5.6
Distant lightning 5-8 miles – 100 ISO f/4
Far away lightning 8-15 miles – 200 ISO f/4-f/5.6

Once it was totally dark, I was able to leave the shutter open for 30 seconds and since there were times where strikes would occur every 5-15 seconds, I would capture lightning just about every time and sometimes multiple strike in one exposure. Shooting lightning in conditions like this is not at all difficult. The camera and nature are really doing all the work, leaving you to sit back and enjoy the show, just be safe. At the very least, try to have some cover and never drink cocktails when shooting lightning.

To start off, each image will be different, obviously, and will demand different types of cloning techniques. I chose this image, because replacing people with water and waves perfectly illustrates this tool and it’s abilities for this use.

Here’s the image. This is the beach at Tulum, the Mayan city in Quintana Roo, Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula. As you can see, its an amazingly beautiful place. One of the most beautiful beaches I’ve seen, but it can get rather crowded since waves of tour buses flood in all day. I love the image of my beautiful wife on a spectacular beach, but not with all the other people I don’t know there too. Let’s make this a little more intimate.

The key to cloning away unwanted items in your photos is to work with the shapes and movement in your image. It helped me in this particular case that I’m a surfer and understand how waves move water and foam around on the surface.

I started by cloning out the boat on the left side of the image. I used the Clone Stamp (S) tool sized at 18 pixels with a feathered brush. As you can see here, there are gradients of color in the water around the boat. It’s important to really study the areas that surround what you are removing because it’s what needs to replace the item being removed. Because there appear to be horizontal bands of color that correspond with water depth, this will be the lines you use, the movement if you will. You can see the area I’m using to clone out the boat here. Remember that its important to continuously clone from different spots within the same area and color range so you don’t start making unrealistic patterns in your image.

Here, you can see a very distinct difference in color at the apex of the wave these guys are floating over. This is the line to follow when cloning these guys out.

Be sure to remain using this technique throughout the different types of surfaces. If there’s a line where surface foam ends, this line should continue though the area the people are taken out of.

The following image shows the most difficult part of the image to clone. Here, a great portion of whitewash needs to be created to where it ends in the face of a wave. To do this, I searched for another section of the whitewash that could serve as at least the bottom part of the section. You can see the arrow indicating the section I used.

Here I used other areas of the top of the whitewash, especially areas where water drops can be seen in the air above to complete this area. I then used some of the sandy water to the right of the guy to finish off the flats.

Next I need to clone out the people immediately around my wife. To do this, I used the Polygonal Selection tool with a feather of one pixel and selected the area to clone so I make sure to not to effect her with my cloning frenzy.

Once I took care of this area, it was pretty much a repeat of the same techniques for the rest of the image. The whole process took ten minutes. Not bad for a tourist free image that appears as if we had this beautiful tropical beach to ourselves!

Cloning is fairly easy, but always remember to go with the flow and use the shapes and movement in the surrounding areas to predict what will replace the unwanted parts of your image. Good luck and contact me if you have any questions.

Click here to view a another sample of where I’ve used this technique.

There’s so much more science to this, but I’ll leave that for those who know it best. If you’re interested in reading more you could purchase this book: The HDRI Handbook.

HDR is quite the rage these days. You can make an image anywhere from super punchy to other-worldly and psychedelic. Here, I show you a way to take it to about level seven. For this tutorial you’ll need Photoshop and Photomatix Pro. There are many ways to make an HDR image, this is just one of the many methods I use. The ideal way to create an HDR image is by bracketing with your camera to create several images of the same scene from underexposed to overexposed, all at the same aperture and ISO and using a steady tripod. Sometimes if I’m feeling lazy or am in a hurry I’ll just adjust my shutter speed from underexposed to overexposed manually as I did here.

Here’s the source images I’m using

These images were as follows:
Image 1: shutter speed 2.5 seconds
F8
ISO 100
Image 2: shutter speed 6 seconds
F8
ISO 100
Image 3: shutter speed 10 seconds
F8
ISO 100

As you can see, since I was in a hurry and on a photo shoot for a client, I didn’t want to go out of my way to set up bracketing, which I’ll cover in an other tutorial, but merely having these three different exposures can still produce striking effects in HDR.

I opened Photomatix Pro and selected Process>Generate HDR. Browse for the images you want to use. Click OK.

Then you’ll see this window:

I chose to reduce chromatic aberrations, or color fringes that can appear as well as noise, which can be an issue in shadow areas when you’re dealing with such a high dynamic range and digital photography. Now click Generate HDR.

