Here is the SOOC version (stands for “straight out of camera” with no adjustments):

The healing brush in Photoshop is often turned to when skin correction is needed. However, I sort of hate the healing brush. It certainly has its uses, but many times the blemish or under-eye circles are near dark areas of the photo (like hair) and it turns the skin grey.

The way around that is my preferred method of spot correcting skin, and that’s to use the clone tool on a separate layer, and then knock back the opacity.

Here are the step by step instructions:

With your photo open, go to LAYERS>DUPLICATE LAYER.

With that top layer selected, use the cloning tool at 50% softness, sample an area directly below the under eye circles (by holding down the control key and clicking on the sample area), and then paint over the darkness.

Then adjust the opacity on that top layer to make it all blend together. This method is great because it leaves a little of the lines/darkness so that your subject will recognize themselves, but just see a newer, better rested self.

If you already own photoshop, the editing portion is nothing to intrigue you, but it does offer 2 gigs of free storage and a flash slideshow, so you can share photos with family and friends online without resizing for email. That part is neat (though I would never be wooed away from my precious smugmug).

At first glance, it seems to me like a beefed up version of flickr…and hopefully Adobe will do a better job protecting people from the weirdos than flickr has.

You can’t edit RAW files in it, but if you don’t have Photoshop or Elements or Lightroom, it would be very useful to have a free online area to edit your photos (adjust white balance or exposure, crop, resize, do some basic cloning/healing, add fill light, easy color pop and auto correct, etc)

There are a ton of people checking it out right now, so it’s running a little slowly (or at least I hope that’s the reason), but I wanted to be sure to sign in today and snap up a good username before the good ones were gone and I ended up having to add three silent “g”s to my name.  (I feel a burning need to register for every new networking site even if I don’t have immediate plans to use it, because should I ever want to jump on the bandwagon, I want a good username.)

Scott Kelby has some training videos for Photoshop Express that will guide you through the process if you need a little assistance learning the ropes.

The thing about photoshop, is that there are as many ways to get an end result as there are people. Of course, all of those ways are not created equal, and my very first way was absolutely awful.

Want to waste time and lose a little bit of your photo when making a border? Do what I did and use the line tool to make four lines and then put them around the edge of your photo.

It took me a few days to figure out a better way: the “canvas size” way.

1. Open a photo. In this case, we’re going to open one of my faves from my recent session with baby Eli:

2. Go to IMAGE>CANVAS SIZE.

3. In the pop-up menu, select your border color (you get to choose from white, black, grey, your foreground color (in this case, brown) or your background color (in this case, orange–both the foreground and background colors are seen in your tools window) .

4. Check the “relative” box.

5. Enter the size of your border.

And there you have it. Simple and fast! If you want to create a double border (like the white border with thin gray border I used), you just do this process twice.

Oh, your pictures want to take over your life. It starts off so simply. You buy a digital camera, you fire off some shots, you download them to your computer. You look at them, you may delete the obviously horribly bad ones, but you save the rest. You can’t possibly delete them–they are photos.

And then it gets worse. You discover “burst” mode and have a baby–all at the same time. Suddenly you’re taking 400 pictures a day and you certainly can’t delete any now because they are of your precious baby, and that is the only photo you have of that precious baby from April 3rd at 3:30pm and 35.28 seconds (you also have one from April 3rd at 3:30pm and 35.29 seconds as well as 35.27 seconds).

And you do this day after day and week after week and month after month…and then you discover the joys of shooting RAW files instead of jpegs. And instead of immediately converting them into jpegs and tossing the RAW files, you can’t possibly part with the RAW files. What if you need to make adjustments later on?

And this goes on for a year or two or three until your home server is bursting at the seams and you are forced to constantly delete a little of this and a little of that just to squeeze one more thing on to it.

And yes, you could certainly buy a bigger home server, but sanity needs to play a part here, too. How many photos does one really need of their own life? I have maybe 350 pictures of my entire childhood. Will has 350 pictures in a folder labeled 14 March 2006. And this folder isn’t alone. It’s not even sort of unique.

How does one manage their digital photos without resorting to purchasing a storage unit for their 1000s of external drives? How does one protect their photos from computer malfunction? And how does one organize their photos so that they can be found amongst the hundreds of thousands?

I have done very well with two of these questions, and failed miserably with one. I’m working on the one this week, and thought it might be helpful to share my workflow with others lest you make the same mistake (or make an even worse mistake and don’t back up your pictures…).

In my experience, there are three important aspects to storing your family’s digital photo snapshots:

1) Editing

2) Organization

3) Back-up
1. Editing
In the past, I wasn’t so good about the editing. I kept almost everything. And a lot of that almost everything is totally unnecessary. I don’t need 35 pictures of Will laying on a blanket with ever-so-slightly different expressions. One, two, or MAYBE three is enough. In the last couple of months, I have been good about deleting the unnecessary pictures the day I upload them. But that still leaves two years of Will photo-mania. So, I have assigned myself a project–every day I’m going through one month of pictures and deleting the ones that really aren’t necessary.

When I’m done, I’ll have a photo library that is actually enjoyable to browse through.

2. Organization

I’m not going to call anyone out, but I have seen some nasty photo organization going on out there in the world. Dumping all of your pictures into the “My Pictures” folder in Windows is a recipe for disaster. Here is the system that I’ve been using since 2002, divided into “b.w.” (before will) and “a.w.” (after Will–when our picture taking went from occasional to hourly).

