I went to our local photo expo a few weeks ago.  Huge mistake, right?  Like I need anything else on my photography wish list.  Luckily, most items stayed on the wish list.  I did buy a set of reflectors which was affordable, much needed and has already improved my photography.

BUT.  There was this Nik Software booth.  Do any of you know their products?  They make products like Silver Efex Pro, which I had heard raves about on Flickr.  They also make Dfine, Sharpener Pro, Color Efex Pro and Viveza.

If only I had kept on walking. . . . Because a Nik representative was demo-ing Viveza on a large screen.  They were using what would be a typical picture for me.  The picture had promise but the overexposed sky, blah foreground and pale skin on the subjects could only be corrected with some Photoshop time and an action or two.   Blah like this “before” version of my picture above.

The Nik man fixed his picture in a matter of seconds, applying a different local area adjustment to each part of the photo.  With no masks involved.  No selections.  And hardly any time.

It was incredible.

And thus begins a series of posts you will see over the next month or so as I review and play with my new software.

I’m going to start with Viveza.  Viveza  selectively corrects or enhances light and color.  With no selections or masks.

My first criterion for any image editing software is that it integrates with Photoshop.  If I have to open an image in one program, save my edits and re-open the image in another, it’s not going to happen.  Not only can you open Nik’s line of products from within Photoshop, you can also use them from with in Lightroom, Aperture and yes, even Photoshop Elements!

So how does Viveza work and what does it do?  Here is a screenshot after I opened it from the Nik Palette in Photoshop:

Do you see the button toward the top right corner that says “Add a Control Point”?  Press that, click in an area of your picture that needs color or lighting improvement and you get this control point:

The four buttons on the right side are your adjustment buttons.  The first controls the size of the selection that Viveza makes for you.  The next three control brightness, contrast and saturation respectively.

For my “after” picture, I increased the saturation on the red of the barn.  I increased saturation and contrast on the windmill.  I brightened and increased saturation on the plant and the grass.   And I darkened the shadows underneath the building.

Can you do all that in Photoshop?  Absolutely.  Can it be done so quickly?  Not by me. I think I placed about 8 control points, dragged the sliders and that was it.  It took me less than a minute.   And if you use this product from within Lightroom, you can apply the same adjustments to multiple shots.

So I mentioned to someone at Nik how much I love their products.  Apparently I’m in good company, because Scott Kelby has raved about them to the folks at Nik.  Viveza, I hear, is one of his favorites.  It’s not just the capabilities of Viveza and the rest of the product line that make them such invaluable tools, but more importantly, their absolute simplicity and speed.

Who should buy this product?  Hobbyists and scrapbookers who are happy with their digital photography workflow?  No.  Professionals?  Yes.  Serious hobbyists who want to spend more time behind the camera than on the computer?  Yes.  People who never got the hang of layer masks and making selections in Photoshop?  Oh yeah.  But if you have Photoshop and are on a tight budget, wait a while.  Photoshop can do just about everything Viveza can, just not as quickly and easily.

After hearing how much I liked Viveza, Nik Software generously created a discount code for any DPM readers who want to purchase their products.  Enter DPM at checkout to save 15%! Nik is currently running a 40% off sale on Viveza, and you can add the DPM 15% on top of that.

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This photo was edited using Lightroom only.  It didn’t take Photoshop to create that edgy look, believe it or not!

Here are the Lightroom settings for the vignette:

• Post-crop vignette
• Amount -100
• Midpoint 19
• Roundness 0
• Feather 50

I’ll post Lightroom presets next week for the vignette and the style, for those of you who are interested.

And, for those of you who don’t have Lightroom, this method from my post on 8 Ways to Vignette in Photoshop Elements will work for you:

• Press  D to set your colors to Default black and white.
• If black isn’t the foreground color, type X.
• Use the Elliptical Marquee tool to select the central portion of your photo.  Hold down the shift key while selecting if you want a perfect circle rather than an oval.
• Invert the selection by pressing Shift+Control+I.
• Apply a large amount of feathering.  Start with something between 75-150 pixels.
• Create a new layer and fill the selection with black by pressing Alt+Backspace.
• If you wanted the darkened area larger or smaller, start over and change the size of your elliptical marquee.
• If you want to control how the black fades, start over and add more or less feathering.

Coming up next week:

• A revised Perfect Workflow free action for Photoshop Elements that doesn’t make a copy of your original file
• Lightroom presets
• And update on the Digital Photography for Moms contest for $150.  We just might do it!  Send everyone you can to DPM to sign up!

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First off, have you seen my new blinkie button?