This is the HDR image produced:

This image looks a little dark and not as snazzy as you’d expect from and HDR image. That’s because we haven’t tone mapped it yet. Tone mapping helps bring the radical contrast we see in an HDR image back to the realm in which we can see the darkest shadows and the lightest lights. Tone mapping bring everything in to view. Here’s the settings I used as the tone mapped image in the Photomatix Pro window.

Once we click Process we get this result. A tone mapped HDR image.

A lot of times, tone mapped HDR images can have halos around dark shadows and color fringes around bright lights. This where our old friend Photoshop comes in. Save the tone mapped HDR image, then open one of your original photos. Choose one that closely resembles the HDR version and make necessary adjustments using camera RAW. You can use camera RAW on JPEGS too. Go in to Photoshop>Preferences>File Handling and click Prefer Adobe Raw for JPEG images. In this case, I’m not liking the color fringes around the neon blue lights so I open this original image here using these setting in Camera RAW:

Once I opened the original image I chose File>Place and placed the HDR image over the top of my original photo on a new layer.
Then I made sure my Layers Palette was open and the HDR image layer was on top of my original photo. I then select the HDR layer and click Create Layer Mask at the bottom of the Layers Palette.

By creating a layer mask I will now be essentially cutting holes in my HDR image to allow some of my original image to be seen through the hole. This is sometimes necessary to correct the wild effects that can happen from HDR. To start masking, I make sure my foreground color is black, select the feathered Brush Tool and set the brush to 30% opacity. Now I can begin brushing the original image back in where there are areas of psychedelic color fringing around the lights.

I’ll create another tutorial for masking another day but email me if you have questions.

Once I mask away those crazy light fringes and flattened the image in the layers menu my image is done. I saved the new HDR image and that’s it. Well, almost. I decided to get creative and place my HDR image on the little monitor in the bottom-right hand corner of the image. To do this I File>Placed my HDR image in a new layer. (You can place the same image you have open in itself.) Then I clicked Edit>Transform>Scale and scaled the image down to just a touch bigger than the monitor screen. The I right-clicked the layer of my placed image in the layers palette and clicked Rasterize Layer. Now I can use Edit>Transform>Distort to make my image angle fit correctly in to the monitor. To make sure I do this correctly, I reduced the Layer Opacity to about 15% so I could see the monitor through my little rasterized image.

That’s it! Here’s the final image:

HDR can be used in so many ways. Some people like it, some people don’t. The same could be said for anything digitally created. There will always be someone bad-mouthing technology and it’s ever-expanding possibilities. HDR can be used to create over-saturated painterly effects, or can be used sparingly to just add a little something extra to an image using the composite method. We’re bginning to see HDR used more often in motion pictures as well. Once you get to know HDR, you’ll start to recognize it instanty, even when it’s used in the most subtle way.

My next HDR tutorial will deal with using this technique in the composite method. The subtle way. The one I prefer.

This is an old video a friend made with a web cam set to record an image every 15 seconds or so. I’ll be posting new videos with voice over as instructional videos for how I create my fine art, illustrations and design. I assure you they will take full advantage of the advancements we’ve seen in technology since 2001, will be of higher quality and also be full movies.

Start by copying photos into a new folder called Mosaic. I just copied and pasted images at random and ended up with 550 of them. Be sure the images in this new folder are copies and not originals.

Next, you want to start an action. To do this, open up the first image in your new Mosaic folder and open the Actions palette. (Windows>Actions) Now click the arrow in the upper right hand area of the palette and select new action. Go ahead and name the action, I named mine re-size.

Now go to Image>Image Size and check Resample Image, make the image size 1cm X 1cm at 200ppi and click OK, save the image and close it. Now go back to the Actions Palette and click stop. You’ve just recorded the image size adjustment.

The next step will be to turn your action in to a droplet. Go to File>Automate>Create Droplet. Click the Choose button and decide where you want to save your droplet, select the re-size action you’ve just created and click OK.

Now go back to the new folder of copied images you created, select them all and drag them over the Droplet icon. Make sure you are dragging the copies! This will convert each image to a 1cm X 1cm square.

Now that all the images have been reduced to their smaller size, it’s time to make the mosaic. To do this click File>Automate>Contact Sheet II.

Select the images you want to you use by clicking Choose and then enter the measurements you want to use. I used 55cm X 40cm and 200ppi. Now decide how many rows and columns you’ll need. I chose 50 columns and 30 rows and made sure to uncheck Auto Spacing so I could make sure there is no spacing between the images. Since the images are square they will fit together nicely. Check the Flatten All Layers box and click OK.

Here are the small images put together in the contact sheet. If you didn’t have enough images, simply copy and paste them to fill the canvas, just be sure to Flatten the image after you do by clicking Layer>Flatten Image.

