As I said, I like to take screenshots of cool stuff I see on the web but there are quite a few different ways to do this.

Command + Shift + 3: Captures the entire screen.
Command + Shift + 4: Turns your cursor turns into a cross-hair. This then allows you to select the specific area you want to capture.
Command + Shift + 4, then hit Space: Holding down Command + Shift + 4 turns your cursor into a cross-hair. By hitting the space bar once it will turn the cross-hair into a camera icon. This allows you to capture any opened windows.

TIP: If you want your screenshot to be copied to the clipboard instead (so you can paste it into Photoshop) just add the CTRL key into the key commands above i.e. Command + CTRL+ Shift + 3.

The default format for screen captures in OSX is .PNG (Portable Network Graphics) but these files tend to be a little on the large side compared to JPEGs. You can change the default format using your Mac’s Terminal utility by typing in these 2 commands.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
killall SystemUIServer

Make sure you include the second command ‘killall SystemUIServer‘ as this restarts the part of the system that includes screen captures and makes your changes active.

By using Apple’s iPhoto I then have the ability to organise my screenshots into something a little more manageable by creating albums for the various types of inspiration I might need. This makes it extremely easy to find ‘inspiration’ for a certain project when required. Another major plus for me is that I can then sync iPhoto with my iPhone, allowing me to have all these ideas in my pocket at all times. Very handy…

Open your image. I’ve used an image I shot on the Amalfi Coast as an example.

[click image to view larger] 

Click on the channels tab in your layers palette and create a new alpha channel by clicking on the icon that looks like a document (next to the trash icon). With your default foreground and background colours selected draw a straight gradient on the alpha channel. You can go from top to bottom or left to right depending on the effect you are after…I guess you could use a circular gradient as well although I haven’t tried that. Name the new channel ‘depth map’.

Go back to your layers palette, duplicate your background layer and open the Lens Blur filter.

In the ‘Depth Map’ pull down menu choose the new alpha channel you’ve created.
 

Click on the area within your image that you want to be your point of focus. By using a depth map the filter is able to blur with varying degrees of strength around the point of focus you have selected.

You can see here that the blur gets progressively stronger as it gets further away from the point I have selected to stay in focus.

Enjoy!

So here’s what we’re starting with.

[click image to view bigger]

First step is to add a curves adjustment layer. There are no hard and fast rules for how to adjust these colours but these are my go-to settings. In the ‘blue channel’ I have pushed quite a lot of blue into the shadows and yellow into the highlights. I do find that my blue channel always seems to end up looking like this so this could be seen as the ‘important’ channel.

I then added more green into the midtones/highlights in the ‘green channel’.

Plenty of cyan into the shadows and a slight boost of red into the highlights.

Next step is to give the image it’s faded toned with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I personally find that a brown/sepia colour works best for me but play around and see what looks good.

The effect is obviously too strong so lower the opacity until the image just looks stained with the brown colour. 50% seemed about right for this image.

Last step is to add a touch of magenta into the midtones and highlights. In this image I used a fill adjustment layer with a bright magenta colour and set the layer blend mode to screen.

It looks pretty horrible with the opacity at 100% so lower to around 10%.

All I did to finish this image was a bit of dodging & burning.

These exact steps won’t work on every image obviously but it’s a fairly good staring point for this kind of toning and does seem to work pretty well on most flat, low contrast images. The great thing about this technique is the variety of tones you can get by just tweaking the hue/saturation layer and playing with opacities. Enjoy!

The other morning I tried to turn on my main image drive, a 10 month old Lacie d2. When it wouldn’t start up properly and starting making a horrible grinding noise I felt my heart climb into my mouth. It’s always a good idea to have some Disk Recovery software lying around but when a drive fails to even start spinning this is rendered pretty useless.

I’m usually pretty good at backing up my data but due to the large file sizes I only backup my PSD documents when a project has been finished. Needless to say, I have potentially lost a lot of my recent work, not to mention the time it will take me to re-do all the retouching. I don’t know if Disklabs will be able to recover any of my data yet (I’ll find out on Monday) but I do know that it will cost me over £400 if they can. This plus the 2 new 500GB drives that I have had to drop ££ on to satisfy my current data loss paranoia makes for a pretty expensive and avoidable mistake! What has also been quite scary is the majority of people I have told my tale of misfortune to have all admitted that they haven’t done a backup for a ‘while’ either.

Moving on to the point of this post. This has obviously got me thinking about a backup solution and what I can do to try and limit the chances of this happening again. First thing I think I’ll do is install a couple more 500GB SATA drives into my G5, one of which will be my main working drive. It seems that one of the problems that can arise with external drives is the lack of adequate cooling fans within the drive housing. So, knowing that the internal cooling of a G5 is pretty good, internal SATA drives are a safer way to go in my opinion.

I’m also going make sure I now keep an exact clone of my working drive at all times. For this I’m going to use SuperDuper, a great bit of software that allows you to do ‘Smart Updates’ of hard drives. A Smart Update will copy, erase and delete what’s needed to make your backup identical to your source drive. You can also schedule backups to happen at the same time every day. Perfect.

I am definitely also going to continue having Lightroom 2 backup my camera raw files to a second drive during the import process. This has really saved my arse on this occasion as I still have access to all my original raw files. If you use Lightroom and don’t use this option I obviously highly recommend it! Finally, I will probably carry on backing up older, completed projects to DVD. However, I suspect I should probably start burning a 2nd safety copy and storing it somewhere safe, just in case.

