I’ve been photographing recently on the canals of Scotland. There has been so much potential for creative stuff I have really been glad that I photograph so regularly and I’m so familiar with my lenses and camera that I don’t worry too much about setup and can spend more time on the creative side.
Here I had photographed these industrial buildings already and I knew there were steers in the field but nothing had quite come into position. The secret is to wait, somehow if you wait, chances are that things just move to where you want them. This field had wonderful colourful scrub, green grass, black and white (friesian) steers and buildings belching smoke in the background. I just had to wait till everything lined up and, in time, it did.
So far as apertures are concerned this is a hard shot to get everything all in focus. It is just too much depth and it was early evening so the light was low. I settled for what I generally use when I want a big depth of field which is around 7.1 or 8 and then I focused on the steer. This brought the industry on the horizon into some focus but threw the flowers close to me out of focus. There was no where to move to as I was standing in the only place I could get everything in the picture and that put some flowers directly in front of my camera.
Turns out I love the effect and the colours in the foreground just work for me. The layers in the image from the out of focus flowers through the field and the steer and back to the industry on the horizon just makes this image for me.
Next time you are out, look for layers to capture. Look for something interesting to shoot and then ask yourself how can you position yourself to capture the shot and get some foreground interest too. You might be surprised at what you can find and what creative opportunities you encounter.
Learn how to make your own brushes from your photos in Photoshop and a trick to make sure brushes paint correctly with light paint on a dark background and vice versa!
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Complete transcript of video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create your own photo brushes in Photoshop, and this works in practically any version of the Photoshop. For the brush that we’re going to create today I’m going to use a photograph. And I shot this in Singapore and we’re going to use this god shape as our brush. So the first thing I need to do is to make my selection. And I’m going to use the Quick Selection Tool because that’s going to work reasonably well here. And what I want to select at this stage is either the statue itself or anything that’s not the statue. And it’s actually going to be easier for me to select the not a statute pieces. So I’m going to start with those. And then I’m going to fine-tune it a little bit because I can see that there are areas here where I have captured part of the statute and not the other bits. So I’m going to add back in the statute bits that I’m missing here by just selecting over these at a bigger zoom. And anything that’s been selected that shouldn’t be selected I can remove. So I’m going to work around this shape and just make sure that everything that should be selected is selected. You can see that there are some missing bits here as well. With the Quick Select Tool I can switch between selecting and not selecting by holding down the Alt key so that effectively reverses the tool that lets me work very quickly through this shape to make sure that I’ve got everything I want and nothing that I don’t want. I’ve got some small problems here. But really the Quick Select Tool does a really good job of making your selection for you. I think I’m just going to remove this bit here. Again, it’s taken too much so we’re just going to go back and just fine-tune around the edges to make sure that we’ve got the bits that we want. So let’s call that done. And let’s just zoom out again. So now I have selected the bits that I don’t want, and I don’t have selected the bits that I do want. So I’m going to choose Select and then Inverse and that’s going to give me my shape. So this is the area that I want to convert into a brush. Now a brush is a grayscale shape, but that’s okay because Photoshop is going to take care of that for us. So to convert this into a brush all I need to do right now is to choose Edit and then Define Brush Preset. And here you can see that the brush preset is created for us. Now I’m a little bit worried because it doesn’t look like there’s quite enough contrast in that. So I might just cancel out for a minute. We might build a little bit more contrast into our brush. Perhaps Levels will help us. And yes it certainly will. Let’s just lighten this. And I’m not worried about the background because I don’t intend using that for the brush. What I am interested in is a little bit more contrast in the shape itself. I don’t mind that I’ve got some black blacks but I do definitely want some contrast and a bit more lightness in this brush. So let’s click Ok and now lets recreate out brush, Edit Define Brush Preset. You can see it looks a bit better now. So I’m going to call this Hindu 1. Now the reason why I’m going to call it Hindu 1 is because I’m going to need Hindu 2 in just a minute. Let’s put that to one side and let’s create a new document. This is 3,000 x 3,000 pixels in size, and I’m just going to flood it with black. Now let’s go and get white paint and go and get our brush. So I’m going to click