I would like you to open Photoshop and to follow the tutorial and you will see it will take only a minute to complete it. Why? You’re smart, that’s why.

Once you have opened a photograph that would like work on, let’s begin.

Refine Edge is a tool that is very useful for photographers as well as for home users. What does it do? Refine Edge helps you replace tricky backgrounds and fine details (soft edges and hair) from a photo with ease.

Enough talking, I want to show you how to get it done.

1. Begin! Select the subject from your photograph using Quick Selection Tool (W). Use the Add tor Selection and Subtract from Selection buttons to make sure you select your subject nicely. When you get to hair and soft areas, it’s better to select less.

Should look something like in the image above.

2. Open the Refine Edge dialog. First stop: View Mode; most of the times I’ll use the black background, depends on photo. Second, Edge Detection. Here you need a small radius number, not too high and you’ll see why. Third, Adjust Edge. How about experimenting what works for you? Never forget of the smooth setting, very useful. Fourth and last, is how we save the photo we worked on (Output to), and you’ll have a list to choose from. Above that there’s a box unticked saying “Decontaminate colors” which you should keep ticked at all times, and of course the amount at 100%. It’s very useful when there’s color “spill” from background to your subject.

Remember settings is a good one to have ticked too. That’s all the ticking work that is needed. I always choose to save the photo as a new document with a layer mask.

3. The most interesting things about these settings are the tricks you can do, it’s Photoshop after all. On the left of the settings box you can see three objects: a magnifier(zooming), a hand(moving if you zoom in a bit), and a brush. Click right on the brush and you have a list there.

Using this tool you draw over the “tricky” edges. Keep the brush small enough to  not select too much, just the area containing fine detail. Photoshop will treat that as “transition” area between inside and outside selection and will do its best to figure out what to keep.

Final Result

Mastering the Refine Edge takes time, but then again, practice makes perfect, isn’t it ?

For this tutorial, I decided to recreate the unofficial image for Microsoft Courier. Just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, in the early 2010 some concept images and videos of a very slick, dual-screen, foldable tablet were leaked on the internet. Whether that leak was intentional or not is another story. Everyone was pretty excited by the idea, but the concept was canned by Microsoft a few months later.

The 3D model

If you’re a photographer or Photoshop artist only, this part will be the hardest. 3D modeling tools are very complex and difficult to master. Fortunately there are many free or inexpensive 3D models and you can start learning any free modeling package.

3D modeling is beyond the scope of this tutorial. Suffice to say that I built the model as a spline cage, turning them into NURBS patches. Then I exported the model in 3ds format.

Building the prop

Next, I built the prop based on the dimensions of the virtual device. Fortunately this was pretty easy as the device dimensions are exactly those of two DVD covers. I sacrificed two covers by joining and gluing them together and then wrapping them in aluminum foil.

As you can see, it was a rush job.  I was only interested in getting the size right and I used foil to catch some reflections.

The photo

With the prop built, I proceeded with the photo.  I put a neutral background and used an umbrella with wireless flash to get an even lighting on the hands.

It’s definitely not pretty to look at. Still, considering that it was about to be replaced completely, it doesn’t matter how it looks. Do notice however that the aluminum foil is picking up some reflections form the hands.

Photoshop

Now here it’s where the fun begins.

Importing the model

From the 3D menu I chose New Layer from 3D File…

Photoshop CS5 Extended does a pretty good job at importing 3D models and their materials. It supports 3ds and obj formats, which are among the most popular. As a tip, I discovered that grouped objects are imported better by Photoshop; otherwise the relative positioning may be off.

Alignment

I placed the 3D layer over the photo and adjusted its opacity to see through it. Then by using the camera rotate tools (rotate, pan, walk and zoom) I aligned it with the hands.  I made sure the virtual camera lens matches the real one’s focal length (taking the multiplier into account). On the whole, the process is not very precise, but it shouldn’t take more than five minutes to have it aligned properly.