I’d be so proud if you would display it on your webpage!  Copy and paste this code if you’d like it:

<a target=”_blank” <a href="http://www.digitalphotographyformoms.net/"<br /> <img src="http://www.digitalphotographyformoms.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/button150a2.gif"<br /> </a>

Select Colors Outside of Photoshop

Have you ever seen a color somewhere that you wanted to use as part of a Photoshop Elements project?  Perhaps you wanted to incorporate it into a frame or a scrapbook layout?  Well, the Eyeropper tool in Photoshop can choose a color in any open window on your computer, not just an image open in Photoshop.

Select the Eyedropper tool, click somewhere in your Photoshop workspace, and, without releasing the mouse button, drag it to the color that you want to select.  If you watch the color swatches at the bottom of your toolbox while you do this, you’ll see that they change colors every time your mouse moves.  Photoshop will select the color your mouse is over when you release the button.

Since that was such a short and easy tip, I’ll tell you another one that I forget, but could use pretty frequently if I’d only remember it.  If you are painting in Photoshop with the Brush tool, and want to select a new color from your picture to paint with, press Alt and click to select a new color.  It’s much easier than selecting the Eyedropper tool from the toolbox and then re-selecting the Brush tool.

This is particularly handy when you are touching up a picture.  Maybe you’re trying to paint away a blemish or you’ve cut a head from one picture and pasted it into another.  The neck colors will never blend exactly in that situation, and the colors are also going to differ a bit from one side of the neck to another.  But painting and changing the color frequently is one way to blend the two images together.

Hope you are all doing well and haven’t had to cut and paste too many heads lately!

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I have a few ideas that I want to share today – a hodgepodge post on digital photography and Photoshop Elements!

Photo Printing and Gift Ideas

Have any of you ever used PhotoWorks.com?  I’ve always been a fan of American Greetings cards (and their frequent buyer program) and just recently I discovered their PhotoWorks website.  They are running a special that ends May 5th- 20% off Mother’s Day gifts.  That’s good for those of us (like me) who have procrastinated about Mother’s Day.  Enter code Mom20 during checkout. 

And just for registering with their website, you can get 25 photo prints for FREE! PhotoWorks has a feature allowing you to import pictures from Flickr to make the process easy.

These guys make everything – photo books, calendars, mugs and mouse pads.  Even tote bags and woven photo blankets!  Plus they have a nice selection of Mother’s Day ideas.  I’m really liking the sterling silver photo charm bracelets and key chains.  Adding  a new photo charm every year on to a bracelet can make Mother’s Day easy for years to come.  I think I just might do that! 

Black and White Conversions and Inspiration

How many of you read Photojojo?  What a fun website that is.

Their latest newsletter has a great article on converting pictures to Black and White using Photoshop.  As is often the case in the Photoshop world, there’s not enough info geared towards Photoshop Elements.  Luckily, we have Rita’s wonderful Coffeeshop Free Actions to give us lots of options for B&W conversions. Of course, the article’s ideas can be applied to PSE via workarounds, if the user is enterprising enough. . . .

What I really like about the article is the link at the bottom to websites of inspirational artists and photographers.  It’s hard to make a good B&W conversion if you don’t have an idea in mind about what a good black and white looks like.  Ansel Adams is the obvious choice for B&W inspiration, but I didn’t know anything about Minor White or the others listed.

Free Action to Create Reflection in Photoshop Elements?

I have an action that I use from time to time that creates a reflection under a picture.  I use it for dreamy shots of my kids, and it might also be useful for product shots for those on you who sell on Ebay or Etsi.  Would any of you be interested in a version that runs in PSE?  I’ve been playing with it a bit, and making it PSE compatible will take some time.  It will take a bit of work on the user’s part too.  But it’s a nice effect.  Let me know if you’d use it.

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Take care, everyone!

The Adobe Kuler website is a treasure trove of color schemes.  In addition to creating your own color scheme or modifying an existing scheme created by a Kuler user, you can also search on keywords (Christmas, pink, wine, terra cotta, spring, pastel and primary were just a few that I browsed).

You can also upload an image and Kuler will create a color scheme for you based on that image.  And then you can take the color scheme that you have created and produce various moods based off of it.  The scheme in the screen shot above was “Colorful”, and the other options were bright, mute, deep or dark.  Do you see those small circles around the colors chosen in the image?  You can move those circles if you’d rather use a different color.

This website is very cool!  Can you tell that I’m excited about it? 

So, what do you do with these schemes once you’ve found some that you like?  Well, you have several different options.  First off, if you have an Adobe ID, you can sign in to Kuler, save your schemes as favorites, or download them.  And, please correct me if  I’m wrong, but I think that everyone can get an Adobe ID, regardless of the version of PS or PSE that you use.

If you have downloaded a scheme, it will be in the ASE format.  I download mine into a separate folder in My Documents.  (I do this with all actions, brushes and any other Photoshop tools so that I don’t lose them when I upgrade my software.)  Then, from Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, go to the Window Menu and select Color Swatches. 

