Add yourself to your Contacts list in Outlook 2007 so you can create a Business Card to send as an attachment to all your outgoing emails.
Once you have added yourself as a contact, choose Tools > Options > Mail Format > Signatures and chose the signature to attach the card to or create a new one.
Click New if creating a new card, and from the Business Card dropdown list, choose your Contact entry to attach it as a business card to each outgoing message.
Labels: attach, business card, Outlook 2007, signature
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Use your camera’s macro setting to shoot flowers and other objects up close.
When you are shooting within a few inches (or centimetres) of your subject your digital camera will make a poor job of focusing on the subject unless you use its macro setting.
Macro is indicated by a small flower icon on a dial on your camera or configurable within its menu system.
The macro setting ensures the camera will focus on an object which is only a few inches or centimetres from the camera. Use this setting when shooting a close up of a flower or an insect in the outdoors or when capturing detail indoors like objects on your desk.
If you’re using a digital SLR you won’t generally find a macro setting on your camera and the lens that it came with probably won’t focus well enough to get good close up shots.
Instead, consider investing in a telephoto zoom lens with a macro setting so you not only get a good telephoto lens but it doubles as a macro lens too.
One benefit of this setup is that you can stand back from your subject and still get in very close to the subject so you don’t scare small insects.
Labels: better photos tips, focus, Macro
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While Photoshop includes some filters you can use to apply a painted effect on your photos, you can also paint them yourself very easily. This way you can achieve a custom look as you paint.
The process involves using the little known Art History brush in Photoshop to do the work, here’s how:
Open your image in Photoshop. You don’t need an image that is in sharp focus (which makes this process a good one for dealing with a slightly soft image), but it should be well exposed and have a good range of tones. If necessary, apply a Curves, Levels or Exposure adjustment to the image. Flatten the image.
If you resize or crop the image, you must save it and reopen it – the Art History Brush won’t work if you don’t. Ditto, if you’re working in 16-bit mode you’ll get a program error if you try to use the History Brush so use Image > Mode and select 8-bit then save and reopen the file.
Duplicate the background layer of the image 4 times. Name your layers (from the bottom up): underpainting, detail, fine detail and color highlights. Hide the three top layers and select the underpainting layer.
Select the underpainting layer’s contents by Control + clicking on the layer thumbnail (Command + Click on the Mac) and press the Delete key to remove everything from this layer. Deselect the selection by choosing Select > Deselect.
Click the Art History Brush (it shares a palette position with the History Brush Tool), select a brush shape to use and make it a fairly large size. Choose a Style such as Tight Short and an area value of around 50px and paint all over this layer. All you want right now is some general color but no detail at this stage.
Click the detail layer and turn its visibility on. Select its contents and delete them. Make your brush smaller in size and now paint on this layer to bring back some of the image detail. Experiment with different settings in the Art History Brush toolbar such as Dab, Curl and Tight. If you get an error stating that the brush won’t work because the history state doesn’t contain this layer, view the History palette using View > History and click in the left column opposite one of the Duplicate layer states to make it the one to paint from.
Once you have some detail in the painting, click the fine detail layer, delete its contents and paint on this layer using a very small brush. This time focus on the elements you want to see in some detail such as the horse.
Select the color highlights layer, make it visible, delete its contents and using a slightly smaller brush, this time just dab a few small scattered brush strokes on the image, you want a smattering of detail but not much at all. With the layer selected, choose Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and drag the Hue slider a little to the left or tight and adjust the Saturation to a little higher value. This changes some of the color and detail in the image to give it a more painterly look.
When you have a result you like, select the top layer of the image and press Ctrl + Al + Shift + E (Command + Option + Shift + E on the Mac) to create a new layer with a flattened version of the image on it. Choose Filter > Texture > Texturizer and apply a Canvas texture to the image.
You can back off the effect by decreasing the Opacity of the top layer to reveal some of the detail from the layers below.
