During my research for this new venture, I stumbled across a real estate photography blog, aptly named Photography For Real Estate written by Larry Lohrman. Larry knows his stuff, and I spent hours scouring his blog for useful information that I could use in my own photos. He was even nice enough to provide me a little feedback on the job I’d done, mentioning that the photos were good for a first time, though I needed to ensure that all vertical surfaces remained vertical in the photos. Mental note taken. If you ever need to do any kind of architectural photography, check out Larry’s site before you do.

So here are a couple of the interior shots from my own house. Here’s my living room:

As you can see, those verticals aren’t vertical, due to the angle of the camera. I could easily fix this in Photoshop, which I will do next time. This was a flash lit photo. I had a 430EX directly to my right pointing up into the ceiling. My Vivitar 285HV flash was in the hallway on the opposite side of the living room pointed into the ceiling. The shutter speed was determined based on the light coming in from the windows, though admittedly that half moon window above the door is way too hot.

Here’s my master bedroom. Yep, you get to see where I sleep.

Again, the shutter speed was set for the windows, and a flash was bounced into the wall/ceiling to my left. Gotta get those verticals straight.

One more, to demonstrate a fun technique, here’s my bathroom:

Everything on the others applies here. But this photo was actually two photos. Notice how the bedroom in the mirror is well lit in addition to the bathroom. I took one photo with the flash in the bathroom. Then, with the camera still on the tripod, I moved the flash to the bedroom and took another shot. Now I had two shots, one with a lit bathroom and a dark bedroom, and another with a lit bedroom and a dark bathroom. I then brought both photos into Photoshop, put each one on a layer in the same image, and set the blend mode to “Lighten”. This let’s the lit up areas show through from both photos. It’s that easy. This was a very fun technique to play with, even though I had the lights to use.

When I presented the photos to my broker he was ecstatic. The simple truth about real estate is that photos of homes suck. Badly. Having good photos of your house really makes a difference in getting traffic through the front door. I think that these photos made a difference in the listing of my home.

UPDATE: Last night (12/26) we got an offer on the house. Not bad considering it’s been on the market a week in a housing market that is taking months to sell. Could the pictures have helped? I like to think so…

I got an email from a reader a couple days ago asking what to do with the files that are obtained when shooting in RAW mode. This seemed like a good time to give a quick primer on shooting RAW and getting your hands on some finished photos.

Why Shoot RAW?

I’ll start with a few reasons why shooting RAW can be a good thing. This list is by no means exhaustive.

• You get a higher dynamic range. Your camera can capture a slightly broader range of light from the shadows to the highlights than if you were shooting JPEGs. Given the narrow range on digital cameras, a little extra can’t hurt.
• You capture the highest quality image. JPEGs are compressed images, and you lose some of the image quality. A RAW file gives you exactly what the sensor captured so that you can make your own decisions later on how to process the image. The trade-off here is that RAW files are much larger than their JPEG siblings thanks to the lack of compression.
• You gain ultimate control. Processing RAW files means you can tweak the image after the fact just like you were making the changes to the camera before you snapped the picture. For example, you can change the white balance on a photo after the fact. You can’t do that with a JPEG.

Software Choices

Viewing and processing RAW files requires a little bit of extra time, knowledge, and software. Here are just a few applications that I’m familiar with for viewing and processing RAW files:

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Works nicely with Photoshop and allows you to view and tweak your photos in a “library” style interface rather than one at a time. This is the software I use to process my RAW files. Lightroom is fairly new and leaves much to be desired in my opinion, but I think it’s the best software at the moment for my needs. The $299 cost of the software will make some hobbiests look to other alternatives.
• Adobe Camera RAW – This is built into Photoshop. The last few versions of Photoshop have it. When you open a RAW file in Photoshop, Camera RAW opens and allows you to make changes to the file before it’s opened in Photoshop as a normal image. This is a great tool and gives you lots of control, but you can only work with one image at a time.
• ZoomBrowser – This comes packaged with Canon’s current crop of DSLRs, and may be a Canon only piece of software. It works like Lightroom in that you can process files in bulk, though you have limited control over tweaking the files. The price tag of free makes it attractive though if you’re a hobbiest.
• Google Picasa – This is cool, and this is the kind of stuff that makes me love Google. I discovered that Picasa reads RAW files on accident one day when it started cataloging all my RAW files. It’s free and I really like the interface. I think that the photo processing capabilities aren’t half bad as long as you’re not being too picky. The main release is Windows only, but a link on their site says they have a Linux version as well.

Processing The Files

The first step is importing the files into the software. This is usually very simple. Picasa does it automagically and Lightroom can do it that way too if configured for it.