Setting the materials

Then I checked the materials. Photoshop has a small collection of materials, so I applied a silver material with 50% reflectivity on the body (materials appear hierarchically as a sub-object of a mesh). On the panels I selected the material and I clicked the button next to the Diffuse color and selected Load Texture.

Isolating the hands and thumbs

Next, in the original photo, I double-clicked on the lock in the Layers panel of the Background to make it a layer. I deleted most of the image, keeping just the hands area.

Using the Quick Mask tool, I selected the background areas around the hands (it really helps to have a neutral background) and I removed it.

By pressing Ctrl+J I duplicated the layer and with the new layer I proceeded with another selection, removing everything except for the thumbs.

At this stage, this is how the image was looking:

Note that the tablet is drawn using the Interactive Renderer.

Retouching the 3D model

Next, to improve performance, I duplicated the layer and rendered it with the Ray Traced Final quality. After that, I rasterized the duplicated layer with Layer –> Rasterize –> 3D. Then I made some tweaks, including using the Blur tool to smooth the edges a little. As a side note, I could have done this in the 3D model by using a Smooth or Fillet Tool, but I wanted to illustrate that such edits are possible in Photoshop, especially if you have only low-poly models (such as those from Google Sketch-Up).

Shadows and reflections

With the model looking all nice and shiny, it was time for the final shadows and reflections.

From the original photo, I selected the bottom area that was featuring reflections of the hands. I applied a high-radius smooth feather and copied it to a new layer, where I used Gaussian Blur.

Lastly, I selected the thumbs and created some nice soft drop shadows for them (you can see there are some soft shadows in the original photo as well). The shadows had to be visible on the device body only and especially not on the screen, so I right-clicked on the layer effects and chose Create Layer. This “detached” the shadow in its own layer, allowing me to erase the unneeded areas.

Screen glow

If you ever tried to photograph a device with an LCD, you know it’s not easy balancing the ambient light with the image displayed on the LCD. Glare and white balance differences further complicate the matter, which is why in most cases the image is added in later in Photoshop (or in the case of video, using complex motion tracking software such as Imagineer Mocha).

To add just a touch of realism, I wanted the screen to glow a bit. For this, I made a selection of the two screens.

From the Channels panel I clicked on the Save Selection to Channel button, as I was going to need it again later. I then copied the screens to a new layer and applied a large Gaussian Blur.

I then reloaded the selection with Load Selection from Channel and deleted the inside of the blurred layer.

To better see how the glow looks, here it is on black:

Finally, I set its blending mode to Linear Dodge (Add).

The Result

So there you have it. Using the 3D tools in Photoshop, you can integrate 3D content in a composition with ease, as long as you’re planning ahead and build some props. Making sure the prop material matches the real one helps improve the realism.

All you need for that is your camera, the person you want to be in the picture and a wand (or even just a stick). A white or at least neutral background would be great. As you’ll see, it doesn’t have to be perfect, I intentionally used something very simple rather than a professional setup. Just try to use an external light source – an off-camera flash or even a halogen lamp will do. After you did that, transfer the picture to your computer and also download the cool stuff I’ve attached to this tutorial: the Harry Potter font, the background that I used and a couple of useful brushes.

So open your Photoshop and let’s get started. Select the Quick Selection Tool (W) and start selecting the area around the person in the photo.

After you’re done, you can use the Refine Edge dialog to add some feathering. If you have the new Photoshop CS5, the new Refine Edge allows you to select fine details such as hair, much easier, by simply painting over the tricky edges using the Refine Radius Tool. Just make sure your selection is conservative (includes only “inside”) areas and then paint over the transition. You can also use the Decontaminate Colors option.

Next, copy the selection with Control/Command-C, open the background image in a new window and paste the selection as a new layer with Control/Command-V.

With the new layer selected, click in the menu  Image – Adjustments – Levels (or press Ctrl + L) to  adjust the levels of the photo and make sure you have enough contrast by moving the white point and black point to the edges of the histogram; use the gray midpoint to make the midtones lighter or darker.

