Very brightly-coloured clothing present a unique problem in post-processing. Most commonly it's red and orange garments, but it can happen with any vivid colour. They're invariably out of gamut, and cause channel clipping. If you shoot Jpeg and this happens, you're screwed. Make sure you shoot Raw, so that you have plenty of latitude for dealing with it.
When time permits, I intend to write more comprehensive information about this. For now, here's a brief overview of your four options.
Option 1. Ignore the clipping. This is a genuine option - a lot of people don't mind a bit of clipping in clothing. Remember that this whole issue boils down to a choice of "bright and clipped" vs "dull and safe". You might prefer the former over the latter. (Of course, some clipping is so severe that it can't be ignored.)
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Why PPI doesn't matter - yet another analogy
This morning my children asked for a drink of milk. So I told them to get cups out of the cupboard, and I'd pour them one.
My daughter (4) found a short fat cup, and my son (2) grabbed a taller, thinner cup. They put them on the table, and I poured the milk.
My daughter immediately asked why her brother had more milk than her. I tried to explain that they both had the same amount of milk, but it looked as if she had less because her cup was fatter, whereas her brother's cup was thinner. Needless to say, she didn't really understand the explanation (how do you explain fluid volume to a 4 year old?), so I brought the discussion to a hasty halt with my most fatherly "Just drink your darn milk, ok?"
Replace "milk" with "pixels", and it's pretty much the same discussion we have regularly on forums and Facebook ...
"That photographer's images are 300ppi, and mine are only 72ppi! Why are hers bigger?"
They're not. Yours are just as big as hers. Hers are just in a "thinner glass", that's all.
Just take your darn photos, ok?
:D
My daughter (4) found a short fat cup, and my son (2) grabbed a taller, thinner cup. They put them on the table, and I poured the milk.
My daughter immediately asked why her brother had more milk than her. I tried to explain that they both had the same amount of milk, but it looked as if she had less because her cup was fatter, whereas her brother's cup was thinner. Needless to say, she didn't really understand the explanation (how do you explain fluid volume to a 4 year old?), so I brought the discussion to a hasty halt with my most fatherly "Just drink your darn milk, ok?"
Replace "milk" with "pixels", and it's pretty much the same discussion we have regularly on forums and Facebook ...
"That photographer's images are 300ppi, and mine are only 72ppi! Why are hers bigger?"
They're not. Yours are just as big as hers. Hers are just in a "thinner glass", that's all.
Just take your darn photos, ok?
:D
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
"Front Image" (Crop Tool): Don't touch it!
When you choose your Crop Tool in Photoshop (I don't think this applies to Elements), one of the features of the Options Bar is the "Front Image" button:
When you click this button, it populates the three fields with the Width, Height and Resolution of the image you're working on.
There is only ONE reason to use this button, and it is a very rare one. You use it if you want to crop another image to the exact same size as the one you're presently viewing. You press that button to get the specs of the current image, then switch to the other image, and crop it. Both images will then be exactly the same height, width and resolution.
That hardly seems worthy of a blog post? You're dead right. It's such an obscure function that it's barely worth mentioning. The reason I'm writing this post is because an alarming number of people misuse the Front Image button.
When you click this button, it populates the three fields with the Width, Height and Resolution of the image you're working on.
There is only ONE reason to use this button, and it is a very rare one. You use it if you want to crop another image to the exact same size as the one you're presently viewing. You press that button to get the specs of the current image, then switch to the other image, and crop it. Both images will then be exactly the same height, width and resolution.
That hardly seems worthy of a blog post? You're dead right. It's such an obscure function that it's barely worth mentioning. The reason I'm writing this post is because an alarming number of people misuse the Front Image button.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Faulty Camera Raw plug-in
Last night I did a fresh install of Photoshop CS5 on my PC. After the install, I immediately chose "Updates" from the Help menu, and it installed all of the latest plug-ins, patches, etc. All pretty straightforward - the kind of thing we've all done a few times.
But this morning when I came to do some work, I found that there were a couple of CR2 files from one particular client which I couldn't view in Bridge, nor open in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). I could see everybody else's raw files ok, it was just this one set.
I was totally perplexed, because I knew I'd viewed these files only a couple of days earlier, before the re-install. And what was more, I found I could open them just fine in Elements 9, so I knew the files themselves were ok. It was a problem with CS5.
But what was the problem? Like I said, I could open other raw files without any trouble. So I thought, well, maybe I didn't do the Updates properly? So I went to Help>Updates again, but it told me everything was up to date. I tried the same thing via Bridge - same result.
I'm happy to report I found the solution, and I'm posting it here on the remote chance that somebody else has this same problem, and finds my blog ...
I went to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS5\File Formats and found the file called Camera Raw.8bi. I deleted it, then went to the Adobe site and manually downloaded that file again. I put the newly-downloaded file into the folder, and launched Bridge - voila! I could see and edit all of my raw files again. Huzzah!
So I guess it means that the Camera Raw plugin file must have been faulty somehow. I don't know how it happened, but I'm very glad that my tale had a happy ending.
(I assume this problem and solution could apply to any version of Photoshop. If you're on a Mac, I believe the path to find your plug-in is /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-Ins/CS5/File Formats.)
But this morning when I came to do some work, I found that there were a couple of CR2 files from one particular client which I couldn't view in Bridge, nor open in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). I could see everybody else's raw files ok, it was just this one set.
I was totally perplexed, because I knew I'd viewed these files only a couple of days earlier, before the re-install. And what was more, I found I could open them just fine in Elements 9, so I knew the files themselves were ok. It was a problem with CS5.
But what was the problem? Like I said, I could open other raw files without any trouble. So I thought, well, maybe I didn't do the Updates properly? So I went to Help>Updates again, but it told me everything was up to date. I tried the same thing via Bridge - same result.
I'm happy to report I found the solution, and I'm posting it here on the remote chance that somebody else has this same problem, and finds my blog ...
I went to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS5\File Formats and found the file called Camera Raw.8bi. I deleted it, then went to the Adobe site and manually downloaded that file again. I put the newly-downloaded file into the folder, and launched Bridge - voila! I could see and edit all of my raw files again. Huzzah!
So I guess it means that the Camera Raw plugin file must have been faulty somehow. I don't know how it happened, but I'm very glad that my tale had a happy ending.
(I assume this problem and solution could apply to any version of Photoshop. If you're on a Mac, I believe the path to find your plug-in is /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-Ins/CS5/File Formats.)
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