the brush preset here and go down to the very last brush because that’s my brush, and I’m going to just size it up nice and big and just paint with it. And you can see that the problem is that I’ve got a negative brush. Now that wouldn’t be an issue if we were painting on a white background. So let’s just create a white background. And now let’s go and switch colors, and this time I’m painting with a black brush. And you can see that that’s just fine for a white background but as soon as I try to paint light on dark I have some issues. That’s why I left this image open still because if I invert this I can now create a second brush. So let’s just go back to something that’s not a brush here, and what I’m going to do is invert the image. So I’m going to choose Image Adjustments Invert. And that turns it into a negative of itself. And now if I create a brush from it, I’m going to call this Hindu 2, and click Ok, we’re going to get a very different brush. Let’s go back now, add a new layer, fill it with black, again because black is the foreground color, just Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, switch to white as my foreground color, pick up my brush, go and get my new second version brush to size it up nice and big for my image here, and click once. And you can see now I’m getting a positive brush so I have a positive and a negative version of this image that I can use as a brush from now on in Photoshop. There is one thing to be aware of with brushes and that is that you’re going to lose this brush if you reset your Photoshop preferences. So for any brushes once you’ve created them from time to time you should come in here and choose Edit and then Presets and Preset Manager. What you want to do is go to brushes. Although there are presets for everything that you can create in Photoshop go to your Brush. And I’ve got two of them here, actually I’ve got a third one that I created earlier today. So I’m just going to select all three of these brushes and I’m going to save these. And I’m going to call them Helen set. They’re save as ABR files, and I’ll click Save. Now not only are they saved to disk but they’re also now in a format that I could share with others. So there you have photographic brushes in Photoshop. Don’t forget to make a positive and a negative one so that you can paint with any color on any color background in future. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Photoshop video. Look out for more of my video training on this YouTube channel.
I got caught recently photographing in Scotland. While I had packed 2 more lenses than I ususally travel with – usually it is only one – I forewent the tripod – I do have my limits and I was spending 6 nights on a 6 foot wide narrowboat on the canals so to say that space was at a premium is an understatement. So, night one of the trip we are moored at the Falkirk Wheel. This huge monolith lifts boats using a rotating wheel up 80 feet or so from one canal to another. It’s big and beautiful and very kindly the guys at the wheel turned the lights on for me so I could photograph it. So, there I was late at night, the weater was cold but luckily pretty still but I really needed a tripod. There was nothing around to sit the camera on so I braced myself and got off a few shots, not too shabby in the circumstance – the lights were great but I love to get something just a bit different.
So here’s what happened – I had spent the afternoon photographing some kelpie statues – these are creatures with horse like heads and dragon like tails. In this case there were only the heads and they were sitting on a boat in the mooring pond at the foot of the wheel – funky stuff. At night it made a perfect focal point for my shots – but still the problem of no tripod. Now there is a flash curtain setting on most cameras – you typically have a front and a read curtain sync flash. Essentially what it gives you is a combination of both a flash and a long exposure – the front and rear bit is when the flash fires – the beginning or the end of the exposure.
So, I could use the flash to capture the statues and the long exposure to capture the lights. Because the sculptures were so dark they didn’t get caught in the long exposure but they were frozen in the flash. Having shot a few test shots, I thought it needed just a bit more so I combined the flash and long exposure and at the same time I moved the camera.
So, the kelpie (horse) statues are lit and they are sharp, the lights are caught but moving and out of focus – and because the statues are little bits of metal welded together with holes in them, the light show through and over them. All in all I called that a technical challenge well met and an ace final result.
A word of caution. The solution to this problem required me to have played with the flash in the past so I understood the curtain sync process, it also helped that I’d played a bit with moving the camera so I could forsee what that might give me. So, as always it will pay to learn to use your camera features before you really need to put them to use.
Then pure luck put the statues there (they get moved around a bit) and it got my host Nick to call the wheel guys and get the lights turned on and Irene to wake me and tell me the lights were on – an all round community effort which paid off with some shots I love.
Learn how to create a Kaleidoscope in Photoshop. Video includes tips for a shortcut for copying and rotating a layer.