Now where still in the adjust area so go to Image – Adjustments – Variations and play with them until you find something you like.

Select Pen Tool (P) and go round the “wand” and the adjust its color.

Create a new layer, this will be for the wand charming glow. First of all select the brush you want by clicking B and then right click to select a small soft brush foreground color white. After that you select the Pen Tool (P) and draw the path of the charm, right click and select Stroke Path and select Brush from the options.

Right now it’s just a line. From the Brushes panel, load the brushes I’ve prepared and “stamp” them randomly hear and there. Then, double-click on the layer with the charm and play with the Layer Styles Options (Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, Outer Glow) like in the images below:

You can use the same technique to add a layer of “mist” in the hallway.

Now we are going to write the text Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by using the Text button (T) - of course you can replace “Harry Potter” with the person’s name if you want to.

Make sure you download and install the font. Pick the “Harry P” text style; adjust the size and the start writing with the foreground set on white. After you arranged the text as you wanted make sure to right click on every text layer you created and chose Rasterize Type.

After you have done that by holding the Ctrl button down chose all the text layers and right click to choose Merge Layers. Double click on the layer with the text to adjust the Layer Style like in the images below:

I hope you enjoyed this small tutorial about how to quickly edit yourself or your friends as a Harry Potter character.

Here are the resources you’ll need:

I must start by stating that if you’re really serious about digital painting, you should consider Corel Painter 11, which is a dedicated natural-media painting program that allows you to use anything from a HB pencil to chalk, charcoal and watercolors and also simulates the canvas properties in addition to the brushes. Nevertheless, Photoshop’s new offering is a solid one and more than enough for many artists.

For best results, a Wacom tablet like the new Intuos 4 is also recommended, although not required. In addition to pressure sensitivity, the new Wacom also senses the angle of the stylus, allowing for even more realistic results. Alternatively there are beginner’s tablets at jr.com for heavily discounted prices, if you’re just looking to pick up digital painting as a hobby.

Theory

There are two new features used for painting in Photoshop CS5. The first one is the new Brush Tip options.

With the new brushes, you can control the number of bristles, length, thickness and stiffness and not only can you see the result in the brush panel, you also get an overlay window that shows you the 3D virtual brush and its bristles.

I am not really a big fan of the brush preview window but thankfully you can turn it off if you find it distracting.

The second ingredient in the digital paint toolbox is the Mixer Brush. The Mixer Brush is like a combination of the normal brush and the smudge tool. As you paint, it smudges and mixes the color, as if you were using wet paints.

The way the brush color is mixed with the canvas is controlled by three parameters – the wetness of the paint, the load of the brush and the mix amount between the paint color and the canvas color.

To illustrate these parameters, I brushed quickly over an image with different settings:

So, a heavy load will carry more paint over a stroke than a light load; wetness smudges and mixes the canvas color with the paint color; a high mix rate will use more of the canvas color than the paint color.

Practice

The real magic with the Mixing Brush is that you can paint using the colors from a picture, effectively helping to you turn a photo into a painting with little effort.

To demonstrate this, I will start with a nice photo I took 10 years ago on film.

Create a new transparent layer. Select the Mixing Bush and from the top bar choose the preset Very Wet, Heavy Mix; choose the brush that you want from the Brushes panel and make it a big size.

To paint on the new layer using the colors from the background, with the Mixing Brush tool selected, make sure that the option Sample All Layers at the top is selected. Deselect the icon (Load the brush after each stroke) then Alt-click on the image to load the brush and start painting on the new layer.

To paint effectively, you need to think in terms of layers, from background to foreground and from broad to detail. Therefore we’ll start painting the background, using broad strokes with a large brush tip, ignoring the shack/cabin completely. Your strokes should more or less follow the contours of the terrain and clouds.

Hide the background layer temporarily to see the effect so far:

As you can see, I smudged the colors over the shack as if it did not exist. Also, notice how my strokes follow the hills and the shapes of the clouds. Keep working until you fill the layer and are happy with the result.

