Piling up so much information on Photoshop

The other day I mentioned that I signed up at KelbyTraining’s site.  Since that signup I’ve been watching video after video.  Seriously, information overload here!

What have I been watching?  Everything under the sun on Photoshop CS4.  I’ve also been watching a few interesting Lightroom2 videos.  One recent one was on using Lightroom and Dreamweaver together to create web galleries.  Extremely cool stuff.

Of course, 50% of what I’ve learned will need to be re-learned.  So much information so quickly.  All of this in addition to the dozens of great books I’ve read over the past year.  But there’s never too much information when it comes to learning!

Now I’ll tell you about a super cool move I learned in one of Matt Kloskowski’s tutorials.  It’s so simple, but in my mind it’s extremely cool!

The other day Sadira was kind enough to let me snap a few shots.  See, I was playing around with my 70-200mm and using it for portraits to see how well it would perform at 200mm as a portrait lens.

When I got home and offloaded my photos I found a few portraits that I really liked.  And a few that Sadira wouldn’t be upset with.

Photos that someone would be upset with are ones where their talking and their mouths are wide open.  Or they’ve got their face all squished up from the sun.  You know what I’m talking about.

After sorting through my shots in Lightroom and flagging the picks from my shots that day I cleared out all the rejected photos and got to work.  With the 5D drive space will get eaten up fast.  So each offload finds me sorting, selecting, and deleting each time.  Good habit.

The photos here today were one of my picks.  See, I’ve presented two images.  Before and after.  But they’re the same picture.  I think you can see the changes pretty clearly.  What happened from before to after took less than 5 minutes and it was all in Lightroom2.

So, what did I do?  Pushed the fill light up just a touch so her face didn’t look so shadowed.  I popped the vibrance slider up to 35.  The blues really benefitted there.  Finally, I did something I’ve never done before.  I dragged the clarity slider into the negative.  That’s the cool trick I saw in one of Matt’s videos and it’s so simple.  It creates a softer and dreamier image.  Edges seem to be softened just right when you add “negative clarity.”

Just extremely cool.  I think I’ll share more experiments as I play with other ideas that I’ve been learning.  As you can see, very simple techniques really can make some interesting images!