Once the files are in the software, you’re ready to make adjustments. A few of the typical adjustments that you might make:

• Exposure - You can bring the exposure up or down several stops easily, freeing you from being 100% perfect during the shoot. Sure, if you blow out the highlights you can’t really fix that, but keeping your exposure in the mid-range means you can fine tune it easily in the software.
• White balance – Forget to change the white balance to the right setting while shooting? Not a problem, just change it now without any negative quality impact to your photo. The software is applying the white balance settings on the raw data, just like the camera would do if it were producing a JPEG.
• Brightness, contrast, fill light, shadows, highlights – These are all usually just a slider away.
• Saturation - Sometimes you want a image that’s more punchy or toned down. Maybe even black and white. This is an easy adjustment.
• Sharpening - Many of the RAW processing applications allow you to do some image sharpening with a simple slider. Good for us Canon guys who are used to a softer image straight out of the camera.

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Once you’re done making some adjustments, you’re ready to export the images into a format you’re more familiar with. For most this is JPEG, though TIFF files are another popular format. TIFF files are of higher quality than JPEG because they lack that compression that can kill JPEG files. But most labs want JPEG files for printing, and a full quality JPEG still gives you a great image. Exporting is usually a simple command in the software, just like importing.

Now that you have a file you’re used to, you can either call it a day or go on to make other changes. Photo retouching, multiple exposure blending, whatever your poison.

Once you become comfortable with the process of dealing with RAW files, you can get through a lot of pictures pretty quickly, especially when using one of the library style applications. When you get used to the control you get and realize that you can actually save some photos that you made a few boo boos on, you’ll like it even more.

Hopefully this primer is enough to get you going on RAW files. If not, you can always ask me a question right here in the comments or even start up a thread in the Sublime Light discussion forum where I or someone else can chime in.

I know this article is a smidge Canon-leaning thanks to me being a Canon guy. Apologies to you Nikon folks out there. Got some specific advice for other brands of cameras and their RAW files? Drop them in the comments and let us all reap the benefits of this wonder we call the webernet.

Original image

We take a lot of pictures with our son, and he has really great skin color. The problem is, when my wife and I are in pictures with him, we always come out looking sunburned while he looks great. Luckily, there’s a quick and easy fix in Photoshop that just gets quicker with a little practice.

You can use this technique in all sorts of ways, but one of the most useful I’ve found is for correcting the skin tone of a portrait subject. For example, you can count on someone getting themselves actually sunburned while everyone else looks fine at least once in your photography days. Here’s how to fix it.

Step 1 – Create a Color Balance adjustment layer. After opening the file in Photoshop, go down to the layers palette and click the icon that’s a half black, half white circle. This pops up a menu for adjustment layers. Choose “Color Balance…”.

Adjustment layer menu

When the Color Balance dialog box opens, play with the sliders to get the skin fixed. At this stage you’re only paying attention to the problem areas. As you’re adjusting the sliders and the problem subject starts to look better, everyone else will look worse. But that’s okay, because in the next couple steps we’ll isolate the fix to just the problem subject. To fix red skin, just move the first two sliders away from red and magenta.

Color Balance dialog

Step 2 – Fill the adjustment layer with black. So now you have two layers: the image layer and the adjustment layer. Make sure you have the adjustment layer selected and go to the “Edit” menu and choose “Fill…”. When the dialog opens, fill the whole layer with black and hit OK.

Adjustment layer mask thumbnail

Step 3 – Paint in the effect. What we’re going to do here is to tell Photoshop what parts of the adjustment layer are to show through and what aren’t. You have the ability to “paint in” the adjustment to whatever parts of the image you want. Anything that is black means the adjustment doesn’t take effect. Anything white shows the effect. Shades of gray in between show varying amounts of the effect. Now that the layer is all black, we’ll just paint white in over my skin, so that the color correction only applies to my skin and not to any other part of the image.

Adjustment layer mask

So using the brush tool, simply paint white onto the areas that need color correction. As you paint you’ll see the skin turn from red to a nice natural color. If you stray outside the skin area, just touch it up with black to remove the effect. To see how you’re doing, you can view the adjustment layer mask by alt-clicking (or command-clicking on Mac) on the little black and white mask thumbnail on the layer palette, shown above.

When you alt-click on the mask thumbnail, the whole image will be replaced with the black and white mask so you can adjust it that way.

Watch the eyes and mouth. Notice that I’ve left the color correction effect off of the eyes and I’ve applied it lightly to the mouth. Taking the red off makes the color a little more yellow, and the last thing anyone wants is yellow eyes and yellow teeth! Also, lips should keep a little of their pink color; yellow lips don’t look so good either!

The Final Product – At the end of the process, here’s what I ended up with. The redness was removed from my face and neck, and the rest of the image is untouched.