Next, we need to paint the cabin. It’s better to paint it on its own layer so that if you decide to change anything, it doesn’t mess with the background.

To do that, you need to hide the landscape layer, create a new one and paint on it. This time you’ll ignore the landscape and do just the cabin. You also need to make the brush tip smaller. Make sure the background photo is visible so it can pick the colors from it.

If you look at the roof, you’ll see that I erased from it some parts I did not like – this is why it’s a good practice to work on separate layer.

Now that we have the broad strokes, it’s time to bring in the details. Repeat the process – hide the shack layer, make sure the background photo is visible, make the brush tip even smaller, create a new layer and start painting on it. This time you no longer need to fill all the stuff, just short, fine strokes in the areas you want detail.

If you show all layers, this is what we get:

Not bad. We still want to add some more details like shadows. Create a new layer and set its mode to Multiply and opacity to around 60%. Choose a Dry Mixing Brush – now we don’t need to mix with the background – and black for color. Paint the shaded areas.

At this point you can leave it as it is, or you can add a final touch. One of the nice things about oil paint is that it has thinkness. To give this kind of tridimensional effect, you need to create a merged copy of the layers. The easy way is to duplicate all layers and then merge the copy (quickest route: select the layers and press Shift+CTRL+ALT+E or Shift+CMD+OPT+E on Mac). Now you should have a new merged layer in addition to the original ones.

An even better method would be to select the layers, choose Layer –> Smart Objects –> Convert to Smart Object and then duplicate this smart object via Layer –> Duplicate Layer or CTRL+J (CMD+J on Mac). This method is better because it leaves the contents of the smart object editable as well as the Emboss effect.

Whichever method you chose, with this new layer selected, choose Filters –> Stylize –> Emboss and in the dialog enter some values like below:

Make sure Height is relatively small – this depends on how large your canvas is, and make sure you crank the Amount all the way to the max. You can always tone the effect down later with opacity. With this emboss layer, set the mode to Overlay.

Here’s the end result, including all the layers for reference:

And there you have it!

For digital painting, a pressure-sensitive tablet is recommended, you may want to get one like this:

Setting it up

1. Open Edit –> Preferences –> Guides, Grid and Slices
2. Edit Gridline every… 100 percent
3. Subdivisions… 3
4. Click OK

That’s it!

Now to show or hide the grid, just press CTRL+’ or select View –> Show –> Grid

Image with visible grid

What is this Rule of Thirds anyway?

Just in case you never heard of this “rule”, let me give you some points:

Beginners in photography tend to frame everything dead in the center. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There are many rules that can be used to achieve a more pleasing composition and this is one of them.

The Rule of Thirds states that you can achieve better composition balance if you place the interesting features of your photos along horizontal and/or vertical lines that divide your picture in thirds, or at the intersection points.

To illustrate my point, have a look at the pictures below:

Horizon and tower aligned to the lines

Eye at the intersection

As with any photography “rule”, you shouldn’t get obsessed with it. Not everything has to be framed according to it. Understand it, learn it, try it – then break it!

Below you can see the ‘before’ and ‘after’:

Day to night conversion: before and after

The original, straight from the camera image is mind-numbingly dull; it’s the very definition of dullness. It was shot in a overcast February afternoon. As boring as it is, it was perfect for my purposes. I wanted to convey a sense of ‘out of place’, of a person that doesn’t really belong there, forcing the viewer to create a story – who is this young and attractive woman and what is she doing in this miserable street?

The overcast day had the advantage of decreased contrast and a complete lack of shadows, allowing me a wide range of editing.

Creating the light/dark versions

First thing, I created two Virtual Copies in Lightroom:

Original, with default contrast. Slightly overexposed too.

The “lit” version, Contrast was set to 100, also Clarity was was to max, increased vibrance. White Balance was set to Cloudy

The “unlit” version. The image was underexposed by 2 stops. White Balance was set to Tungsten.

