It happens to all of us. You take those group shots and as you go through them there is always somebody with eyes closed or looking away or frowning. Well there are some pretty easy to use software tricks that let you combine several photos to get the best picture of each person.
To illustrate I’ll take these two pictures that I took on Mother’s Day.
Scarlett’s eyes are partly closed in the first one and Lindsey is making a funny face in the second one.
I open up both photos in Photoshop Elements and Choose Group Merge from Guided Activities.
I chose the image with Lindsey making a funny face as my base because I like all of the faces in that one except Lindsey’s. Next I draw a circle around Lindsey’s face from the other picture
As soon as I do this the software transfers her smiling face to the other picture and I end up with this.
Windows Live Photo Gallery calls this feature Photo Fuse. I highlight two or more pictures and then click the Photo Fuse button
I don’t even have to draw a line around Lindsey’s face, the program automatically pops up a comparison box and asks me which I like best
I could do this for each face in the picture but I’m okay with the other three so this is what I get.
There are two other things that bother me a little shown in the red circles below
but a quick application of the Stamp tool –aka cloning brush fixes those right up
This works best if you concentrate on keeping the camera in exactly the same spot. If your camera will shoot several shots in rapid succession, do that. I kind of forgot that yesterday and was moving the camera around too much on most of my shots.
I thought I would share a few things that may be interesting reading that I’ve run across
53 Weekly Themes For Your 2011 Project 365 This comes a bit late but if you’re struggling with taking a photo a day this may give you some ideas.
An article about shooting a variety of subjects when you travel
The Only Tip You’ll Need for Creating a More Interesting and Well-Rounded Set of Images of Any Destination or Subject The author also has a site called
If you’re in the market for a camera this may help The 10 Best Digital Cameras
A very cool USB drive http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/usb-film-roll/
Improving your food photography
Photographing Boulder Waterfalls and Slides, Fountains and Streams
The best way to upload your photos to Flickr, Smugmug and Windows Live is to use Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can get a plug in for smugmug here
http://plugins.live.com/photo-gallery/detail/publish-on-smugmug
and Facebook here
http://plugins.live.com/photo-gallery/detail/liveupload-to-facebook
Of course it natively supports uploading to Windows Live.
If you don’t have Windows Live Photo Gallery you can use the built-in Smugmug uploader
This works better with Google Chrome than Internet Explorer (and does not work at all with 64-bit Internet Explorer)
If you have Picasa then use that to upload to Picasa Web Albums. You can also add a smugmug button to Picasa
http://www.smugmug.com/help/picasa-smugmug-uploader but I would not recommend it. It lists all of your galleries in one giant drop down list – not very workable.
I don’t recommend using the Photoshop Elements uploading tools.
In yesterday’s post Fix up washed out skies I showed you some simple techniques for adding some blue to gray or white skies. But sometimes even when you have a blue sky it’s still boring. Clouds would be nice but it’s tricky to add clouds and have them look real. What better way to punch up a picture that to add a real sky from another picture. When you see a cool sky take a few pictures of just the sky and save them for another time.
I shot this sky picture in 2002
So, if I have a picture that needs a better sky, I have one handy. Consider this
There are two ways to combine these pictures. Open them both in PSE or you favorite photo editor. Use the magic wand or lasso tool to select just the sky. Then choose Select Inverse so you now have the skyline selected. Right click and choose Layer via Cut. You’ll end up with something like this
Now you can go one of two ways. You can paste the sky into the background of this picture. Switch to the sky picture, Select All, then copy. Come back to the skyline picture, make sure the Background layer is highlighted and Choose Edit, Paste. Your layer palette will look like this. You can delete the Background Layer.
Your picture will be like this
Or, you can go the other way – pasting the skyline into the sky picture. Highlight the the top layer with the skyline and choose Select All, then Copy. Go to the sky picture and Paste. Your layer palette will look like this.
After the Paste you can use the Move tool to move the skyline around a bit. Your photo should look like this
Pretty much the same result but if you look closely at the top of the Sears Tower you’ll see that in the second picture the cloud line is a little higher than in the first example.
Or maybe you’ve got a picture of a helicopter or plane in a neat sky that you want to add to a picture such as this one. I shot a helicopter downtown last year while they were filming transformers. It’s not very interesting all by itself.