Final image

Once you’ve done this technique a couple of times to fix photos, you’ll find that it’s a really fast and easy fix. If I hadn’t been taking screen shots for this article, this photo would have taken me around 60 seconds to fix. Give it a try the next time you find that someone or something in one of your pictures just seems a little out of place color wise.

Original Image

If you’ve been taking photographs for any length of time, you’ve surely come across the technique of turning color digital photographs into black and white photographs. Doing this to some photos can really add a level of drama and impact that would not be there if the photo was in color.

But sometimes you have a photo that you don’t like in color. But you don’t like it in black and white either. It’s a no-man’s-land photo, and you need a way to save it. Desaturating the color without completely blowing it away may be a good option.

I’ll show you how to make this simple change to your photo in Photoshop. Any photo editing software should do just fine though if you don’t have Photoshop. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open up the image in Photoshop.
2. Create a new adjustment layer, choosing the “Hue/Saturation…” option.


Create Adjustment Layer

3. When the Hue/Saturation box pops up, adjust the saturation slider so that the value is less than zero, but more than -100. Somewhere around -50 is probably about right to take a lot of “punch” out of the color but still leave some intact. Choose a value that you think looks best.


Hue/Saturation Dialog

4. That’s it. Click OK and you’re done.


Final Photo

To contrast this technique with making images completely black and white, I made an additional image by adjusting the saturation slider all the way to -100. Which version you like better is of course completely subjective. I like the desaturated color version myself. Here is the B&W image for you to compare to the desaturated color version.



B&W Version

When it comes to portraiture, the work is only half done once you’ve pressed the shutter button. Often, the subjects of your photos will have small blemishes that they really don’t want to live for eternity over their fireplace. One of the best things you can do to turn a photo session into a product sale is to retouch the photos.

If you’re using Photoshop, your primary weapon here is the healing brush. It’s a great tool for quickly and easily removing scratches, pimples, blemishes, and even scars. Even stray hair in the face is no problem once you’ve had some practice. The healing brush blends color and texture to create a nice, even replacement and you’ll never know anything was there to begin with.

While you wouldn’t think so, babies are usually good candidates for retouching. When they’re little, they have razor sharp fingernails and don’t know not to scratch at their face, especially when they get upset. You end up with little scabs, such as in this picture of my son when he was five months old. There were about five more just out of frame in this picture.

Step one, choose the healing brush tool. It’s that icon that looks like a Bandaid.

Step two, choose the brush diameter and edge hardness. You’ll want the diameter to be a little bigger than the blemish you’re trying to remove. The hardness defines how much fuzziness there is around the edges of the patch you’re about to put in place.

Step three, define the pattern for the replacement. Here you’re telling Photoshop what the blemish should look like when it’s fixed. So you want to choose an area that has a similar color, tone, and texture as the area you’re replacing. For example, I wouldn’t take a sample from the shadow side of my son’s face to replace a blemish on the light side of his face. In this case, since the scab falls right on the transition from light to shadow on the bridge of his nose, and the transition falls in a vertical line, I can snag a sample from directly below the scab. I do this by holding down the Alt key and clicking the area. Not sure about a Mac, it’s probably the Command key.

Step four, replace the blemish. Just position the brush over the blemish, and click. The scab instantly disappears and is replaced with even, consistent color that matches the surrounding skin.

I now have a photograph that doesn’t draw your eyes to the scab between my son’s eyes. If I were pitching this photo to a client, I would be much more likely to get a sale from this photograph than I would the original.

Using the healing brush requires a little practice to become really proficient at it. This was an easy fix, but some can be more difficult. Grab some photos you have sitting around, and start retouching them. You’ll see that you get better each photo. And don’t just do portraits or pictures of people; this tool can be used for all kinds of photos. I use the healing brush extensively in my smoke photographs to eliminate stray bits of flying ash that get lit up by the flash.

In the first part of this tutorial on smoke photographs, I taught you how to take the actual photographs. Hopefully you’ve gone out and had some fun capturing some easy and beautiful smoke images. Now I’ll show you how to take those images to the next level and really make them pop. Let’s get to it. The first thing you’ll need is Adobe Photoshop. If you don’t have Photoshop and want to use another tool, you’ll need to figure out the steps as you go.

