This seems like an easy thing to do but I’ve noticed that people are still asking about it So here’s how you can achieve this effect with this easy to follow tutorial. All the edits that you are doing are 100% none destructive, which means that you can go back at any time and tweak the different layers to your liking.

Difficulty: Basic – Intermediate

Completion time: 1/2 to 1 hour

Tools: Adobe PhotoshopCS1 +

Resources

The image you want to convert to B&W with a splash of colour

or

The stock gallery can be found here if you want some other images to play with

http://glamourousacid-stock.deviantart.com/

What you’ll be creating

Note: For Mac users, the correspondent keys for CTRL and ALT are CMD and OPTION.

STEP 1

Open the image that your using in photoshop and apply a channel mixer adjustment layer.

The settings that I used were the default Black and White with red filter (RGB) which is red – 100%

STEP 2

The on the mask with a soft brush, using black as the foreground colour, you just mask out the part of the image that you want in colour.

And that’s basically it. You can also use a hue/saturation adjustment layer and the black and white adjustment layer in the same fashion. I prefer the channel mixer as it give a lot more control over how the black and white will look in the end.

Optional:

You can also duplicate the back ground layer, and place it above the channel mixer layer, change the blend mode to soft light and create a muted colour instead of black and white.

Here’s the same effect, but the blend mode is set to overlay:

And here the blend mode is set to screen with lips masked out again.

Handy tip: When applying the same mask again, hold the alt key and drag the mask up. This will duplicate the mask without you needing to redo it all over again!

The lips look a little washed out here, so lets duplicate the background layer again, place it on top of the layer stack, change the blend mode to multiply, apply the same mask as the screen layer, but press ctrl-i with the mask selected to invert it and change the opacity to 50%.

So there you have a quick and easy black and white image with selective colour and few more bonus techniques on how to make your images pop!

I would love to see what you come up with and any feedback that you may have.

Ok so we have slugged through white balance and how to expose an image, now we are going to learn how to compose an image.

I have detailed some basic principles of composition in this article and then gone into some more depth with different ways of composing, such as the golden mean, the rule of thirds and the golden spiral.

Basic principles of composition

• Center of interest: Decide what the focal point of your image is before composing.
• Simplicity: Avoid busy backgrounds. Keep the composition simple.
• Subject off center: Place a subject slightly off-center rather than in the middle of a photo.
• Horizon lines: Don’t place the horizon right in the middle of the image. This also applies to any strong horizontal or vertical lines. Also ensure that the lines aren’t tilted.
• Leading lines: Strong lines should lead the eye to the main point of interest, not out of the frame.
• Foreground objects: Don’t be afraid to include an interesting object in the foreground of a scene. It can can add depth, dimension and a point of reference.
• Vary angles: Different angles can show the subject from a different view point. Move the camera around. You can shoot looking down (birds eye) or looking up (worms eye).
• Framing: Frame your subject by using zoom or moving closer. Draw attention to what you are shooting.
• Silhouettes: The subject of your image doesn’t always need to be brightly lit. Try finding photographing  backlit subjects.
• Reflections: Adds an interesting, sometimes abstract, look to a photo.
• Symmetry: An identical or near-identical image of its other half. Use of symmetry often provides a formal balance.

There are no hard and fast rules for composition of an image. There are five different ways to help us, but they are only used as guidelines rather than rules.

Golden Ratio

The golden ratio is a principle that has been around for hundreds of years. It has been used by Leonardo Da Vinci, who investigated the principle that underlies our notions of beauty and harmony, but before that Egyptian, Babylonian and ancients Greek masters also applied this principle in architecture and art.

The Golden Ratio shows us that certain points in an image attract the viewers attention. The same in regards to nature or man made objects with certain proportions will automatically please us, whether this is by chance or design.

As shown above, the image is divided into 9 unequal parts. Each line is drawn so that the width of the resulting small part of the image relates to that of the big part exactly as the width of the whole image relates to the width of the big part. Points where the lines intersect are the “golden” points of the picture:

Rule of thirds

This method of composition is probably the most well know one. All budding photographers are taught this, as well they should, because it creates well balanced and interesting shots. This is a simplified version of the Golden Ratio.

The principle is very simple. You are just breaking down the image into thirds, horizontally and then vertically. You then are placing the points of interest along those lines.

As you can see from the example below, I have placed the old man on the crutches on the far right hand side of the image, with a wake of swan trailing behind him. I deliberately placed the sky in the top third, the  sea at the middle and the beach sand on the bottom third to make him the focal point of the image.