Now decide what you’d like to use as the main image, but be sure it’s at least the size of your canvas. Now click File>Place and find this image. This will place the image in a new layer above the smaller ones. Set this image layer’s options to Hard Light.

That’s it! You can play around with the Curves on the bottom layer if you want to adjust the contrast a little. That’s up to you.

There are so many ways to do things in Photoshop. This method is one of the many I may use for a given project. You may have a better way. Always do what works best for you.

Start with a blank page and fill it with light, baby blue color. Now make a new layer to make your bubbles on. Select the Circle Selection Tool with no feather and make a medium sized circle in the middle-upper left hand area of the page. Then, while holding down Shift, make another smaller circle to the right of it. You can make as many circles as you wish, but make sure you keep the Shift key held down. If you don’t like a circle you’ve made, hold down the Option/Alt Key and deselect it with the Circle Selection Tool.

Once you’ve made your circles, fill them with white.

Now the fun part: Using the Eraser tool with a feathered brush set to an opacity of 100%, start to erase the middles of the white balls you’ve made. For this I adjust my brush size to about 75% of each ball and simply click inside each of them three times. That’s all you’ll need to erase to create your basic bubble. Just make sure you adjust your brush size for each bubble.

Now it’s time to take your bubbles to the next level. Using the Paintbrush, set to feathered and 100% opacity, make short sweeping strokes on the upper left hand corners of each bubble. Be sure to adjust your brush size for each bubble.

Now it’s time to make the background a little more interesting. With a large feathered Paintbrush make long vertical sweeping strokes with a darker blue. Here, you can stylize however you wish, just think hula dancers and mai tais.

Here I take a large feathered Dodge Tool set at 100% opacity and do small sweeps in light areas of the background just to add a little more depth.

I do the same with the feathered Burn Tool set at 100% opacity to the dark areas.

My last step is to take the Smudge Tool set at normal and 50% strength and blur some of the hard edges on my light reflections.

All done! This took about 5 minutes, but I could easily take more time and make it more elaborate. This is just the simplest way to make realistic looking bubbles. There are so many ways to do things in Photoshop. This method is one of the many I may use for a given project. You may have a better way. Always do what works best for you. Here’s an example of these bubbles in action:

Mahalo,
Tyler

Lighting and makeup can do a lot, but there are times when it’s just not enough. In this tutorial I show one way of achieving a final photo that pops.

The first thing I did was open up the Levels Dialog and give enter the properties: 12 1.00 243 to give the image a little more depth and contrast boost.

The next step is to clean up all the stray hairs covering her face. For this, I used the Clone Stamp set to lighten with a feathered brush and reduced the opacity to 40%

I did the same for any blemishes I found.

To get rid of the dark circles under her eyes I made a feathered Clone Stamp a little larger, set it to lighten and cloned the area directly under the dark areas.

To diminish the shiny areas on her face I used Select>Color Range>Highlights, copied the highlights to a new layer, and Gaussian Blurred the layer to 18% so it wasn’t too dramatic.

Next I used the Lasso Tool and set a feather at two pixels to select the whites of her eyes. Then I clicked Image>Adjust>Hue/Saturation and lowered the saturation to -19 to reduce redness and upped the brightness to +6 to make them slightly whiter. Be careful not to overdo this. It’s easy to do.

I used the same Lasso Tool set at a feather of two pixels and selected her iris and pupils. I then copied them to a new layer and used Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask set at 73, 3.0,0. I clicked ok and repeated this one more time to add some punch to her eyes.

She had some fray on her tank top under her arm so I used the Clone Stamp set to normal at 100% opacity and used a sweeping motion from her arm down towards the seam.

Then cloned the vertical left edge downward to meet up with it and make it look natural.

To add a little more life to her and Kevin’s hair I selected the highlights I could see with the Lasso Tool set with a 35 pixel feather and set the levels at 0,1.00,219.

To reduce the harsh shadows a little I adjusted the Curves as such.

I then selected her lips with the Lasso tool set at a feather of 4 pixels, and used Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask to these settings: 73, 3, 0 to add some pop and a little extra shine.

That’s it! As I always say, there’s so many ways to do things in Photoshop. This method is one of the many I may use for a given project. You may have a better way. Always do what works best for you and happy editing!

-Tyler

Using the Ruler Tool, click and drag a line across the image going with the horizon.

Next, click Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary.

A dialog box will come up showing you the degree of rotation necessary to straighten the image based on the line you made with the Ruler Tool.

Click OK, and your image is straightened out. Now all that’s left is cropping out the white edges.

That’s it! Cropped and straightened out!