Pushing On

While the Covid-19 pandemic pushes on, over one million cases have been reported in the United States, with over 1,600 cases in my county and over 2,000 in my immediate area.  Yet, the governor has partially opened the state, to commerce.  I am sorry, but this is scary to me.  Many businesses were boarded up during this time with lots of graffiti artist painted their graffiti on the boards.  Because of some of those businesses deciding to open up, many of the boards are coming down.  It seems like a waste of talent.  Why don't some of those businesses use the boards as part of their decor?  It could be that they don't want to be reminded of the times, but it is a piece of history.  Someone once said, "The reason that history repeats itself is because we don't learn from it".  Some have said that the world will not be the same after this and others have opined that perhaps we should not go back to the old ways.  Perhaps.

Focusing more on the positive, I have been listening to podcast and getting ideas for things that can help my process my photographs.  I created a preset for Lightroom, that I will use to process my photographs as I import them into Lightroom.  I also made a LUT (Look Up Table) for my colors and tones in Photoshop.  Both of those were inspired by listening to Blake Rudis' podcast on the Virtual Summit that Dave Cross put on.  Now all I can have all of my colors and tones can look the same throughout my photographs.  I am looking forward to using it on many if not all of my photographs.

I also listened to Dave Cross' podcast called "Talking Shop".  He made a suggestion about using two curves in Photoshop, one for darkening and one for lightening and then making an action to put the two curves on your layer stack.  I have been interested in trying to burn and dodge in Photoshop without using the burn and dodge tools.  It is my thought that with using a mask in Photoshop, making the mask black, then painting in white with my settings at 10% intervals for the brush and going over and over until I am satisfied with how the highlights and shadows look in my photograph.

If you think about it, every object that we see, has highlights and shadows.  Photographs are two dimensional objects having only a length and width.  It is putting highlights and shadows in your picture that helps it become three dimensional helping it to have depth.  Having the ability to dodge and burn will really help in my processing abilities.  I am looking forward to making the action and putting it in my library in Photoshop so that I can use it in my post processing.

I am itching to get outside and take pictures but I am doing my best not to dwell on the negative and focusing on the positive.  I hope that you are as well.

COVID-19 Continues

Grrrrrrrr COVID-19 still has me stuck at home.  I am still hoping that as some of the medical experts have said that heat of the summer will kill the virus.  Is it possible that many of these restrictions will be eased up?  In my state, some have, but then the city is still taking precautions since there are close to 1200 cases of the virus here.

I am a person that needs to get out.  This business of sitting at home is getting to me.  I still want to go places and see things that I haven't seen or really experienced yet.  Yet my camera is sitting in its bag gathering dust on my floor.

You might have noticed that I did not post last week.  That was because I was attending a Virtual Summit on Photoshop.  As per the typical summits or conferences, some of the instructors were very informative and others were just so so or down right not interesting.  One particular instructor that I enjoyed was Blake Rudis from https://f64academy.com/.  It was through him that I learned to do a LUT (look up table) to help with my post processing.  While, Blake uses Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw to process his pictures, I am going to split his process putting the Adobe Camera Raw part into Lightroom as a Preset and the Photoshop part into its own LUT.  Then, when I import my image into Photoshop, I can use the LUT at the first action to get the proper tone and colors to begin my processing with.  I am excited to set this up and start using it and see what it does to my processing.

Someone else that I really enjoyed was Jack "Wow" Davis http://jackdavishowtowow.com/.  Jack took a step by step approach to using Lightroom for my iPad.  He really made it seem interesting to me and I have the feeling that it is something that I can use if I am at lunch and want to see how some of my pictures may look once I put them on my desktop computer.  Presently, I use my iPad to take panoramas, so I am looking forward to using it and getting over some of the wonder that I might have after I take a picture that I feel really good about.  As I tell many of the people that I interact with, "Everything looks good small".  It is when you get it larger that you start noticing the flaws.