Tutorial: Digital ProTalk: My Cheatin' Light - Or How To get Your Flash To Sync At Higher Sync Speeds Than Normal

Wedding shooter David Ziser has put together a well-done twelve-minute tutorial on working above your flash's native sync speed for outdoor lit portraiture. With great tips and tricks he shows new possibilities for using your flash.


Here's his original post: Digital ProTalk: Technique Tuesday: My Cheatin' Light - Or How To get Your Flash To Sync At Higher Sync Speeds Than Normal, and Alligators On Location

Lightroom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder

In the Library module in Lightroom there is a lot of metadata. I don't want to see all metadata all the time and although Adobe ships some presets I really like Jeffrey Friedl's Lightroom Metadata-Viewer Preset Builder.

This tool lets you build your own preset configuration files online for the metadata viewer in the Adobe Lightroom (Version 1.1 and 2.0) Library module.

Tutorial: Flash Photography

Although I'm a landscape photographer, I do like to take personal pictures of my wife, family and my lovely dog.
For this kind of photography it's great to master flash photography. I found a real valuable and in-depth tutorial of Neil van Niekerk about flash photography. In twelve chapters he explains the use of indoor and outdoor use of on-camera flash (not the build-in flash, but a speedlight or so). He does not provide tricks but clearly explains how and why to use different settings. Thank you Neil for this great tutorial.

Read all about it here.
Neil describes mainly the use of in-directional light, but on the right you see a result of his techniques with directional flash light.

Photoshop Actions: Advanced Sharpen Photoshop Action

Almost all digital images require sharpening. I've created a set of two free Photoshop actions to sharpen for gloss and matte output.


Download the actions for free.

Tip: Extract the JPG image from a RAW File

Check out this need free tool called Instant JPEG From RAW (IJFR):
it just pulls out the JPEG preview embedded by your camera. It does not convert any part of the RAW file.

Tip: See brush adjustments in Lightroom

I really like the new local brush adjustments in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Todays tip is to see where the adjustments are located in the photo. For each brush you get a clear visible control knob within your photo. Hover with the mouse over the knob and Lightroom shows the adjustments as a kind of quick mask like Photoshop CS. See an example below:

Tutorial: Fixing a blown out sky (with Photoshop)

Sometimes it is very hard to retain highlights in the sky. Here's a tutorial to fix this problem in Adobe Photoshop (CS, CS2 and CS3) without having to make difficult selections even with trees in the image. Here's the start image and the final result.




Here's the step-by-step tutorial:

1. Make a rough selection with the lasso tool of the sky. Don't bother about branches, trees, etc. Here's my result:


2. Make a new Selective Color adjustment layer and choose the white colors. Use the Cyan and Magenta sliders to get the desired sky color.


3. Now we have to select the sky again. CTRL+click on the mask of the Selective Color layer. The sky will be selected as shown below


4. The sky is now too solid and with a gradient we make sure it's a bit lighter at the horizon. Press D to make sure you get a black and white gradient and hold down the shift while drawing the gradient within the selection. Here's the result:


5. Most of the times the effect is a bit to harsh. Choose the menu item Edit->Fase Gradient ... to fade the effect to the desired strength.


6. The sky looks natural but could be improved by adding some clouds. If you don't have cloud brushes already, you can download some great ones from the Adobe Exchange site.

7. Make a new layer. Select a brush and use white as foreground color. Draw some different clouds in the sky.


8. Here's the before and result after:


Please tell me if you like this tutorial.