A Casual Look at the Canon G12

For my commercial stock imagery shooting, I use the big boys of DSLRs, like the Canon 1dsMk3 and the 5d2.  Which are great when you’re “working”.  However, you don’t always want to be dragging something that big around to birthday parties and vacations.  I’ve got a Canon D300 Digital Rebel from 2004 that I will occasionally use if I’ve taken the trouble to drag it along somewhere.  I’ve gone through a couple iterations of the Canon Digital Elph, which is a really convenient camera to take along.  They’re metal and small and easy to use.

However, I really never did like their performance in low light, and that’s where I want good results.  Inside a living room at a birthday, or in a restaurant for a character meal on vacation.  Very noisy results, and with the tiny flash so close to the lens, you get a lot of red-eye.  So, I finally stepped up to the middle of the range and recently bought a Canon G12.  Here’s my casual look at using it on our trip to Florida last week.

Photoshop Whirled

This week I’m heading off to attend the Adobe Photoshop World Expo and Conference in Las Vegas.  It’s 3 days of classes and demos, as well as an exposition hall of product vendors.

In my work creating stock images, I make a concerted effort not to look at the work of other stock photographers.  However, in this venue, with a variety of different instructors, I’m hoping I’ll gain a little inspiration from other types of photography industries to help kick things up a notch.  We’ll see – it’s the first time I’ve attended a teaching/learning conference like this.

Of course, there will be other iStockers in attendance there.  If you’re going, why not join the thread on iStockphoto and keep an eye out for a get together?  See you there!

Rainy Artifacts

When I was going through the golf images that I mentioned last week, looking for the best takes to process, I noticed this strange artifacting.  It took me a minute to figure out where this weirdness was coming from.

iStock Turns 10 in April

Happy Birthday to iStockphoto!  The stock content portal that brought huge changes to the stock buying population turns 10 on April 7th.  Details on the online celebration are here.

To celebrate, we’re holding multiple contests and giving away a lot of money: $21,000 USD in cash and prizes to be exact. There will be a 24-hour Twitter contest with $10,000 worth of cool prizes (iPad anyone?) and another grand-prize draw for 10 grand.

I love prizes!  At least they didn’t use the oooold radio missive “It’s our birthday and we’re giving you the presents!”.

Part of the production includes some sort of gallery of the faces of iStockphoto:

To kick it all off we’re creating a massive online gallery and we need your help. We want to see everyone out there involved in the iStock world: all you photographers, designers, illustrators, photo-retouchers, scrapbookers, video editors, musicians, Flash coders, marketing execs, iStock Inspectors, Steel Cagers, Australians, forum hanger-outers – everybody. And yes, you’ll get to see what we all look like as well.

They then request a portrait of some type to be uploaded at istock10.com .  Now, I know everyone loves my “clone” shot.  It has provided hours of discussion on how that is how I’m able to upload, shoot, process and be in the forums at the same time.  You can see the shot on my About page.  However, I discovered, upon digging out the comp from 3 years ago, that it wasn’t really in focus at a larger size, and … I’m just tired of it.  So after a photo session last night, I set up my lights and tried for a new self portrait.

Now, I’m not going for anything esoteric here.  The concept is a headshot with a little personality.  No inner meaning, nothing too self-indulgent.   Normally, I don’t like myself in pictures, but I’ve dropped a little more than 20lbs in 2010, so I’m feeling pretty good, and the ladies like the facial scruff too.  Ok, my daughter doesn’t like it, and my wife is undecided, but that sort of counts.

Interested in the setup?  That’s the white wall of my studio about 10 feet back.  There is an AB800 at 1/16  in a giant softback right above camera.  I’ve got a white card on my lap reflecting the light up into the shadows of my eyes and nose.  There is another AB800 at 1/32 with a 30 percent grid on a boom playing the part of hairlight to separate me from the background, which is not “white” but dark grey due to the falloff of the lights 10 feet forward.  Camera at 1/125 5.6.  Developing in ACR included some desaturation, and pumped up clarity.  Plus vignette so I can submit it to Vetta .

By the way, this is not the portrait I’m sending off to the site – that’s a secret for now.  But it’s one of the ones I liked from the session.

“Check” It Out

Recently, I’ve added images to my iStockphoto.com portfolio of various people interacting with one of those giant promotional personal checks you see contest winners holding, or in similar situations.  I thought these would be a great way for someone to illustrate tax rebates or payments, bank loans, etc., by adding your information to the check image.  However, you may need help doing this, so a tutorial follows…

Turning the Orange Down

Over in my iStockphoto.com portfolio, I have a growing series of 3d rendered images featuring a cute cartoony male character.

As you can see, the 3d shader description that defines his “look” gives him a bright orange, sort of velvety appearance.  I went with orange because it denotes warmth and power, without the intensity of red, or the “lose it in the background” quality of yellow.  Orange gives a bit of a “call to action”, “look at me” type of feeling.

However, I know some people would prefer the more typical white/grey color for the character, so I wanted to give a Photoshop way that you could modify the image to make him grey.  Now, keep in mind, that for most of these shots, the character is the only thing that is orange, which makes this easier.

Let’s take a look at this image from a series for the 2010 Winter Olympics that I am working on:

As you can see, the only orange color here is the character and the reflection in the skates.

Method 1

1. Create a hue/saturation layer.  Open your “layers” window (F7).  At the bottom of it, click on the black and white circle.  Choose “Hue/Saturation”.
   