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Transcript for video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create quick and easy kaleidoscopes in Photoshop. Before we begin let’s have a look at the sort of thing that we can create. This is the kaleidoscope I created earlier from the image that we’re actually going to use. And as you can see I’ve layered various copies of the same kaleidoscope on top of it, changed some of the colors to create an even more distinct pattern effect. This was my original kaleidoscope. This is a second version of it on top and this is another version of it in the middle. So let’s get started with our image. This is an image I shot at the Neon Bone Yard in Las Vegas. The first thing I’m going to do is to convert this background layer into a regular layer just by dragging and dropping the lock icon into the trashcan. Then I’m going to move this image. So I’m going to first of all zoom out a little bit so I can see where I’m going. Then I’m going to select the Move Tool and I’m going to start transforming this shape. And what I want to do is to transform it through 60 degrees, some sort of 60 degrees, minus 60 plus 60. And what I’m going to do is drag this shape over the edge of the image here. I can resize it if I want to but I want it to only go over two edges of this image because I want to use the 60 degree angle that we have. So I’m going to save it. That’s good because I’ve got some nice texture in here and I’m just going to click the checkmark. So if we had a really good look at this we would see that there’s some anti- aliasing down here on this edge. So to get rid of it I’m going to click the Magic Wand Tool here. I’m going to click on this side of the image. And you see perhaps even on the video that there’s a little bit of a gap between the selected area and the image itself. So I’m going to choose Select Inverse to inverse the selection so I have only my corner piece selected and then I’m going to bring it in by choosing Select Modify Contract. And I’m going to bring it in one pixel and that should make it just a little bit smaller. And then so that I get just that piece I’m going to choose Image and then Crop. And this is the piece that I’m going to use to create my kaleidoscope from. So we have it on its own layer. But we need a bit more area to work in. So I’m going to select the Crop Tool. And if you didn’t know that you can do so you’re going to find out now that you can actually crop in a negative direction. So you can use the Crop Tool to add space to your image. So I’m just going to add a little bit of extra space around my image so we have a bit of a better area to work with. I’m going to select my layer with my shape and I want to flip it. So I’m going to choose Layer New Layer via Copy. And with this shape I’m going to transform it. So I’m going to choose Edit and then Free Transform. And I want to transform it around this side. So I’m just going to click on this side so it’s anchored here so that when I flip it over it doesn’t move. And I want to flip it over so it’s exactly mirrored which means that it’s negative 100 percent. So I’m just going to make that negative 100 percent and then I have an exact duplicate of this shape. And this is the piece that I’m going to rotate around to create my kaleidoscope so I’m going to merge these two layers together. I can do that by selecting both layers and choose Layer Merge Layers or Merge Visible, either of those would work. So too would Flatten Image or I could just press Ctrl E. But let’s choose the menu option. Now that we have our basic shape I’m ready to rotate it. And I’m going to do this the smart way so I don’t have to do every single one of them. I just want to do it once, Layer New Layer via Copy, Edit Free Transform. I’m going to anchor it at its bottom center point. And I’m going to rotate it around 60 degrees, and I’m going to click the checkmark here. And having done that once I’m now going to get Photoshop to do it automatically for me. And all I need to do to do that is to press these keys, Ctrl Shift Alt T, and that’s Command Option Shift T on the Mac. So I’m going to press all these keys and every time I do it Photoshop duplicates the layer and rotates it. So with four keystrokes I’ve now got the rest of my kaleidoscope. Again I’m going to select all these layers and Ctrl or Command E to merge them into one. And now I’ve got one layer I can make a duplicate of it. And then I can size it as we saw earlier. If I want to size it around its center point I’m going to hold Alt and Shift as I resize it. And now I can also rotate it. So I might rotate it for example 15 degrees. And then I might make another duplicate of this and do something similar to this duplicate layer, again holding down the Shift and Alt so I’m rotating or sizing around the middle point, place my shape in and then rotate it. This time I might choose say let’s go 30 degrees. And then for each of these I could add a hue/saturation adjustment. And that will allow me just to recolor the shape and perhaps get a more interesting effect in doing so. I’ll do that and just click Ok. So there is the basics of creating a kaleidoscope in Photoshop. Now you could use a different measurement than the 60 degrees that I used. You might want to try it with 30 degrees to get a more complex kaleidoscope. But basically once you get your flipped shape and you merge it you can get Photoshop to do all the copying and rotating work for you. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my Photoshop video training on my YouTube channel.