Same image with different WB settings

As you can see above, the altered versions are already better — especially the “night” one, dark and moody. However, the street lamp gave me the opportunity to go the extra mile in creating something realistic.

Mixing light and dark

Having exported the two versions as 16bit TIFF (for maximum quality), I opened both of them in Photoshop. I then copied the “dark” one and pasted as a layer over the “lit” version.

Creating a new layer mask

It was pretty clear already that quite a lot of trial-and-error was to be expected, so instead of simply using the Eraser to remove parts of the “dark” layer, I decided to use a mask instead.

I selected the Dark layer and from the Masks panel, I clicked on the Pixel Mask button to create a new mask.

A Pixel Mask works just like an alpha channel for the layer – it’s a grayscale bitmap where white is opaque and black is completely transparent. What’s cool about it is that you can alter the opacity of the layer by painting on the mask.

The effect of the layer mask in mixing the lit/unlit areas

You can see on the left how the mask affects the mix between lit and unlit areas.

I clicked on the mask in the Layers panel to select it and then I simply used a semi-transparent, highly feathered black brush to create transparent areas.

There are three main lit areas: the light on the wall, faing out, the light on the pavement the light spill on the roof. You can notice that I preferred to paint everything instead of using gradients, to avoid the artificial “perfect” look.

Adjusting the exposure

The light was still too even in the lit area; close the the light source I needed something much more powerful (remember that light falls off exponentially). To improve the realism, I added an Adjustment Layer just above the Lit layer.

The Exposure Adjustment Layer

The Adjustment Layer was set to Exposure (Layer –> New Adjustment Layer –> Exposure). I added a simple radial gradient as a mask for this layer the same way as previously and then I tweaked it to get a slightly overexposed look.

Adding the glow

By now I had the light on the wall and pavement pretty much in place; it was time to turn to the light bulb. For this, I simply used the Lasso tool to select the visible area of the bulb and then copied and pasted it as new layer. I then used the Curves to make the bulb much brighter. Finally, from Layer –> Layer Style –> Outer Glow I created a nice amber glow around the bulb.

Setting the glow on the light bulb

Below you can see the exact settings for the glow:

Light bulb glow settings

I still wanted to add some nice touches: the glow should not be that strong in the upper area. Can you guess what I used? Yep, another Layer Mask.

Please note: By default, layer masks do not affect the layer effects. To make a layer mask hide the effect, open the Layer Style window and go to Blending Options section. From there, check the “Layer mask hides effects” option.

In the layer mask, I painted in black the areas I wanted the glow to be weak. Below you can see the result:

Glowing behind the edges

As you can see, I did not eliminate the glow completely, but created a glow-behind-the-edges effect that is seen in high-contrast situations.

Lens flare

A simple lens flare

Most designers, upon hearing the words “lens flare” run away screaming. They are very often overused and cheesy. Even the new JJ Abrams’ Star Trek features some lens flares annoying as hell. Still, they an unavoidable part of photography and can add some realism if used wisely.

Subtle lens flare applied

Unfortunately, Photoshop’s Lens Flare effect is laughable. I think it’s the same effect as 15 years ago. I only know of two decent lens effects – one in the old plugin Kai Power Tools 6, the other is Corel Photo-Paint. Both of them allow you to control the size, glow, ring, stars, streaks and reflection trail. This is not a tutorial on lens flares, but modern, good lenses don’t create reflection trails, but only a nice star pattern with minimal interference or random streaks.

For this photo I created a very simple star pattern on black background and I put it as a layer with blending mode set to Linear Dodge (Add) at 33% opacity. You can see that the effect is barely there; its purpose is to enhance the scene in a minimal way, not to overpower it.

Shadows

Selecting the body shape

If you recall from the beginning of this tutorial, the original image had no shadows because of the overcast sky. Now, as I created a light source, I needed to create a shadow too.

Refining selection edges

With the background layer active, I started to make a simple selection on the girl using the Magnetic Lasso. I didn’t even needed to be very careful, but just to follow the contours.