Step one, load up the image in Photoshop. Easy enough, I don’t even need to give you instructions on that. Here’s my original image:

Step two, create a levels adjustment layer above the background layer to set the exposure for the image and make that black background truly black. In the original image it likely looks black, but isn’t truly black. You do this by clicking the little black and white circle at the bottom of the layers palette and choosing “Levels”. Once the dialog window opens, click the black dropper and click a black area of the image. This tells Photoshop what you want black to be, and it makes it truly black. Make sure you don’t skip this step, as if you don’t do it, the rest of the steps will be messed up big time! Here’s the levels adjustment layer dialog:

Step three, clean up the image. If you’re like me, some of your images will have stray smoke that you find distracting or some bits of ash that light up like stars. This is easy to fix. Just go to the background layer, and use the brush tool with a color of black and paint out any unwanted smoke or ash pieces. For ash bits that are in the smoke, make use of the healing brush tool. This is great practice for when you’re retouching those family portraits and need to remove a pimple or two! Once you’ve finished the cleanup work, you can either be happy with the image and be finished, or move on to make it even more glitzy! Here’s my cleaned up image:

Step four, invert the exposure. This is an optional step, but I always do it to see if I like it better. Create a new adjustment layer like in step two, but choose the “Invert” layer instead of “Levels”. This simply creates a negative of your image. If you like what you see, great! If not, just undo your change or delete the layer. Here’s a screen shot of the process for inverting:

Step five is also optional. If you inverted your image and the smoke looks too light, try creating another adjustment layer, but use curves. Using this you can darken the smoke to make it more visible and appealing.

Step six, colorize the smoke. Yet again, create an adjustment layer, but use the “Hue/Saturation” option. Once the dialog opens, check the “Colorize” box and start fooling with the Saturation and Hue sliders. This will change the color and color intensity of the smoke. Leave the Lightness slider alone as it will change the lightness of the whole image, including the background. Here’s a screen shot of the dialog:

And here’s what I got after changing the hue and saturation:

There’s one final optional step that I’d suggest you try, as you might really like the results. Mirror the image. If you don’t like it, just undo it, but you might really like it. To do this, create a copy of the background layer by holding it and dragging it to the new layer button on the layers palette. While that layer is selected, change the blending drop down to “Lighten”. You won’t see any change yet. Now go to the Edit menu and choose Transform >> Flip Horizontally. Now you’ll see the mirrored effect. Here’s a screen shot of the blending:

And here’s the final image:

This is the basic sequence for processing smoke images. There are lots of things you can do with this. You can fool with the contrast, selectively color sections of smoke using combinations of hue/saturation layers, and much more. Experiment, have fun, and most importantly, put your comments and your own tricks in the comments sections of this tutorial.

I’ll show you step by step how to photograph smoke, then how to process the pictures using Photoshop to really make them stand out. So enough already, let’s get started!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• A digital SLR camera capable of firing an off camera flash using a PC connection or a hot shoe cord.
• An off camera flash. This can either be a full studio strobe, or as simple as a battery operated flash connected to the camera using a cable.
• A black background. This can be as simple as a black coat draped over the back of a chair.
• Some incense. Incense gives off the nice thick smoke needed to make these images.
• An image processing application such as Adobe Photoshop. Other applications will work as well, though I won’t give you directions on how to use those. One popular free application is Gimp.

Set up your incense a couple feet in front of the black background, and your camera directly across from that. Then set up your flash directly to the side of the incense so that the light hits it at a 90 degree angle to the camera’s view. Make sure the flash isn’t pointing at the background and it’s not pointing back at the camera. This will cause the background to light up, or will cause flare in the picture. If needed, you can put a home made snoot around the flash to keep the light from spilling away from the smoke. Here’s what it should look like:

Shut off all the lights in the room and close any shades so that stray light isn’t falling on your future masterpiece. Better yet, take the pictures at night with the lights off. Also make sure there aren’t any A/C or heater vents blowing on the area where you’re taking the pictures. Even the slightest breeze will ruin your photos. Consider turning off the air for a half hour while you take the pictures.

Next, set your camera to manual exposure mode. Set the aperture to a medium setting, around f11 or f13, as this will give you a fairly large depth of field so that focus is maintained throughout the image. Now pick a shutter speed below your camera’s maximum sync speed (my Canon 20D has a max sync of 1/250th of a second) and take a test shot. See how it looks and adjust the exposure as needed. Try not to over or under expose the image.

Once the picture looks good, start having fun. Experiment with using objects to disturb the flow of smoke. Try moving the incense stick around. Try blowing puffs of air in the smoke. The more you experiment the more cool photos you’ll get in the end.

You’ll be amazed at some of the pictures you get. They’ll be beautiful and fantastic! But they could be better. In the next article I’ll show you how to squeeze the most from these already beautiful images and take them to the next level. But for now, have fun!

Here are just a few examples of what you’ll get in a raw smoke photo. These three photos are completely unprocessed; what you see is what came straight out of the camera. Beautiful yes, but in the next installment I’ll show you how to really make them shine.

To see some of the best smoke images I’ve taken, visit the smoke photograph gallery.