So. When was the last time you backed up your data?

It seems that that the purpose of this function is to account for camera exposure changes between shots in a series. Suppose you’re shooting in AV mode and there are slight changes in shutter speeds, or your in M mode and you change the aperture, shutter speed or ISO to compensate for light changes etc. By selecting one of the images with a visually ‘good’ exposure in a series of shots Lightroom will attempt to match the exposure of the other images in the selection by adjusting the exposure slider in the Develop module.

It’s frighteningly simple idea and seems to work pretty well. More importantly, it’s a major time saver while wading through hundreds of images.

I wonder what other cool things I’ve missed………

First make a selection of the iris with the circular marquee tool. This can be a little tricky if the subject is not facing straight on to camera like in this image but if you hold down the space bar while making the selection you can finesse it into place. Don’t go too close to the edge with the selection.

[click thumbnail to see a larger image]

With the selection active, select the ‘refine edge’ command and feather the selection. The idea is just to soften the edge a little, don’t go to far. Click OK.

Select ‘Layer via copy” from the Layer/New menu or hit the Apple+J key command. This jumps your selection onto it’s own layer.

We need to get rid of the small part of the eyelid that has been copied into this layer. Using the circular marquee tool select the part of the iris that you want to keep. Once selected use the ‘refine edge’ command again to feather the selection, your previous settings should still be active so just click OK.

Inverse the selection either via the Select/Inverse menu or with the key command, Apple+Shift+I. Delete the selection leaving you with a nice selection of the iris.

From the bottom of the layers palette (or the Layer/Layer Style menu) add an Inner Glow. At first it looks pretty nasty with a pale yellow line around the iris, but stick with me!

In the Layer Styles box change the colour to black and the blend mode to Multiply. Adjust the ’size’ slider to something suitable for the resolution of image your working on but try not to make it too large. Click OK.

With the iris layer selected change the blend mode to screen. This will probably look a bit over the top so just lower the opacity until it looks more natural.

And here’s a before & after…

What I like about this technique is that the layer style is completely editable, leaving you able to change your mind and tweak the settings down the line…which is nice!

First thing I should say is that both these techniques works best when applied to skin that has already been retouched. By retouched I mean removal of blemishes, marks and stray hairs with the healing brush, patch tool, or clone stamp tool. It’s important to have good, clean skin before you start. Second thing is that this first technique is the simplest of the two and is a little ‘ghetto’, but it works really well and is fantastic at getting rid of those fine little hairs on arms and legs.

First thing we need to do is make a selection of the skin. There are so many ways to make selections so just use your preferred method. For this tutorial I used a combination of the ’select colour range’ command, painting with the ‘quick mask’ to clean up the selection (eyes, mouth, hair etc) and the ‘refine edge’ command to feather the selection and the contract the selection away from the edges.

[click the thumbnail for larger version]

With your selection active jump the skin up onto its own layer by selecting the ‘Make layer via copy’ command from the ‘Layer’ menu or using the key command, Apple+J.

Blur the skin with the gaussian blur filter. This is the ‘ghetto’ part I talked about earlier, I normally hate ‘blurred’ skin but we’ll fix that in a minute. I used a radius of 14.4 which is probably too strong. On a high-res file a radius of 8 - 12 should do the job. Click OK to apply the effect.

Add some texture back into the blurred skin using the ‘add noise’ filter. I used monochromatic and gaussian at a radius of around 0.75 - 1.0. You shouldn’t really have to go over 1.0.

Open the blending options for the skin layer by going to Layer/Layer Styles/Blending Options or simply double click the right hand side of the skin layer.

Go down to the ‘blend if’ section of the window and on the ‘underlying layer’, holding the Alt key, drag both the black and the white sliders. Holding the Alt key while dragging the sliders should split the sliders in two. Pull the black towards the right, and the white towards the left. The sliders under the bars represent the spread of lightness values from 0 (black) to 255 (white). Splitting the sliders in this way creates a smooth transition from blacks in the underlying layer (un-blurred) into the blurred layer and the whites in the underlying layer to the blurred layer. Confused? Basically it allows the important stuff like the highlights and shadows in the pores of the skin to peek through the blurred layer, creating a more natural blend in the skin.

Click OK and add a layer mask to the skin layer. Invert or fill the mask with black to hide the softening. With a large soft brush, paint with white on the layer mask to reveal the softer, smoothed skin tone avoiding edges and details that maybe got a little too blurred first time round.

You might want to lower the opacity of the skin layer as it’s probably a little strong, but that’s up to you. It can be very easy to get carried away. Below is a before and after at 50% zoom.

At 100% you can see the skin is soft and much more even, but retains detail.

As I said previously, this is my goto technique for the fine hairs on arms and legs. Just be careful not to overdo the blur and play with the opacity of the skin layer once finished. When I get a chance to write the next tutorial I’ll show you the more complicated technique.

Big *hug* to Carlos Amoedo for letting me use this image for the tutorial.
Image © 2008  Carlos Amoedo

And if you don’t read Photo Pro Magazine magazine then I can highly recommend it. There’s some good stuff in there every month.

TinEye is an image search engine using the very latest in image identification technology. Upload an image or submit a URL of a web page containing multiple images and TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web, even if it has been modified.

The search index still seems to be in it’s early stages but it promises to be an extremely useful tool for photographers.