Learn how to create a half drop repeating pattern in Photoshop. Also see how to fill a layer with a pattern and how to scale a pattern in Photoshop.
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Complete transcript from video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to create half-drop repeating patterns in Photoshop. To create a repeating pattern I’m just going to create a new document of a fixed size. So I’m going to make mine 100 x 100 pixels in size, RGB color with a transparent background and I’ll click Ok. I’m going to zoom in here so we can see it a little more clearly on the screen. And I’m going to use a path for mine but you could start with anything you like at all. And I’m just going to click and drag and then click and drag in this direction because I want to make a sort of boomerang shape and click back over the starting point. Now I’m going to select my Direct Selection Tool, click on this point because I want to adjust it and Alt drag to split these two handles from each other, Alt drag again so that I can create this sort of boomerang shape. And I’m thinking that that looks pretty good. So now I’m going to turn this path into a selection by clicking here on the Load Path as Selection. I’m going to display my Layers palette so we can see what’s going on here. I have a color already selected so I’m just going to Alt Backspace Option Delete on the Mac to fill this shape with my color. Now I’m thinking I would like a stroke around this as well so I’m just going to stroke it. I could stroke it from the work path but it’s easier just to stroke this selection. So I’ll choose Edit and then Stroke and then let’s select a darker version of this color for the stroke. And we’ll stroke it in the center. And we’ll stroke it by 2 pixels and just click Ok. So there’s my shape and now I can deselect my selection using Ctrl D or Command D on the Mac. So now I have my shape I’m ready to create my half-drop repeat. To create a half drop repeat I have to break this up into four pieces and put it in the corners of the image. Luckily Photoshop can do that for me. So I’m going to start by making a duplicate of this layer and I do that by dragging and dropping it onto the New Layer icon. So I now have two copies of the image. I’m going to turn off the background copy so I have only the top version visible. And now I’m going to choose a filter that’s going to do all the splitting work for me, Filter Other Offset. And the offset filter will break the shape up for me. All I need to do is to tell it what half the distance is of the vertical and horizontal size of this image. Now I set up my image to be 100 pixels by 100 so half of that is 50 x 50. And all I need to do is type 50 and 50 into these boxes. And you can see that Photoshop has now broken this image up into the required pieces. I set the undefined areas to wrap around and just click Ok. And there is the breakup for my half drop repeat. And all I need to do now is to drop this middle shape back into position. And this is exactly the pattern I need for a half drop repeat. So I’m going to choose Select All and then Edit Define Pattern. And I’m just going to click Ok. I could call it something if I want to. I’m not going to bother at this stage. Let’s hide this. And now let’s create an image with that half drop repeats in it. So I’m just going to get rid of these tools over here and let’s create a brand new image File New. Let’s choose a US paper, let’s do it letter size. But I’m going to do it landscape. No background, we’ll just do a transparent background and click Ok. And here’s our image that we’re now going to fill with our half-drop repeat. And we do that using Edit Fill. And here we have in the Fill dialog the option of choosing a Pattern. And your pattern is always going to be the very last one in the list. It’s the last one because you just created it and click Ok. And here’s our half-drop repeat. Now I’m just going to drop a layer in behind this and we’ll fill it with white so I’ll just make white my foreground color, Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the Mac. And there we have our shape filled with our half drop repeating pattern. Now if that’s not the half drop repeat that you wanted but it’s too small or too large we could use a different way of doing this. I’m going to choose Layer New Fill Layer Pattern. I’m going to create it just as pattern fill layer, just click Ok. And now what we’re doing is we’re filling it with our pattern. But since we decided our pattern was either too small or too large, let’s say it was too small, we can now scale it up to 200 percent by typing 200 percent in here and click Ok. And now we have a pattern that is much larger than the original. So there are different options that you have for using your half-drop repeat pattern once you’ve created it in Photoshop.
Want to quickly switch the colors you’re working with back to the default black and white? All you have to do is hit the D key on the keyboard and the color palette will be reset to the default black foreground and a white background.
(photo by: Jenny Kennedy-Olsen)
(photo by: Leroy Skalstad)