Next time you’re looking to create a painting from an image, consider by passing the filter menu and use the Art History brush to make your own custom painting.
Labels: Art History brush, custom paint, painted effect
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Confession time. I had a picture in a table cell in Word and try as I might I couldn’t get the little black angled cursor to appear so I could select the cell’s contents. Frustrating – yep, I’d say so.
Nope – wrong arrow, the image is so close to the table cell it’s almost impossible to get the cell select arrow to appear.
This is what it should look like.
Then I remembered the new feature in Word 2007 – it’s on the Table Tools >Layout tab (so you have to have a table and click in it to see this option). On the far left is the Select button – new to Word 2007. Click it and you can select what to select. Oh! let’s back up a bit here – it would be a good idea to click in the cell you want to select before you begin – forgot that bit.
Using this you can select a cell then right click and, as I did, choose Copy to copy its contents. Don’t be fooled by the fact that not everything in the cell looks like it is selected – just trust that it is.
There are other options there that include Select Row, Select Column, Select Table – much easier than trying to juggle those little arrows when they just won’t appear.
Labels: cell contents, cell entry, table, table cells, Tables, Word 2007
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I just made a set of fun Photoshop steampunk brushes. They are made from clock parts and they have a photographic quality to them. The collection includes a range of gears and some funky metal bits too. They are sized upwards of 600 pixels and some are as large as 2400 pixels.
They are free brushes for personal use and an inexpensive commercial license is available.
You can download them from projectwoman.com.
Labels: download, free brushes, steampunk
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When taking photographs at night, turn off the flash and take a long exposure to capture the lights.
When shooting a night time concert, sporting event or even the city lights you might think your camera’s flash is a necessity. Unfortunately it’s not only next to useless at a distance of over 2-3 metres but using it will force the camera to use a faster shutter speed than you need so all you’ll get is a severely underexposed image.
Instead, disable the camera’s flash and switch the camera to night mode shooting so it will meter for the surrounding darkness and set a slow shutter speed allowing you to capture the detail in the scene.
A downside of the slow shutter speed is that any camera movement will result in the subject being severely blurred. When shooting at night without a flash, use a tripod or brace the camera so that it does not move.
On the flip side, when you take long exposures at night you can capture light trails from car headlights and taillights as they pass in front of you which can look really great.
Labels: better photos, nighttime, no flash, tips
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One of the cool things about Lightroom is its ability to store develop settings as Presets so you can use them again later to edit other images.
In addition to creating and saving your own presets, you can also download presets from the web and use them in Lightroom.
In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Lightroom preset and in a future post, I’ll show you how to download and install Lightroom presets you find on the web and also explain how you can share your own presets with others.
To get started with presets in Lightroom, select an image in the Develop module which is ready for some creative attention. Just be aware of any settings you have already applied to the image as these will be included in the preset if you don’t specifically exclude them. If you have done a lot of work to get the image to this stage, export a copy and re-import it back into the catalog – there’s an option that does this in one step in the Export dialog. If you now select and work on the edited version, only the upcoming changes will be included in your preset.
Now you’re ready to work creatively on the image. For example, to split tone the image, start by increasing the Contrast in the image and reduce the Brightness a little to compensate. Adjust the Clarity to a high value so you get more sharply defined edges.
In the Split Toning options, for the Shadows click to select a dark blue/teal color and adjust its Saturation to suit. For the Highlights, select a mustard yellow and adjust its saturation to suit.
Adjust the Balance slider to favor the shadows or highlights as desired.
You may want to decrease Saturation and Vibrance or tweak other color settings to get the result you want. Here I added a Vignette too.
To save the settings as a preset, locate the Presets panel on the left of the Develop panel. Click the plus sign to the right of the word Presets to open the dialog.
Give the preset a name that describes what it does, in this case I called mine, ‘teal-blue split tone with vignette’. Disable any options that you don’t want stored with the preset – leaving selected only the options you have configured and want to use on every image.