Depending on the version of PS or PSE that you have, you will see a button in the top right corner of the Color Swatches palette that might say “More.”  Click on this button and go to Load Swatches.

In the resulting Load Dialogue box, change the Files of Type field to ASE.  Then navigate to the location where you have stored your downloaded color swatch.  Hit Ok, and the new swatch will appear at the end of you color swatch group of colors. 

Now, if you’d like to see only the new color swatches, you could select Replace Swatches instead of Load Swatches.  You will lose the ability to return to those colors unless you know the source or color code for them, however.

Once you have the new colors in your colors palette, you can select your Foreground or Background colors from there.

If you don’t have an Adobe account, you can also view the color values in Kuler so that you can transfer the hexadecimal numbers or RGB numbers into your PS color picker.

And there is one last way that I know of to select colors.  If you have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements open, size and position your PS and web browser so that you can see both of them at the same time.  Click on the Eyedropper tool in Photoshop, and click somewhere in your Photoshop document window.  Do not release this second click.  Then, drag your mouse to your browser and release the click over the color you want to select.  As you move  the mouse, you should see your color swatches in the toolbar changing.  This tip, by the way, works in any open window, so you could use it to select any color you see on your computer.

For those of you using Photoshop CS4, the Kuler Browser is built in.  Access it from Window/Extenstions.

What do you think?  Is this website new to you also?  Some people are born with the ability to select colors that harmonize well.  I hope you are, but I am definitely not!

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We’ve been meeting new friends and reconnecting with old.  Have you ever tried to write your email address with a wriggly baby in one arm and an overflowing diaper bag on the other, while trying to wrangle a 5 year old at the same time?  It’s not easy, is it?  So I created a business card for Stay at Home Moms.

I got the idea for this project from the Script and Scribble cataglog.  I modified my project so that the card is the same size as a standard business card, making it easy to print and cut.  Perforated business card stock is available at office supply stores and you can download templates for the business cards from the stock manufacturer’s website.  The template I used was a Word document, so I created the card in Photoshop, then saved it as a JPEG and copied it into Word for printing purposes.

While I was at it, I made a card for boys as well as one in primary colors.  You can download the PSDs here, if you’d like to customize them in Photoshop for your own family.  They might also make good birthday or new baby presents.  Or even a Mother’s Day gift for your girlfriends?

You can use the template in either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

Some of you guys are excellent with graphics and I know you will have great ideas for really sprucing this card up.  I hope you want to share!

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• Why shoot in Raw?
• White balance
• Expsosure and color intensity
• Sharpening

And now, the conclusion.  How exactly do you make the “Raw Conversion” and what do you do with your photos once you’ve made the ACR adjustments?

First, a background note about Raw images.  Raw file formats vary from camera to camera.  I shoot with an Olympus, and the Raw shots from my computer are named with the suffix ORF.  Nikon’s end in NEF and Canon’s in CRW or CR2.  Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw can open most of these types of files, depending on the version of ACR you have. 

To open a Raw file that you have transferred to your computer, you start in Photoshop  Elements (or Photoshop).  Go to File/Open, and open the Raw file like you would any other picture.  Doing this will automatically start Adobe Camera Raw.

ACR is a bit persnickety.  If you want to edit multiple photos in ACR at the same time, you have to select them all at the same time in the Open File dialgoue of PSE.  Do this by control clicking on all the files you want to work on.  This is good to do when you have lots of pictures taken in the same shooting conditions that you want to apply similar Raw settings to.  Unfortunately, you can’t pop back over to PSE to open additional files without closing ACR.

So, once you have your pictures opened in ACR, control click on the thumbnail for each picture that you want to edit.  Your edits will be applied to all activated images.  Then, if you need to fine tune pictures individually, click on each by itself.

When you have completed you edits, you have several options:

• Save Image – Use only if you want to save your image in the DNG file format.  I never do. 
• Done – Used when you want to make no further changes, but don’t need to change the file format
• Cancel – Use this only if you want to cancel your changes
• Open Image – Opens the picture in PSE so that you can make further edits and save it in any file format.  If you want to save your picture as a PSD or JPEG, go here.

A note about saving Raw files.  None of the changes you make in ACR ever touch your original Raw file (the ORF, NEF, CRW, etc.).  Your changes are stored in a separate XML file that is created when you first open the picture.  This is good for two reasons.  First, you can always get back to your original, untouched image, if you want.  Second, you can process this same image in many ways, all based off the original.  This is good is you have a picture with a wide range of exposure.  You can adjust the Raw settings for the low exposure areas and open it in PSE.  Then, reopen the Raw in ACR, adjust is for the high exposure settings and open this version in PSE.  Then, use a layer mask to combine the two, masking in only the appropriately exposed section of each picture. 