But using the same techniques we just covered I got this
So that’s it for today. Remember to shoot a few cool sky pictures when you get the chance and use them later when Mother Nature has dealt you boring skies.
And do me a favor, leave a comment here and use the link on the right to subscribe to that you get an email when I post something new. I’d appreciate it.
There are lots of ways to fix up gray or white skies.
Picasa has an effect called Graduated Tint. If you hover your mouse over it you see that the Picasa folks say it is “useful for skies”.
If we click on Graduated Tint you get a screen like this
And if you pick a nice light blue you get something like this
Notice the little green cross hair in the center above the fountain. You raise or lower that to control where the blue effect starts.
This works pretty well since the scene is pretty well divided between sky and buildings. Sometime you’ve got a lot more sticking up into the sky and with this approach you’re going to turn those things blue.
Consider this shot.
With the Picasa method we would put a lot of blue tint on that yellow building.
So I’ve opened this picture in Photoshop Elements and done a rough selection of the sky using the lasso tool. I could have painstakingly selected only the sky, leaving out the building and the trees but as you’ll see we don’t need to go to that much trouble.
The next step is to choose New Fill Layer from the Layer menu. Choose solid color and pick a nice light blue. You’ll see something like this
Whoops, where did those trees and top of the building go? Not to worry we’re now going to choose Darken from the Blending Modes drop down in the layer palette. Darken tells the program to only change the color of those pixels that are lighter than the color we chose.
It still looks a little too blue for the time of day so we dial it back a bit using the opacity control in the layers pallette
and we end up with this
One fun thing that you can do with a photo is create an image that looks like the subject is actually coming out of the frame. I saw a cool one on smugmug today and thought I would show you one way to do this.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about
While the typical use of this technique is for a person or an animal it can work okay with other subjects like flowers.
Consider this daffodil shot I took recently
Using Out of Bound, I transformed it to this
I’ve done these with Photoshop Elements, Version 9 using the Guided Activities, Out of Bounds
The layer palette look like this.
Once you finished with the guided activity you can switch back to Full Edit and do some more tweaking. Here I just filled the frame with brown and then applied a texture using the Filters, Texture.
Adobe has a good tutorial with more details on how this works here
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-photoshop-elements-9/using-the-out-of-bounds-effect/
Have fun.
My friends at 2guysphoto have blogged about composition
http://2guysphoto.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/ask-2-guys-photo-composition-rules/
and I’ve touched on it indirectly in a few blog posts such as https://arthillphoto.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/crop-it/.
I ran across this article that you might find interesting
Digital Focus Composition. I thought of some things I might have shot that illustrate his points.
Rule of Thirds
Use diagonals to your advantage
Break the monotony
or
Make it Symmetric (and Then Disturb Your Symmetry)
Position Movement Into the Frame
Go back through your own photos and see if you can spot examples that illustrate these same points.
When I started shooting cameras didn’t even have exposure meters. Basically you guessed, based on your experience. Or you carried a little card which had suggested f-stop and shutter speed for a given film. “Advanced” photographers carried a separate exposure meter. You could point the meter at your subject and see what f-stop and shutter speed to use. You could even take readings from several parts of the scene and mentally average those to come up with your settings. Eventually meters were built-in to consumer level cameras. As you might expect they had two modes: average and spot. With average mode the camera came up with settings based on the entire scene. With spot mode only the center of the scene (maybe 5%) was read.
Average metering was often fooled. If you had a bright subject and a dark background neither was properly exposed. Rather, the camera settings resulted in an exposure for something in between. The next improvement was center weighted averaging; as the name implies the center of the scene was given more weight than the rest in determining exposure. This worked pretty well and came to be the way most serious photographers got used to shooting. As you can imagine this wasn’t particularly good if the subject wasn’t in the center of the scene but we all learned to center the subject for the metering reading and then recompose the shot to put the subject where we wanted it to be.
Evaluative or matrix: Today’s sophisticated digital camera takes metering to a whole new level. The main default metering method for your camera is called evaluative or matrix or something like that. Sophisticated computer algorithms in your camera take light readings from as many as several dozen points within the scene. The computer also notes which focus point has been activated and treats that area as the subject, giving it extra weight. Then, it compares the information it has obtained to a database of typical scenes and set the f-stop and shutter speed accordingly. It will even apply exposure compensation if it determines that you have a backlit subject. Whew! It is truly amazing. So, most of the time you will be fine with the default evaluative or matrix metering. If you’re shooting in Program or Auto mode with a DSLR or using a point and shoot this is what you’re going to get and it will work well almost all of the time. The gray area in each diagram below shows how much of the scene is used by that metering mode.
