Photo: Garden

Here's a favourite image of me of my last shoot. It's simple, but has a special mood. The garden in winter time isn't that spectacular but I thought this still life was worth the effort. The photo is taken in a public garden in Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Tutorial: Selective Color Cast Correction

I found a nice and not too hard method to correct a color cast on just a part of a photo. In the examples I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS4, but it also applies for CS3, CS2 and Photoshop CS.

Let's take a look at the start image and a close zoom of the head:

The white pole and the shadow around her head have a distinct green color cast. Here's how we can correct this part of the image:

• Create a new adjustment layer Photo Filter and pick a color with the colorpicker which has to be corrected. In this case I took a sample of the white pole.

• Select Hue and add 180 to the current sampled value. In this case the value is 59. So 59 + 180 = 239. Enter this value as Hue.
  
  
• Change the density of the filter to 50% (or what works the best). Now we corrected the color cast of the pole, but also for the complete image. It's a bit too cold.


• Add a layer mask and paint everything black where you don't want to correct the color cast and paint everything white where you do want the correction.



• We can repeat these steps on different parts of the photo. I corrected the shadows a bit more and here's the final result and a close up of the part we corrected:

Before & After:

Hope you like the tutorial.

Lightroom plugin Export to Blog

Timothy Armes wrote a very useful plugin to export photos directly from Lightroom to a blogpost. Even the blog content can be written directly from lightroom. As a matter of fact, this post is written with his plugin. Take a visit at his website for more information about this export plugin.

Lightroom Preset - Soften Highlights for portraits also

In a previous post I showed you the effect of the Lightroom Preset called Soften Highlights on a landscape picture, but it can also perfectly applied to portraits.

Before & After Soften Highlight lightroom preset:


Please let me know what you think of this preset. Download the preset here.

Cheers,

Joop

Tip: Lightroom Short Cuts - Brush adjustments

I already described a way to see the brush strokes in Lightroom here, but there's an even easier way to do this.

In brush mode type O and the Overlay mode kicks in, just like in photoshop.Some other short cuts I use are: brackets to adjust the brush size and the alt key to erase adjustments.