2. Now, double click on that layer in the layer box to bring up the Adjustment window.
3. Orange is made of two colors, red and yellow, so we will individually use the Adjustment controls to lower the saturation for those two colors (ie., remove the hue value of the color).  This will not affect anything else, since there are no other reds or yellows in the image.  Change the pulldown that says “Master” to “Reds”.  Adjust the Saturation and Lightness to suit your taste.
   
4. Now, you can see that we’ve adjusted the areas where red was predominant.  Now, switch the pulldown to “Yellows” and do the same thing to adjust the top.
   
5. Voila – the orange has been removed and we now have a grey character.  Save the file and move along.

Method 2

1. Instead of using the “Reds” and “Yellows” adjustments, we are going to select ALL the orange-ish pixels in the image and assign the Hue/Saturation layer to those.  Under the “Select Menu”, click on “Color Range”.  This enables us to make a selection based on the color of the places we click in the image.
2. Set the “Fuzziness” up high, to maybe 125.  This will give a range of colors around the color we actually pick.  Here it is not an issue, but if he was holding something red, you may want to lower it (or later on, deselect just that area).
3. Now click in the image on an orange area.  You can see in the dialog box it is creating a selection silhouette.  Hold shift down, and keep clicking on different orange values until you build up a pretty good silhouette of the character.
   
4. That’s a pretty good selection (although notice his right elbow isn’t completely white).  Click OK.
5. Now, create a Hue/Saturation layer as detailed in Method 1.  Leave the pulldown on “Master” and lower the saturation and up the brightness to your choosing.
   
6. You can see there are some areas on his head and elbow we missed, due to my poor clicking.  Remember, now, this Hue/Saturation effect is only being applied to the selection we had when we created it, and that is defined by the opacity mask shown in the layer window.  To catch those bad areas, we click on that layer mask, and use a paintbrush colored white to paint in those areas.  Now, this will increase the brightness of the area we paint, as well as removing color, so we wouldn’t want to do it over the boot area, but the rim, with the white around it is fine.  can’t get any brighter than white!
   Now, you see we get a little bit of a different look to his “skin” than the first method.  That’s because the shadows tend to have more red in them, and the highlights, more yellow, and in Method 1, we adjusted those separately.  In Method 2, we adjusted all the orange together.  Your choice which look you want.

Conclusion

Hopefully this will help you adjust this 3d Orange Guy series (or any thing else color related) to your needs.  If there are other objects that the layers are affecting in the image, use some selective painting in the opacity mask to remove them from the Hue/Saturation effect.

PS…

Tomorrow, I will unveil the totals from my holiday kids’ charities drive.  For more details and a chance to win 50 FREE iStockphoto credits, click here.

Top 5 iStockphoto Articles

Along the path to where it is today, iStockphoto found, that by educating buyers and contributors on topics related to design and photography, they could increase both the quality of the content offered, and the knowledge of the buyers to use and appreciate said content.  There are a lot of good articles in their database, but here are a couple of my favorites.

1. Tips on Lighting And Isolated Shots – One of the classic articles, oft pointed to in the forums when discussing how to do the infamous “isolated on white” shot.  Good for designers because it gives a basic overview on what “white” means to a camera
2. Know Your Type – A good primer on typography, written by an outside company.  Good illustrative graphics accompany the text.
3. A Very Important Message For Everyone at iStockphoto – Founder Bruce Livingstone announces the sale of iStockphoto to Getty Images.
4. “K” is for Tags? – Buyers often run into roadblocks when searching the image database.  This article explains how the controlled vocabulary system works.
5. I Resolve to be More Resolute – Answers the hows and whys of dpi.  Why pixel resolution is what really matters on the front end and the final use is what you make from that.  A definite “must read” for newbie buyers.
6. Evolving Intellectual Property Standards at iStockphoto, pt. 2 – This series addressed concerns of what content is safe to portray in commercial royalty free imagery for sale.  This article was heavily read because it addressed some popular topics – NASA imagery, autos and especially the use of model releases.
7. Any of the “Points and Paths” articles about vector creation.  I’m just a beginner when it comes to illustrations, and these how-to’s can benefit everyone, from creators to integrators.  Like “RGB CMYK Q&A“, “Layout, Cutout, Knockout” and “Develop a Personal Palette“.  Even if you don’t use the software, it’s neat to see how the magic is done.
8. Top 5 License Faux Pas – This article echos a lot of what I’ve written in my blog about safe and correct ways for the buyer to use their licensed files, but it’s nice to get it straight from the officials.

Ok, that was 8.  Not 5.  But a catchy title does not an exact list make… There’s a lot more in the article morgue, so page back and check them out.  Some from a few years back are timeless, and some are tired, but there’s probably a little something about everything you didn’t know in there.

Hot Shoe Cover

I don’t know about you, but when I spend $8000 on a camera, you’d think it would come with something to cover the exposed contacts in the flash hot shoe.  I mean, you don’t want to run about getting dust and grime on the contacts, causing problems triggering the flash or remote, right.  For some reason, Canon doesn’t seem to want to include a little piece of plastic for that purpose.

When I was making a B&H Photo order recently, I thought I’d look for something to fill that need.  Lo and behold, Nikon sells a plastic hot shoe protector.  I assume it’s just a spare version of the ones they include with their cameras.  However, they fit into Canon hot shoes just fine.

Anyways, it’s only about $2, and you might just want to add a couple onto your next order to help keep your camera in top shape.  Here’s the B&H link:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/207371-USA/Nikon_4731_BS_1_Hot_Shoe_Cover.html