Before Will:

1. In “My Pictures,” every year gets a folder. Then every event/picture taking reason got a folder within the year. Like 2003>Trip to Disney World or 2005>Ferrets Make Mess in Kitchen. I had 20-40 folders within each year, and it worked well and was easy to browse and easy to manage.

After Will:

2. Suddenly we were taking pictures every day, and 365 folders were not going to be easy to browse, or to manage. So I came up with a new system: every year still had a folder, but within that folder there was a month, and then a day. So it now looked like 2007>January>14 Jan Will and Nic in snow.

3. When I first started Real Photography, my home snapshots dropped dramatically, so I was able to go to just a year>month folder system this past summer, since June only had 30 pictures in it (for example).

Organizing after RAW:

If you shoot in RAW, your pictures are a lot bigger. Odds are good that you won’t ever go back and want to readjust your RAW adjustments, so to save storage space and my sanity, when I download my personal snapshots, I immediately make my adjustments, convert them to jpeg, and delete the RAW file. (This also means that my pictures are ready to be shared online and I can view them in windows photo gallery as opposed to only in bridge.)

Taking Organizing to the Next Level…

By using Bridge or Lightroom, you have lots of options for adding additional organization to your photos. But this post is getting a little long, so we’ll save those tips for later this week.

3. Back-up

You know how in the movies people always lose important files and then the supporting character says “well, didn’t you back it up?” Backing up is like flossing. Everyone knows they should do it, but only the professionals and anal-retentive actually do.

Here’s the deal: if you don’t back-up because it’s a pain in the butt, I hear ya. So you have to build a system that makes it automatic.

For our family photos, we have a simple two back-up system. When I download the files initially, they go to our home server, which has an additional hard drive set up to mirror the first. Without having to click anything or adjust anything, every photo is saved to two hard drives. If one dies, the other will be there.

And in case that doesn’t work out, every month I burn a cd with the past month’s photos. Just once a month. And since the pictures are organized by month, it is super easy to just drag and drop that month folder into Roxio data dvd burner. Voila!

(For our personal snapshots, I don’t back-up as much as we do for our wedding and portrait photographs. If you want to go for the gusto and treat your family pictures like treasures, you need to consider what happens in the event that your house is destroyed and invest in a firesafe box rated for electronic media or look into off-site/online storage, as well as burn two DVDs with the pictures immediately every time you download.)

Photoshop Disastors Blog

My favorite is the one where the girl has three hands.

Photoshop has to be one of the most common image editing software programs around. Odds are it’s on your computer–even if you didn’t purchase it, you probably downloaded an illegal copy of Photoshop 7. (If you are receiving money for your photos, I beg of you to purchase a legal copy of Photoshop. It’s ridiculous to ask people to pay money for something you created with stolen goods.)

Even with all of those copies of Photoshop floating around the world, there are still many people that have no idea what it does or how to use it. So Photoshop Fridays are here to help. Sometimes it will be basic tips, sometimes things for a more advanced user. If you have specific Photoshop questions, just leave us a comment and I’ll either answer it, or find someone who can.

Lesson Number 1: Photoshop is not a magic wand.

The key to photoshop for the beginning user is subtlety. It is NOT the sort of thing that you should dive into thinking that you can make magic with. One of the most common beginner photoshop errors? Adding a person to the scene.

I give you exhibit a (and why I felt no guilt about showing my “Bad Picture” of Nic on Tuesday’s Photography Tips):

(Just as a disclaimer, I was not drinking before this picture was taken. But I can’t decide whether that helps or hinders my case.)

This picture, as you can immediately tell, is two pictures. One, of a snowy background:

And the other, of me trying on a hat at Disneyland:

To amuse himself one night while we were dating many years ago, Nic decided to send me a picture to show me what it would be like if I was there in snowy Virginia with him. I remember that he could barely tell me to go check my email he was laughing so hard at his own picture joke.

To create a composite picture is easy enough. You open one photo (in this case, the snowy background). You open a new photo (in this case, a ridiculous picture of me at 18). You drag and drop your first photo onto your second photo. Go to your LAYERS menu, and under the opacity box (which right now will show 100%), lower it to around 50%–now you’d be able to see the picture of me under the snowy picture. Then grab your eraser tool and start erasing that top layer (in this case the snow scene) to reveal me beneath it:

When you’re done erasing, you pop the opacity of that first layer back up to 100%, flatten the image and VOILA. You have something. And the word is SOMETHING.

The thing about most photo composites is that even if you’re very careful with your erasing, the picture still won’t look right unless you know what you’re doing. If you’re taking two pictures from two different scenes, dates, etc, the lighting and white balance will be different. In this case, we have a picture with direct flash, and an orangey no-flash, streetlamp lit picture.

To fix that, you either need to pull pictures from exactly the same day, angle, and lighting, or spend a lot of time trying to make the two pictures look like they were from the same moment. My advice is to leave it alone.

Here is a case where photo composites work (in this case, the infamous “head swap”):

(this is the part with actual advice, as opposed to a “please don’t do anything ugly like this” plea) For large groups, head swaps for photographers are probably inevitable. With dogs or little kids I *plan* on doing headswaps. I put myself in a single position and fire on burst mode. I get a ton of exactly the same shot with slightly different expressions on everyone’s face. That way if a person blinks or dog looks away, I can layer the photos, erase just that one area, and have it look seamless, because the two pictures were identical in angle and lighting.

Bottom line: Unless you set out to do it from the get-go, or really know what you’re doing and plan to adjust shadows and white balance and lighting effects and scale/angle, leave separate pictures as separate pictures. Otherwise they’ll look like a drunk cowgirl in a snowstorm.