Tag Archives: masking

*I thought my way was easy… Hair Masking made ridiculously simple, and remarkably effective.

by in Postprocessing techniques, Software tutorials / reviews and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

topaz remark does it again!

I get a lot of email trying to promote, or sell me stuff daily.  Deals on this, or sales on that.  Discounts on memory cards, or steep cuts on camera kit prices.  Normally, I quickly scan them and toss them as my time and energy is pretty minimal these days.

As any readers will know, my enjoyment of the Topaz plugins run deep, and although I only started to use ReMask last year, it has been a revelation for me, especially when it comes to meticulous selection tasks, like hair.

Imagine my surprise when up pops an even simpler hair masking tutorial from our friends at Topaz Labs showing that you can turn a task that without ReMask has taken me up to an hour or more into an even more remarkably time saving step of about 3-5 minutes at the most.

Seriously.  If you use photoshop, and you ever have had to select something like hair, you’ll know how tedious it can be even with the best techniques in Photoshop.

Oh yeah, and on top of this killer tutorial, they’re offering ReMask for 20% off (click HERE to download the free trial, or buy ReMask on Sale using code: “hairmask20”)!!!  It’s a little, unofficial sale that I didn’t see coming.

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*How to shoot HDR Composite imagery with people

by in HDR 101, Lighting tutorials, Photography tutorials, Postprocessing techniques, Software tutorials / reviews and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

indbeautyhdr

Sure, we’ve all seen the images that have been run through an HDR-like tonemapping, contrast increasing filter, making the grungy, saturated and contrasty images we’ve all come to accept as HDR, or at least, HDR-like shots.  While the “HDR” look can bring about photographic debates bordering on political or religious polarity, there is a way to actually capture and process the actual dynamic range of a scene, not just try and make it look like a processed, HDR image.  If you’re not a fan of HDR, by all means, feel free to ignore this post, but to and for me HDR can be a very useful tool, and one that, in this particular situation can help stretch a limited budget by being able to get a good range of exposure for a dynamically diverse scene without tons of lighting.  Now, the trick here when wanting to do this with human subjects is that you’re needing to take multiple frames at differing exposure values, which means, in short, a person or people would need to stay statue still to make it work, right?  Not so.  C’mon in and I’ll show you how to get around this unfortunate challenge…

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