Once this was done, I clicked on Refine Edge and increased Smoothness and Feathering. After that, I created a new layer and filled the inside of the selection with black.

Distorting the shadow

The next step was to convert the new layer into a Smart Object via Layer –> Smart Objects –> Convert to Smart Object. Why? It’s because a smart object’s original appearance is preserved so I could distort it any way I wanted without degrading its appearance on each step.

Finally, I set the layer’s blending to Multiply and its opacity down to 50%.

Final result

Here’s the final view with all the layers:

All layers

But first…  a Sneak Preview!!!

In the next tutorial I’m going to remind you that Photoshop is designed for massive photo editing, in 6 easy steps you edit a photo into something magical. I’ll use Photoshop in this case to make my friend look like an elf. Hope you will enjoy my small presentation and have fun trying it.

About the tutorial

I decided to make this tutorial because it is useful when it comes to serious Photoshop editing. So if you think your eyes would look better in a blue color in a certain picture although your natural eye color is green, Photoshop has the answer; (this is also a good way to see if a contact lens color suits you before you actually buy it).

How to:

The 6 Things you have to remember are:

• duplicate layer;
• erase the iris on the background layer;
• use the Magic Wand Tool (W) to select the white circle;
• go to Image  – Adjustments – Hue & Saturation and DO NOT FORGET TO SELECT COLORIZE!
• play, experiment with Hue, Saturation and Lightness;
• right click on one layer and select Flatten Image.

Useful:

You can try it out on the original picture I have used in the video. Please do not steal it or use it to other purpose that training, as it’s copyrighted by us.

And here is the video:

Exposure and lighting affect the mood of the photo

To aid those who want to be in control of their cameras, to go beyond point-and-shoot, I decided to write a series of tutorials on the basics of photography. If you don’t know what the exposure or aperture are, this little tutorial is for you, so read on. I’ve done my best to avoid overcomplicated technical details and give lots of analogies and examples instead.

What is exposure

The single most important thing to learn about when making a photo is exposure. You’ll never go beyond point-and-shoot without understanding how this works. Any gorgeous scene can and will be ruined by bad exposure — and you can turn a mundane setting into a startling photo by mastering the same exposure.

Tricky lighting required careful control of the exposure

In this photo, lighting the model while keeping the details in the sky was tricky, because the setting sun was behind the model.

How do we capture the light in the scene in a photo? Whether we talk about film or digital, the principle is the same: we’re letting a piece of light-sensitive material to gather light from the scene.

How much light do we need to capture? Here’s the tricky part. Each scene has a certain amount of illumination that can be measured objectively using a light meter. The typical unit of measure for luminance is called “lux” but most light meters are set up to display results in photographic terms (more on that later). Most likely however, you won’t have a light meter, so you can’t rely on them. All photo cameras have internal light meters, except they can’t measure the actual light levels from the light source(s), but the light that enters the camera, which is the reflected light by the scene objects. Why is this important? It’s because the camera has to “guess”. The camera tries to find a good average of the light intensities – here’s how it works:

what you see - what the camera meter sees - averaged gray

The camera takes readings of light intensities across different areas of the image. The number of segment and pattern varies from model to model. The readings are averaged based on different algorithms (“evaluative”, “3D matrix”, “center-weight”, etc.) and the exposure is adjusted to obtain a medium gray.

This method works most of the time – but sometimes it misses. Do you have your camera nearby? Take a picture of a white sheet of paper. — just the white paper, without anything on it. Download the picture and look at it on the screen. I’m willing to bet it came out gray-ish. Take another shot of a black T-shirt. Have a look at it, it’ll be gray or dark gray. Why?

Dark backgrounds will fool the camera meter

White or dark backgrounds can fool the camera meter. The camera tries to average everything to gray. If a scene has bright areas and dark areas, the camera can determine a proper average and from that, it can determine the exposure. But, if you’re shooting tricky scenes, it’ll fail (even a sunset or a portrait against a white wall can be considered tricky, so don’t think you won’t encounter such cases).