The theory of the rule if thirds is that if you have points of interest of interest in the intersections of the lines or on the lines, your image is better balanced and enables the viewer to interact with it more naturally. Different studies have shown that people when viewing images, their eyes go to the intersecting lines naturally  rather than the centre of the image. So by using the rules of thirds, it helps viewing the image rather than working against it.

Golden Spiral

The golden spiral is another way to compose an image. A lot of images that are taken in the fashion are usually flowers, but it can be applied to any image to make it well composed and dynamic. As you can see from the example above, the spiral uncoils starting with the snail, then flows out into the larger part. The focal point is the smallest coil, which is nearer the corner. this means that the viewers eye is drawn to the focal point and then is taken through the image as it unfolds around the golden ratio.

As you can see there are few different methods of how to compose your images, making them more dynamic and interesting to the viewer.

Have fun composing

Welcome to part 2 of taking awesome photos!

Now that we have that pesky white balance sorted, lets look at understanding exposure. This embraces 3 different things:

• ISO
• Aperture
• Shutter Speed

ISO

Back in the days of film, which seem like forever away since the introduction of digital photography, the term ISO referred to film speed. ISO comes from the International Organization for Standardization which sets a world wide standard for measuring film speed. Hold on a sec you say, that acronym is wrong! Yes I thought that too, but found the answer here:

ISO’s name

Because “International Organization for Standardization” would have different acronyms in different languages (“IOS” in English, “OIN” in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation), its founders decided to give it also a short, all-purpose name. They chose “ISO”, derived from the Greek isos, meaning “equal”. Whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of the organization’s name is always ISO.

Source: http://www.iso.org/iso/about/discover-iso_isos-name.htm

Anyway back to ISO setting in a digital camera. Back in the days of film the ISO referred to how light sensitive the film was. The faster the film, 400 and up, the less available light you needed. The slower the film, 200 and down, the more light you needed. This also determined how fast or slow your shutter could be and your aperture size. The downside to faster film was the amount of grain on the images. The faster the film, the more grain and less margin for error ie one stop under or over for 800 and 1600 ISO.

Now in digital photography, the ISO has a similar meaning but now refers to the sensitivity of the sensor inside the camera. The higher the ISO, the faster the shutter and less light you need, but the more digital noise you will have in your images.

All these number you scream – I still don’t get it! What does it all mean?  Basically it boils down to this: the higher the ISO setting the quicker the shutter speed. The lower the ISO, the longer you need to keep the shutter open for a properly exposed shot.

In everyday photography, you can leave the ISO on 100 or 200 and it won’t need to change. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you can leave the ISO at 800 as you will have a ton of digital noise in the images that you shoot. I personally leave my ISO on 100 or 50 as there is hardly any noise in the images.

Aperture

Aperture is measured in f-stops, for example f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6,f/8,f/22 etc. Each time you go down from one aperture to the next such as from f/4 to f/5.6, you cut the amount of light entering the lens by half. But then when you change the aperture from f/11 to f/8 the amount of light entering the lens doubles. Each half or double is referred to as a stop.

The aperture also controls the depth of field in a photo. The depth of field is the amount of your subject that will be in focus. A large depth of field, such as f/22 means that your foreground and background will be in focus. A shallow depth of field such as f4  is where the foreground is in focus and the background is blurry.

So the easiest way to remember is small f/stop number = small depth of field, large f/stop number = large depth of field.

Shutter Speed

Depending on the make and model of your camera, you may have shutter speeds as fast as 1/8000 to 30 seconds or a bulb mode where the shutter stays open as long as your finger is on the button. The shutter speed controls the amount of light coming through the lens. The same half and double principle that applies to aperture, is the same in regards to shutter speed.

The shutter speed is measured in fractions of a second and seconds  such as 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15 etc, then going down to 1 second and so forth. The bigger the denominator, the faster the shutter speed.

You will generally use a shutter speed of 1/60 or higher for handheld shooting. If you are using a slower shutter speed, you will need a tripod or a steady surface.

How to put them all together

As you can see in the above example, the difference of changing the shutter speed and tweaking the aperture.

The image on the left was shot with the following settings: ISO 80, f/stop of 25 and a shutter speed of 1/10

The image on the right was shot with the following settings: ISO 80, f/stop 4.5, and a shutter speed of 1/320

You can see the difference in the movement of the water in both pictures. The higher shutter speed “freezes” the water in the example on the right. On the left, the slower shutter speed makes the water appear “fluffy”.