In this one the camera gives extra weight to the zone where the autofocus point is set. See the discussion of autofocus points in Are your photos as sharp as you like. Note that if you’re doing manual focus the metering system uses the central focus point.
Your camera may however support additional exposure modes. My Canon T1i supports three additional ones.
Center weighted averaging: This takes readings from all over but gives extra weight to the center of the viewfinder. I suspect this is included because so many photographers have used this method or so long that they are comfortable with it. I never use it.
Spot metering: This only uses the information from the very center of the viewfinder (about 4%). It is useful for getting an accurate reading of a single close-up subject. I use it mostly for light colored flowers.
Partial metering: This takes a reading of about 9% of the viewfinder and is useful when the background is much brighter than the subject (e.g. backlighting). 
My advice is to use evaluative or matrix metering most of the time and switch to spot metering for situations where you want to make sure that a light or dark subject is properly exposed. Fortunately you can check how well the camera is done after you take a picture by looking at the histogram displayed on your LCD. I’ll cover that subject in a future post.
And, as good as the metering systems are now there are still situation where they can be fooled. You’ll want to learn how to recognize those situations and use exposure compensation to get the best picture. I’ll also cover that in a future post.
One of the web pages I visited popped up an ad for a Photoshop class and I was reminded why I don’t own the program even though I have been heavily involved in Digital Photography since 1998.
Here’s a four day course in how to use Photoshop. Says it is for novices and intermediate users. And it’s only $1595.
http://www.ledet.com/courses/831-Adobe-Photoshop-Bootcamp-Training-Class?metro=Chicago+-+Park+Ridge
Then you could take the 2 day advanced class for $895
http://www.ledet.com/courses/1-Adobe-Photoshop-Advanced-Training-Class?metro=Chicago+-+Park+Ridge
Why would anyone want a $600 software program that would require this much training?
If you haven’t bought it, take it off of your wish list and get something you can actually learn to use.
https://arthillphoto.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/photo-editing/
Maybe buy a new camera and a couple of lenses with the savings.
If you own Photoshop tell us why you bought it and whether it has met your expectations. Would you recommend it to other digital photographers?
I shoot a lot of pictures of the same subjects. The grandkids are #1. Once the weather warms up I shoot a lot of flowers. When we go somewhere I end up with lots of cityscapes or landscapes. I know photographers on smugmug and Flickr that don’t even vary that much. They keep shooting the same thing over and over and over again.
The thought behind this post is to challenge you to shoot something different. If you go somewhere take some pictures of things you normally wouldn’t. This requires a lot of looking around. When you go to the Grand Canyon or Paris or Washington DC you know what to shoot, right? It’s obvious – just take a look at the postcard racks. So go ahead and take those mandatory shots but take a break every once in a while and look for something else to shoot. It could be important to where you are – a street sign perhaps. Or is could just be different, a pair of shoes in a window display. Every month I post of few of my favorite pictures to my smugmug galleries. I went back over last year’s photos to see if I could find some examples to get your creative juices flowing.
January
Here’s a chandelier at our local McDonalds. 
and a notepad for sale in a nearby Home Goods store. 
February
A couple of shots from Beverly Hills California.
March
Unusual soap for sale in an antique mall 
Broken chalk on a sidewalk in Geneva, Illinois 
April
Candy in a store window 
May
A wasp nest on our garage 
Lunch at Kona Grill
June. This was pretty easy because we went on a cruise. But I tried to find some shots that were different from the typical postcards
Bike in Geneva, Illinois 
Athens
Istanbul
July
Our dinner one night
Bison burgers on our grill 
August
Breakfast 
Troop car, New Buffalo Michigan 
September
October
November
Shoe in a candy store window 
Gingerbread house at the Chicago Marriott 
December
Fish at the Rainforest Café 
13 second exposure at night out the window
That’s it. Go back through your pictures over the past year or month or whatever. How many can you find that aren’t from your specialties? If you don’t find many then challenge yourself going forward to add some variety.
Starting today try to find something different to shoot. Post it somewhere by the end of the month and send me a link. If I get some response I’ll do a blog post with the pictures that you all take.