For example, I set a Split Toning, added a Vignette and adjusted Brightness, Contrast, Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation.
When you’re done, click Create.
You’ll now find your preset in the User Presets collection and you can click it to apply it instantly to any image in future.
In some instances you may need to edit the image after applying the preset to it to fine-tune the effect for that image.
If you find that your Preset isn’t working quite as well as you imagined it would and if, for example, you always seem to make a particular change to the image after using it such as brightening it a little you can save an edited version of the preset without having to create it from scratch.
To do this, apply the preset and make your change. Then right click the preset and choose Update with Current Settings.
Select the settings to save in the preset and click Update. In future when you apply this to your images it will be applied using these new settings.
You’ll also find that a number of Presets ship with Lightroom. These are in the Lightroom Presets list. Click on any of them to apply it to your image. To see how the image might look with a preset applied, make sure that the Navigator is visible so you can preview the effect without actually applying it to the image.
In later posts, I’ll look at downloading, installing, exporting and sharing Lightroom presets.
Labels: balance adjustments, Lightroom presets, split tone
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Sometimes a photo needs its tonal range fixed but some areas of the image may not need the same fix as others. Here’s how to limit the fix to a selected portion of an image using a mask.
Look at this photo and noticed that on the left are the light and highlight areas and on the right are the dark areas. The camera has exposed primarily for the light areas in the image and the darks are very black. I need to fix each side of the image independently of the other. 
Step 1
To fix the image make two copies of the background layer so that you do your work on duplicate layers. To do this, right click the Background layer in the Layers palette and choose Duplicate Layer and then repeat this step once more. Disable the visibility icon on the topmost layer and select the middle layer.
Step 2
To bring detail out of the shadows, choose Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlight and adjust the Shadows but leave the highlights untouched. Typically the default setting will be all you need. Ignore any effect this fix has to the lighter areas of the image. 
Step 3
Now enable the visibility icon on the top layer and select it so you are working with this layer. Choose Image > Adjustment > Levels and adjust the levels to improve the contrast in the lighter areas of the image – ignore the darker areas as they have already been fixed. You can also adjust the saturation using Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation if desired. 
Step 4
The top layer contains the adjustment for the light values and the middle layer contains the adjustment for the dark values. To blend these layers, use a layer mask to selectively adjust the opacity of a layer.
Unlike the layer opacity slider which sets every pixel to the same opacity value, a mask lets you adjust the opacity selectively so one area can be 100% opaque and others can be partially or fully transparent.
To do this, click to select the topmost layer and click the Add Layer Mask button at the foot of the layer palette to add a white layer mask to this layer. When working with masks, “black conceals and white reveals” so the white mask reveals everything on the top layer and the image is unchanged. 
Step 5
Set the foreground colour to black, select a round brush and set its Opacity to approximately 20%. Click in the mask to select it and paint over the dark areas of the image to reduce the layer opacity and to allow detail from the layer below to show through. Using a low opacity brush lets you reduce the opacity gradually.
Continue and paint over the area to make more transparent. It may help to turn the visibility of the top layer on and off to see what detail is available on the layer below that you may want to recover. Make sure to select the layer mask again before painting to reduce the layer opacity.
Labels: selctive fixes, using masks
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The best photos of animals and kids happen when you get down to their level.
When you are photographing children and animals, get down to their level so you shoot from the side and not the top of their head.
This may require you to sit on the floor or to put the animal or the child on a table or bench.
If you are capturing animals that move a lot it can be helpful if you have a handler to hold the animal while you take the photograph.
A good time to photograph the family cat is when they are basking in the sun or asleep.
Labels: animals, better photos, children, get down low, tips
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Here is a new video on painting with the Art History Brush in Photoshop:
A video on how to paint a photo using the Photoshop Art History Brush.
Labels: Art History brush, Painting, Photoshop, video tutorials
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