I started voice lessons a few weeks ago, with a friend of mine.  He is having me sing a song that I’d never heard before.  Last week he asked me to write out the lyrics (or find them online) and read through them apart from the music. “Goodness is rewarded” “Hope is guaranteed” “Laughter builds strong bones” “Right will [...]

Ok, so one thing I always enjoy seeing is how people bring their photos from SOOC (straight out of camera) to the final product. Typically, the most awesome end photos are awesome already SOOC, but I’ve seen amazing artists do amazing thing with ill-lit or otherwise flawed material.

I haven’t reached the point where I can save a badly lit photo, but I thought I would share with you my current process for editing a photo.

The first photo is “SOOC” – I shoot in RAW so technically this is straight from RAW… but close enough. RAW allows for more flexibility in editing, so I try to always shoot in RAW; however, there is some altering of the photo in the processing to JPG that is inherent in RAW. At least, I think there is.

Top left photo is the SOOC+crop – this step comes first, typically, and then tweaked before export. For headshots, I grab every photo in lightroom and adjust the aspect ratio to 8×10 before I do anything else. Then, I’ll go through and individually edit each photo’s crop and straightning.

Top right photo is SOOC+crop+lightroom adjustments. This varys wildly depending on the photo. I either use my own tweaking or I’ll use a preset and go from there. For this photo I used a preset and tweaked from there.

The bottom two photos are after final photoshop tweaking. Sharpening the eyes, dodge the eye whites, brush out stray hairs, tweak the levels, and then convert to b/w for a b/w version (I use a setting for this, because I am lazy and the person who made the setting is amazingly talented and really, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel).

So, that’s kind of how I go through processing a photo. Not every photo makes it to the photoshop step; not every photo even makes it to the cropping step. But for all my final photos, this is pretty much the process.

Ok, so I got some flickr mail today.   Apparently the guys at http://www.wefeelfine.org/ are creating a book, and want to use a photo of mine in the book.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=2056810170&size=large

In return, I will get a copy of the book, signed by the authors, and an invitation to the book release (which, I think they’re in California, so unless my picture is like… the cover shot, unlikely I will go).

I shot back with the following questions:
First, how will my photo be used?  Will it be in the book itself?  Color?  Black and white?  Will it be edited / where in the book are you thinking of using it / how do you plan to use it?

Will I be given credit in the book?

This is the second time I have been asked to publish a photo.  The first time is already underway, and it was for a photo I actually like less than this one, and I got paid (albeit only a little bit).  I don’t know how I feel about not getting paid – but at the same time, being published in a book is still pretty novel.

Will update when I have more information.

What would you do?

There is a wonderful scene from the West Wing.  Jed Bartlett OWNS. Leviticus 18:22, Chapter and Verse People are coming together, nationwide, tomorrow, to protest against Proposition 8 (etc).  Joe. My. God. has a great map that he posted on his blog, with the names of all the cities where the protests are being held. I will be [...]

Tonight I had an hour-long voice lesson with a friend of mine from this area.  It was actually really good – I was nervous for no explainable reason, but I got over that about half-way through.  I am going back tomorrow to pick up some sheet music for a song he wants to teach me; [...]

So, I missed posting yesterday, but that’s alright.

I wanted to take a quick moment to share with my (two) readers something really cool -

If you use photoshop, you’ll appreciate this real-life mock-up of the program.  I found this through design fckr (http://dfckr.com/), a neat design blog I have in my google reader, and had to share it.  I use photoshop quite a lot myself, and am responsible for hooking at least one of my friends on its awesomeness.  So, this was really neat to see.

Enjoy.

Happy weekend!

Like many people, I was thrilled when Obama was elected president.  How exciting to see a fresh face up there, giving his acceptance speech, reaching out across the aisle to those who didn’t vote for him; what a thoughtful, inspiring, caring person. And then, the next morning, my thrill was crushed a little when I heard [...]

Hope is a very … well, I don’t want to say overused, but it is kind of overused … word today. However, with the results coming in, and this historic election, I just wanted to post something I saw earlier today. It’s called “Hope”, and it’s from a speech by Harvey Milk. I find [...]

Ok, so, I hope that everyone voted today. Last major election, I was in Australia. They were, at that time, going through a general election of their own – and I found it amazing that my friends all had to vote, or they would be fined. While I think that, unless you live in [...]