Hopefully, by now you understand what exposure is and why it’s important to get it right. Next, it’s how do we get it.

The right exposure – juggling with shutter, aperture and ISO values

Obtaining the correct exposure is like filling a bucket of water. Too little water and you don’t have enough to use it; too much water and it spills, making a mess.

Too little - Just right - too much

To fill the bucket with water you turn the tap. The longer you keep it open, the more water pours. You can also increase or decrease the rate of flow. So in effect you can get the same result either by keeping the tap open for longer and reducing the flow, or with a larger rate of flow for a shorter time. This is exactly how exposure works, except we use light instead of water.

The amount of time you let water, err, light “pour in” the camera is called “exposure time” or “shutter speed” and it can vary anywhere from 1/10000 of a second to minutes or hours. The amount of flow has its equivalent in “aperture size”, which basically measures how big the opening that lets the light shine on sensor or film is.

These two values – shutter speed and aperture are intertwined. To get the correct exposure, both have to be set correctly – that is, if you increase the exposure time then you need to decrease the aperture.

You may ask yourself now – why should we deal with two variables instead of one? Why not keep the aperture wide open and change just the shutter speed? It’s because unlike the bucket of water analogy, you’ll get different results depending on how you set these variables. Cellphone cameras or cameras set on Auto will try to work out a compromise, some sort of average between these two. Modes like “Portrait” or “Sport” are simple presets, favoring one or the other variable.

Shutter speed

The shutter looks like a curtain and acts like the tap in our example.When you press the shutter release button, it is opened briefly, allowing light to expose the film or sensor for the specified amount of time and then it’s closed again.

Fast action

The shutter speed value is specified in seconds, for example “2s”, or “1/30s”. High shutter speeds (low exposure times) are needed to capture fast action. Capturing a bullet as it passes through a glass requires extremely short exposure times, like 1/10000s, which are usually obtainable only in controlled environments. Fast sports or dancing need exposures like 1/125s – 1/250s. At the other end, night scenes may require exposures of several seconds, even minutes, which lead to interesting effects.

Aperture

The aperture is iris-shaped, with metal blades that allow it to grow or shrink. The larger it is, the more light enters the camera. Just as the pupils get narrower in bright light and wider when it’s dark, a photographer will adjust the aperture size to gather the needed light.

The aperture size is measured using a rather unintuitive notation, such as f/2 or f/16. The larger the number, the smaller the aperture. An aperture of f/1.4 is very very wide, while f/32 is extremely narrow.

Changing the aperture has a very clear impact on the pictures, that is called Depth of Field. Depth of Field (or DOF for short) is an interesting topic on its own, that’s outside the purpose of this tutorial. Depending on the camera you have, altering the aperture may or may not be that apparent. Compact cameras have a lot more depth than (d)SLRs, which can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on situation.

Shallow DOF - Deep DOF

Above you can see pictures taken with different aperture values. Note how the image is blurred in front and behind of the subject when the aperture is wide open compared to the picture taken with a small aperture. A “shallow” DOF that has little detail in front and behind the subject is desirable especially for portraits, because a blurred background doesn’t distract from the main subject; on the other hand, landscapes benefit from a deep DOF that ensures that all close and distant features are sharp.

ISO Speed

Going back to our initial tap analogy, if you can alter the quantity of water that is collected in a bucket by altering the time you let the tap open or by increasing/reducing the flow, what happens if you change the density of the poured liquid? If you want a pound of liquid, then the denser it is, the quicker you’d get it because it’d require less volume – a liquid twice the density of water would occupy half the space, so all else being equal (time, flow) you’d get it twice as fast.

It’s the same with ISO speed. For film, ISO specifies the film sensitivity to light. A ISO200 film would be twice as sensitive than a ISO100 film, a ISO400 film is twice as sensitive than ISO200 and so on. The sensitivity ranges usually from ISO50 to ISO3200.

