I am glad to say that I am nearly done editing my first photo's and I will be posting them shortly. Lord knows it has taken long enough. I'm trying to teach myself Photoshop and while several parts are fairly easy to grasp, there is a TON of stuff that I may never even realize is there. My goal is to be proficient in using Photoshop to do post-processing.
Just as with Photoshop, I'm trying to figure out how to use a DSLR camera. My shooting method is as follows: play with a few settings, take a shot, play with a setting some more, take another shot, play with settings yet again, take another shot, and so on. In the end, so far, for every 10-15 shots I take, two to three may be usable with some touch-ups, and maybe one turns out great as shot. The reason I am just now learning to use a DSLR is that my brother-in law, Galen, let me borrow his camera at the end of July so I could take it with me to Grand Teton National Park with my wife, Kyra. Long story short, we ended up not backpacking (too tired and too damn hot!) and it has since been nearly two months since I borrowed the camera. Galen has been around a few times, and I always offer to return it, but he is very kindly letting me continue to "take good care of it."
While the initial intent of this blog was to post the stories and photos from my hiking and backpacking adventures, this may be a good place for me to keep track of little nuggets of information and share them with all of you. I have only learned a few things so far and they all deal with Photoshop. The first thing that I have learned is that YouTube is your friend. If you have a question about Photoshop, YouTube has a video for it. Well, I should say that for ME there has been a video for everything that I have wanted to do. . .so far. I have found videos by TUTsona to be particularly useful so far so check him out.
Let's start with the basics. I like panoramic shots but the default Windows photo software whateverthehellyoucallit does a pretty shitty job of stitching pictures together. Don't get me wrong, it's not too shabby given that it's the OEM photo software that comes free with Windows, but it doesn't hold a candle to Photoshop (btw: while I'm thinking about it, I heard that the new iPhone 5-thousand is supposed to be able to stitch panoramic photo's together on the fly. Something tells me that the software used to do that will be very very shitty so please, iPhone users, do NOT, let me repeat this, DO NOT sit there and take 5 gajillion photos of your bedroom, dog, neighbors yard, face, or whatever else you think is cool and stitch them together throwing them up on Facebook with some "huzzah" comment on there. Just don't!).
It is actually pretty easy to stitch together photo's as this video explains. While your at it, click on the link in that video that teaches you how to use Content Aware. I haven't used it much but I can tell you that Content Aware is bad ass. You select an area and Photoshop attempts to fill that area "in context" using Content Awareness filling it with something that is almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea. Excuse me. What I mean, is that Content Awareness uses the surrounding pixels to determine what would be occupying the selected area if whatever is in there. . .was. . .not there. Oh, you get the point.
The next thing that I learned was how to create a watermark. To me a watermark is what makes the picture look professional, and it doesn't matter how bad the shot it. Someone could take a close-up, out of focus shot of an acne infested face and if there is a watermark on that bitch. . .BAM "he's a professional". It is odd that there are more steps to making a decent watermark than there are in say. . .removing your ex from all of your old photos. This video explains the process of watermarking quite well. I prefer option 2, but that is primarily because it just looks cooler. The video is by MrVemzer and while I have only watched this one, he goes pretty deep and gives multiple ways to create watermark depending on the circumstances. I will probably watch a few more of his videos and will update you on my thoughts.
Next. learn how to use Photoshop to, you know, actually edit photos.
I should be posting the photo's I have been working on soon. Hopefully you will enjoy them, hopefully I will have something interesting to say, and hopefully you will read it. Until then, TALLY-HO!!
