Three inches! Amazing. When I zoom in, I can tell the photoshop sky is there. Also, wonderful depth of field!
Flash, I used the magic wand as a quick way to eliminate the bottom of the second deck. A better way would be to manually outline the horizon--it does avoid the bright line that announces Photoshopped skies. Usually, I drop in a better sky, but I was short on time. I can do it later, however. For Photoshop people, here's how I dropped out this background. First, I made sure there was plenty of light on the background. In this case I used the magic wand, with a tolerance of about 10, to pick out the sections of the background I wanted to eliminate. This is a fairly tedious process, but not as tedious as using other tools to pick out the sections. I then used the paint bucket tool to fill the sections with a sky blue. I was just experiementing on one layer because I was in a hurry and just fooling around; it would be much better to use layers and masks, if you know how to. On the same sky area, which is now all bright blue, I used the gradient tool next to vary the saturation from white to blue from the horizon to the top of the picture. Then I used the Filter>Render>Clouds tool to create clouds. This was quick and dirty, and left artifacts. An alternative, once I selected out all of the sky background, is to delete the selection, and use an image of real sky "behind" the deletion, on a "layer" below it. That's what I usually do, except I didn't have time last weekend to find the right sky image and scale it for this photo. For those of you who have followed me this far, there's still possibilities. I think I'd go back to the original, reselect the background with a bit more precision, and put a different sky as a replacement, color-balancing it better, and using layers and masks so I could independently manipulate highlights and shadows. Work calls. More later.
Pete, I am very impressed with your ability with Photoshop. My wife recently upgraded to Photoshop Elements 3 and gave me her copy of PS Elements 2 and instructional book/disk. So I hope to learn enough in a few years to do what you are doing now. I may be asking you a question or two in the future. If you would as soon I didn't, that's fine also. Thanks, Hank
Hytec, Feel free to ask here on the forum, as others might have the same questions. And still others might have better answers! I'm pretty skilled at preparing photos for printing; I'm not so skilled at things like substituing backgrounds, which I have to do on my multi-deck layout due to the vertical restrictions on spacing. I'm still learning, in other words, and am willing to share my successes and failures.
It might be interesting to some Trainboarders to see the image that I started with. Now, I bracketed exposures here by an f stop of 0.3f. I chose this exposure because it still had highlight detail in the siding of the white farmhouse. Man, it looks under-exposed, but it really isn't. I used the shadow/highlight tool in Photoshop to bring out the shadows and, at the same time, hold back the highlights: As a photographer, I'm looking to boost shadow detail while not blowing out the highlights. Perhaps I overcooked this one? [ June 09, 2005, 08:44 PM: Message edited by: Pete Nolan ]
Hi Chessie, excellent photos, I have the same Canon 350D rebel and find it brilliant myself. By the way, here's the first photo of yours, I re-sized it so members on dial up could view it. Cheers Paul [ June 10, 2005, 08:16 AM: Message edited by: Paul Templar ]
Thanks, Paul. I meant to do that. The photo is O.K. and hopefully I have some better ones now. I need to post some of my recent ones that I have taken with my 55-200mm lens. Harold
Here you go.... one of my first images with my new 55-200 lens (on my Canon Digital Rebel XT). This was shot handheld at 200mm (~ 320mm equivalent for a 35mm camera!) and highly reduced and compressed from its original size: Harold
Did this issue get fixed? The issue is not with the graphic I think you will find it is true with all pics you try to save. There is a fix and I can find it if you like. One option is to use FireFox browser which I use at home and work for most things.
When you find that you right click an image you know is a JPG and it offers to save as a BMP, that means your temporary internet files folders are full. Delete them and try again. You occasionally need to refresh the page. To delete the files, click tools, then Internet Options then in the Temporary Internet Files section, click Delete Files. This often takes several minutes so you may want to occupy yourself with other activities while this is going on.