Without a tripod, this scene required high ISO

As with all things in life, by gaining sensitivity, you lose something else. More sensitive films (also called “fast” films) result in grainier pictures, with less vibrant colors (actually all ISO3200 films I know of are black-and-white only). With digital, things are relatively the same. The analog signal is amplified by software, resulting in more visible noise, especially in darker areas. The camera software tries to clean some of the noise with varying degrees of success. Noise levels are dependent on a number of factors, among which the sensor size and resolution are very important; digital SLRs with their bigger sensors behave much better than compact cameras.

Putting all together

To recap, a certain exposure can be achieved using a combination of three factors: ISO, shutter speed and aperture.

ISO, Shutter speed and aperture opening

ISO goes from ISO50 (clean, bright image) to 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and 3200 (grainy, noisy) – doubling the sensitivity.

Shutter speed goes from let’s say 1s (slower), 1/2s, 1/4s, 1/8s, 1/15s, 1/30s (faster) and so on, doubling the speed.

Aperture has a stranger progression (than can be explained mathematically), from f/32 (narrow), f/22, f/16, f/11, f/8, f/5.6, f/4, f/2.8, f/2 (wide), each time doubling the amount of light that hits the film or sensor.

Each step in doubling or halving the exposure is called a “stop”, so the difference between 1/30s and 1/60s is one stop. The difference between f/5.6 and f/8? One stop. ISO3200 to ISO800? Gotcha – two stops. So, an exposure taken at ISO400, 1/125s, f/5.6 would be equivalent to one taken at ISO100, 1/30s, f/5.6 or ISO200, 1/15s, f/16. Modern cameras can adjust these values in half- or third- increments, so you will see values like 1/20s or f/9 or even ISO80.

Conclusion

Exposure and all the technical terms used here are really the foundation of photography. You may think you don’t need it – after all the cameras are pretty smart nowadays, right? I beg to differ. You should know your tools, first understand their capabilities, strengths and weaknesses and then use your creativity to push them to the limit.

Sneak Preview!!!

In the next tutorial I’m going to show you how to change eye color. I’ll hope you’ll enjoy it. If you have a suggestions about what I should do a tutorial about, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do about it, don’t be shy!

original photo by Armand Niculescu

About the tutorial …

With what I have shown you in the tutorial you can do your own wallpaper, you can use it as in e-card, a poster, or even do a nice thing for your friends, they will appreciate it. Use your imagination to create different things you will see that now that you know how to create your own brush, expressing yourself through digital media won’t be that hard.

Attention!!!

When you are doing this just out of brushes, you should have an idea of what you want it too look like from the beginning. First you apply the background color, then the brushes that you want to have in the back and so on, in the end you apply the main brush.

Credits

We don’t believe in stealing art! I have to admit that the brushes presented in the video are downloaded from deviantart (Resources – Applications – Photoshop Brushes).

Useful

If you want to reproduce the image I did in the tutorial here are the brushes … so as I like to say: Brush away!

The video tutorial  Vector brushes creation

Why organize???

When you’ll be moving to hard core photo editing the last thing you want to spend time on is searching for the brushes you need in the multitude of brushes you have loaded. You should get used to loading only the brushes you need, it will save you a lot of time and energy.

How to organize???

Click on the brush button (keyboard shortcut is B) then rightclick on the working space in the upper side of the box opened you can see an arrow, by clicking it you will open a new set of options, the most important one being Preset Manager. As you can see with this option you can Load, Delete and Save set/sets of brushes.

My suggestion to you all is to play around and see for yourself what each option does, I presented only a few in the video tutorial so don’t be afraid to experiment.

Remember!!!

When you create your own brush (as I did show in the first video tutorial – How to make your own brush) photoshop will not automatically save your brush, if you consider that you want to use that brush in the future make sure you will have it then by saving it right then.

These being sayed, here’s the video, hope you enjoy it and also remeber to stay tuned I have a little surprise for you in the next tutorial .