Blacklight Breakdown poster

Tried out some new techniques for this design. Wanted to create some depth of field and the look of light. I added some neon looking paint blobs after finding out that neon paint will be used in the decor for the party. The brush engine in photoshop cs4 did most of the work for me on this one. Randomizing the circles and stars in both their opacity and location. I did several layers of different sizes for the added depth of field effect.

Photoshop CS3: New Black and white adjustment layer.

Tutorial #2 is finally here. This is the best way I’ve found to convert color photos to black and white in Photoshop. It gives great control and it’s not overly difficult. First off you’ll need a color photo, then you are going to add a black and white adjustment layer by clicking on the half white/half black circle at the bottom of the layers palette. You can also get there by using menus if you like. Click Image–>Adjustments–>Black and White, but this doesn’t give you an adjustment layer and once you convert it to black and white, there’s no going back and tweaking it later… so don’t do it that way! Once you have the Black and White dialogue box open, you’ll notice there are a lot of color sliders that may make this seem daunting… relax, this is where my tip comes in handy. Once you take your cursor outside this dialog box and over your photo, you’ll see you get an eyedropper tool instead of your normal arrow. Try clicking on an area of your photo that you would like to see lightened or darkened and click and that area of the photo. When you click and hold your mouse button you will notice you get a finger cursor with arrows pointing left and right. That’s your cue in Photoshop that you can now change your color values by dragging left or right. Right to make that area darker, left to make it lighter. In these samples I’ve adjusted my son’s face to exaggerate the effect. Try it out on a few different areas… you’ll notice the color values in the dialog box changing. It’s that simple.

Champions postcard…

Here is a postcard that we are sending to about 42,000 lucky people. This one took quite awhile to design. Finding photos, cutting out 2 players, adjusting colors etc. Every athletic team that we have made the NCAA playoffs this year, so we decided to let EVERYONE know about it with this postcard. It was tough trying to decide which photos and which sports to use. I wanted to represent all sports, but not men’s and women’s for each. It would have been nice if we had one compelling sports image that could have represented athletics, but we have students taking these shots.. so we work with what we have.

Tutorial: Extending the dynamic range.

Here is my first attempt at an actual tutorial for photographers and photoshop users.If you don’t have the latest version of Photoshop, you can still make some pretty nice enhancements to your photos and extend the dynamic range to levels that cameras today cannot capture. First off, you are going to take two exposures of a single identical composition (using a tripod, of course). One slightly overexposed, and one slightly underexposed (also called Bracketing). I am going to take you through some steps to combine these multiple exposures so that you can make an image that combines the best shadows from your overexposed picture with the great highlights of your underexposed picture.

First off, take your two exposures of a single identical composition (using a tripod, of course). Then, when you get both images open in Photoshop, you are going to drag your darker image into the lighter one (holding down the shift key will drop your darker image directly into the center of your lighter image).

Now you should have both images in a single document, and we are going to use blending options and blending modes to combine those perfectly exposed shadows and highlights from both images. Once your images are aligned as best you can select Layer>Layer Styles>Blending Options. We want to keep the highlights from the top image, and combine them with the shadows from the underlying image, so we are going to move the sliders in the bottom of the Blending Options dialogue box. Move the upper-left Blend If slider to the right until you start to see sufficient shadow detail appearing, then hold Option/Alt and drag the right edge of that same slider toward the right until you create a smooth transition between your shadows and midtones. You should see your slider split into two pieces. Then, before leaving this dialogue box, select Darken from the Blend Mode drop down menu, and this should help you improve the image in any areas where there may be some alignment issues from things such as wind. As this is my first attempt at a tutorial, please feel free to ask questions, and comments are always appreciated.