Lets bring it all together, all the elements described above work together. If you change one, you need to adjust the others to compensate. For example if you close the aperture, then you need to adjust the shutter speed to a slower speed to allow more light through.  Or you can raise the ISO to compensate.

The following tables will help you in understanding exposure. They are some general settings that will help with your exposure settings on the fly.

Outdoor settings

Indoors, without flash

You can also check your exposure by pressing the shutter button half way to get a light reading and adjust the settings in order  to get the meter to read in the centre.

Welcome to the first part of many articles about how to take an awesome photo.

The best place to start is getting the colours right. And to get the colours right we need to know about white balance.

A lot digital camera owners don’t understand/ don’t care/ don’t use a very important aspect of photography which is white balance. This is something that is worth learning as it has a big impact on the photos that you take with your camera.

The crux of white balance is this: when white balance is adjusted properly it will show the colours as accurately as possible.

So now the million dollar question – what is white balance? It all comes down to colour temperature. This is a way of measuring the quality of the light source. It is based on the ratio of amount of blue light to the amount of red light, while the green light is ignored. The unit for measuring this ratio is Kelvin (K). The higher the colour temperature  value, the cooler the light as it has more blue light in ratio to red. The lower the colour temperature value, the warmer the light as it has more red in ratio to blue.

A Kelvin huh? What’s that? Good question It started when a British physicist William Kelvin heated a block of carbon. As it heated up the carbon glowed, producing a range of different colours at different temperatures. It first produced a dim red light, then increased to a brighter yellow as the temperature rose, to eventually producing a bright blue white glow at its highest temperature. The unit Kelvin is a variation Centigrade degrees. The Kelvin scale starts at absolute zero which is -273 centigrade. So basically you subtract 273 from  a Kelvin temperature to get the centigrade. Although the colour temperature is referenced to the different types of lights that correspond to the visible colour matching a standard black body not the temperature that the filament burns.

The following table shows the correlated colour temperature of common light sources:

Note that Kelvin values listed in the table are approximate rather than exact. You need to keep in mind that a new light bulb and new flash have higher color temperature than their old and used equivalents, and an electronic flash is designed to have a color temperature comparable to that of average sunlight.

Preset White Balance Settings

Here are some of the basic White Balance settings you’ll find on cameras:

• Auto – This is when the camera decides what is best for the photo. It was a bit hit and miss in the earlier digital models, but the newer ones are a great deal more accurate. Don’t limit yourself to this setting though, especially when you can create wonderful images by tweaking the white balance.

• Tungsten – this mode counteracts the warmth of tungsten lighting and brings the white balance up to cool the image. It is symbolised by a little bulb.

• Fluorescent – this compensates for the ‘cool’ light of fluorescent light and will warm up your shots.

• Daylight/Sunny – this is the average white balance.

• Cloudy – this setting warms the photo a touch to compensate for clouds.

• Flash – camera flash can be quite blue, so this setting warms up the image.

• Shade – the light in shade is generally cooler (bluer) than shooting in direct sunlight so this mode will warm things up a little.

TIP: use the shade setting when taking photos in the forest. It will give you warm accurate colours!

Setting your own white balance

To set the white balance manually all you need is a gray card. Why a gray card? Because 18% gray reflects all the colours of the spectrum equally.

Once you have taken the image, most cameras have a menu option that will allow you to bring up the image and set it as the custom white balance, then instruct you to change the preset to the proper white balance setting. This can also be used when taking a series of shots then adjusting the white balance in photoshop or camera raw or lightroom using the gray point eye dropper.

You must have the gray card in the frame with the subject, as there is not point in having the card in your hand as the white balance setting will be different from where the subject is.

The added bonus to doing a custom white balance, resulting in more neutral and natural colors is the total decrease in post production work you’ll have adjusting for improper white balance settings.

So there you have it people – An explanation on white balance. Stay tuned for the next article in this series!

Welcome to the new AllyKatDesign Forum!

Feel free to come and have a look around, register, ask your questions and receive your answers! Make it your happy place that has all the answers that you seek

See you there!

Let’s go there now!

http://forum.allykatdesign.com/

Definition of frustrating: trying to re create sin city rain and having to trawl through a bunch of useless tutorials that just say the same thing over and over again! Never fear loyal readers, I have perfected the perfect sin city rain effect.