Much of this info came from my pouring over the Adobe Photoshop Elements Techniques newsletter and the following books:

I think that does it for my Raw series.  Did I leave anything out?

Coming up soon – info on a cool tool and learning opportunity that I’ve recently learned about.  Subscribe to Digital Photography For Moms via email or RSS so that you don’t miss out!

Where and How to Sharpen in Adobe Camera Raw

You can find the Sharpening settings on the Detail tab of the ACR window:

Adobe Photoshop Elements Adobe Camera Raw Sharpening

• Amount – adjusts the level of sharpening
• Radius – ACR sharpens the parts of your picture it thinks are edges.  This slider defines how wide an area must be for ACR to recognize it as an edge.  I don’t usually change this one.  More is sharpened with an edge is as the radius increases.
• Detail – This slider helps control halos that sometimes appear around parts of your image when sharpening.  But if you go too low, no sharpening at all will happen.
• Masking – This slider is especially great for faces.  It protects non-edge areas from sharpening.  The higher the number the more is masked, and so less is sharpened.

These adjustments are all dependent on each other.  So increasing the detail and masking at the same time might really help a portrait.

Try holding the Alt key (isn’t that Option on a Mac?) when adjusting Radius, Detail or Masking.  Your image will turn gray so that you can focus on each change as you make it.  When using this trick as you adjust the Masking, remember that white means the effect is showing and black represents areas where the sharpening effect is masked, or not visible.

ACR’s Noise Reduction

I just don’t use it.  I’m a big fan of (free) Noiseware by Imagenomic.  The freeware isn’t integrated into PSE and requires extra work, but it sure is worth it.  Noise control is one place I’d really like to see Adobe improve in the next release.

Other articles you might be interested in:

Why Shoot in RAW?

Processing RAW Images in Photoshop Elements/ACR – White Balance

Processing Raw Images in Adobe Camera Raw – Part 2

I just read that Adobe has PSE 7 (full and upgrade versions) on sale for $59.99 now through April 23.  This is a 40% discount!  And a lot less than I paid, I can tell you that!

Note that PSE 7 is for Windows only.  And for some reason, this deal is only being offered to North American customers, excluding Quebec.  I apologize to my readers in Quebec and the rest of the world!

As you guys know, I love free actions that are compatible with Photoshop Elements.  And installing them in any post-PSE 5 version is a relative breeze. 

Now is the time to upgrade.  Having watched this product like a hawk for the past 4 years, I wouldn’t expect prices to go down, much, if any, lower than this.

Speaking of installing actions, have you seen Rita’s brilliant tip about creating a shortcut for installing actions?  Total Aha moment.  She also has a new CoffeeShop Lomo Free Action and a set of lace brushes and a frame that is perfect for spring pictures.

My next post will be the continuation of my series on Raw conversions.  A couple of readers sugested super ideas for further topics about Raw, so we hae at least two more installments.  Thanks for the ideas!  Subscribe to Digital Photography For Moms via email or RSS so that you don’t miss this great info on Raw!

EDIT: Why upgrade, beyond easier to install actions?  If you’re coming from a version prior to PSE 6, you’ll definitely see a big difference.  Here are links to some of my previous posts discussing reasons to upgrade to PSE 7.

• Photoshop Elements 7 Smart Brush - select an area and apply great effects with one brush stroke (whiten teeth, make skies bluer, greenery greener, apply lipstick, etc.)
• Skin Softening Filter
• Scene Cleaner (removes distracting background elements)
• Photoshop.com Plus Membership - artwork, templates, tutorials fo

The first cool idea arrived in my inbox from Helen Bradley’s Project Woman blog, which has all sorts of fun photography ideas.  She calls it her “3 Step Photoshop Every Image Quick Fix.”

• Duplicate the background layer of a flattened image
• Add a Gaussian blur to the top layer.  I used 10 for the image below.  Use less if your image is low resolution.
• Change the Blend Mode of the top layer to Soft Light or Overlay. (I used Soft Light.)
• Adjust the new layer’s opacity, if needed.

A member of the Flickr PSE group suggested the 2nd tip in a discussion about giving impact to landscape shots.

• Duplicate the background layer of a flattened image.
• Convert the new layer to black and white.
• If your black and white conversion creates a new layer, merge it down onto the second layer.
• Change the Blend Mode of the new layer to Multiply.
• Adjust the new layer’s opacity.

I like all three versions.  And I love collecting ideas to pop images that need a little something.  There are going in my notebook!  And Helen Bradley’s website is going on my Best Resources page!

That picture, by the way, is the Mausoleum of the Duchess of Kent at Frogmore in Windsor.  It was built by her daughter, Queen Victoria.

If only I could make a living taking pictures of my family at royal history sites in England, I would be in perfect heaven!

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