Award winning design right here…

Who would have thunk it? On Tuesday night, I won a gold addy for the playlist cd design i did last summer. It will now move on to district or state or whatever the next round is. I think it will be in april, so keep your fingers crossed.

Good photography makes my job easy.

Sometimes a project is super easy.. like this one. A poster for a speaker coming to HSU to speak about photography.

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.

RR is almost done…again…until next time.

Well… it’s almost ready to go to proofing. That means that I get a break for a few days while they find a ton of changes for me to make. This issue has been much better than past issues. I’ve had a lot more freedom and this issue isn’t as text heavy as the past 2 I’ve worked on. Hopefully this will translate into a similar plan for the next issue.. which should be really great. I’ve heard the plan for the feature section, and it should be a fun one. I leave you with one of the final spreads I worked on.