Here’s the first lot of rain that I came up with using all the tutorials that I found online:

Basically the formula for this rain is as follows:

1. New layer> Fill 50% grey
2. Filter>Add Noise>Add Noise, Amount 400%, Gaussian, monochrome
3. Transform: 500% with the little link button pressed.
4. Filter>Blur>Motion Blur, angle 75, distance approx 400 (depending on size of image)
5. Set the layer on screen, then duplicate and mask out the offending rain.

As you can see its pretty uniform rain, not very exciting and not at all like the rain that you see in the posters. The lines aren’t thick enough and it looks pretty boring

Here’s the rain that I came up with:

It all came to help with these two brushes that I came up with:

Rain Brushes (9.0 KiB)

Basically all I did to come up with this effect was the following:

1. Two layers with rain underneath the person, first on set at 25% opacity, the top one at 50% opacity to create a look of depth to the image.
2. Then another layer at the top of the image, set at 100% opacity. Just mask out any rain that doesn’t belong.
3. A new layer with the splash II brush across the shoulders and the gun.

Yay all done. Its so much easier than messing around with noise and motion blur etc. You can also change the size of the brush depending on how you want the rain to look, direction etc.

To finish the image off you can add some authentic sin city text and a quote from the movie that will fit in with the person:

The sin city font was done in colour: #ff0000, rotated with layer style>Drop Shadow, Angle: 141, Distance: 21px, spread 4%, size: 0px.

P. S. You can’t see the layer style in this pic unless you move it over to an area that has white in it.

The quote  was done with a shape layer, with the colour set to white and a layer style>Stroke, size: 10px, position:inside, colour black.

Find the sin city font here: Dafont and the writing font here: Blambot

So easy once you know how Enjoy recreating your sin city posters!

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to achieve the Quick  Antique Colouring effect, that you can find in my latest group of actions.

1.  If you have retouched the image and made density corrections, press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy of the image.

If you are working from the original image, press crtl-J. Name this layer Softlight.

2. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and apply with a radius between 5 px – 10px .

3. Change the blend mode of the Softlight layer to Softlight.

4. Open the Layer Style Palette and move the Blend If black sliders to 25, then hold alt to split them and move the other slider to 100.

5. Apply a Channel Mixer adjustment layer.

6. Move the Channel Mixer adjustment layer to underneath the Softlight layer.

Here’s the final image and two other variations on the same effect:

The first version is as described in the tutorial above. The second image has the dress masked out on the Channel Mixer adjustment layer. The third image has the skin masked out on the Channel Mixer layer, then a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer is clipped in to the softlight layer, with the saturation set at -100, with everything bar the skin masked out.

Here you can download the action on its own:

Quick Antique Colouring Action (3.8 KiB)

Or you can download the whole set here: AllyKatDesign Actions

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to achieve the High Saturation effect, that you can find in my latest group of actions.

1.  If you have retouched the image and made density corrections, press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy of the image.

If you are working from the original image, press crtl-J. Name this layer Overlay.

2. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and apply with a radius between 5 px – 10px .

3. Change the blend mode of the Overlay layer to Overlay.

4. Open the Layer Style Palette and move the Blend If black sliders to 25, then hold alt to split them and move the other slider to 100.

5. Apply a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and lower the saturation to -50.

6. Clip the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to the Overlay layer.

Here’s the final image:

Here you can download the action on its own:

Saturated Glow Action (3.4 KiB)

Or you can download the whole set here: AllyKatDesign Actions

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to achieve the Orton effect, that you can find in my latest group of actions.

1.  If you have retouched the image and made density corrections, press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy of the image.

If you are working from the original image, press crtl-J. Name this layer Screen and change the blend mode of this layer to Screen.

2. Press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy, name this layer Multiply and change the blend mode to Multiply.

3. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and apply with a radius of 3 px.

Here’s the final image:

Here you can download the action on its own:

Orton Effect Action (2.9 KiB)

Or you can download the whole set here: AllyKatDesign Actions

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to achieve the Bleach Bypass effect, that you can find in my latest group of actions.

1.  If you have retouched the image and made density corrections, press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy of the image.

If you are working from the original image, press crtl-J. Change the blend mode of this layer to Multipy.

2. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and lower the saturation to -45.

3. Add a levels adjustment layer and change the property of the white slider to 200.

4. Add a curves adjustment layer and pull the curve up in the middle to lighten the image..

Here’s the final image:

Here you can download the action on its own:

Bleach Bypass Action (3.9 KiB)

Or you can download the whole set here: AllyKatDesign Actions