Sunday, October 3, 2010

Photogeddon - Day 7

 
Photogeddon - Self Portrait
 To mark the successful completion of my first week of Photogeddon, let me restate my 12 steps to becoming a better photographer and person in this world.
  1. I will stay involved in developing myself and others. I will go to the overnight shoot with fellow photographers, rain, sleet, snow and inner critic be damned, and I will experiment and play but most of all I will have fun.
  2. I will share my results with you here. Good, bad or indifferent; I will share and accept feedback constructively, even when the feedback isn’t so constructive.
  3. I will help others. I am going to help others improve their craft and develop their voice.
  4. I will believe in others.
  5. I will motivate myself. I will watch Zack’s Transform video as well as his Creative Live series again. I will read informational and motivational blog posts.
  6. I will take five photos each and every day. I will share these photos here with the title of Photogeddon – Day X.
  7. I will try; day after day, week after week and month after month. This means every day I will do something new and stop living/reliving in yesterday’s success/failure.
  8. I will continue to develop myself. I will attend Joel Zak’s Artist’s Way for Photographers workshop in January. I will attend Kevin Kubota’s Digital Photography Bootcamp® next year and each year following I will attend two or more workshops.
  9. I will believe in myself. If I can’t believe in myself, how can I believe in others? I have the knowledge. I have the talent. I have the drive. I just have to believe it and I will from now on.
  10. I will put my foot in the ass of all my critics; my inner critic included. There will be no more fear in my life. No fear of failure. No fear of success. No fear of disappointing myself or others.  
  11. I will take one day off from my day job per month and spend that day developing my photographic voice and style. This is not an exercise of mimicking others, but actually developing my own voice, my style, my own self.
  12. 
    Photogeddon - Negative World
    
  13. I will share my voice with the world.

So what have I done to accomplish the goals set forth? Well here is the list:
  1. I have challenged myself to help shoot a wedding and I have read about and applied a new post-processing technique.
  2. I have posted results from the wedding, the good, the bad and the indifferent.
  3. I have helped others. I helped Chris David with his wedding shoot, I helped Nathan Smith with his senior portrait shoot. I have posted two free presets for Lightroom to allow others to have the tools to make their work better in post. I attended the Local Help Portrait planning meeting and made value added contributions to the meeting.
  4. I had absolute faith in my fellow photographers to meet their obligations and they did.
  5. I watched Zack Arias' Transform video as well as his Creative Live Series, or at least part of the series.
  6. I have taken 5 new photos each day and posted them on my blog for feedback and people are actually providing feedback.
  7. I have shot something different each and everyday. I have went some place new and photographed something new. I have not tried to recreate a past success or improve and past failure. I have focused on producing something new each and every day; Monday - Construction; Tuesday - Water, Wednesday - Senior Portraits; Thursday - Different Subjects (Morning, Flower, Lines, Bee, Waterfall)
  8. I am signed up for Joel Zak's workshop and I also actively pursued the SummitUp workshop contest on Twitter and won. Not only do I get to go to this workshop, but I get to take someone with me and I chose to bring Nathan Smith. So in addition to developing myself I am also able to let my success be the success of others photographers as well, all because of Kubota's generosity.
  9. 
    Photogeddon - Spooky
    
  10. This is a constant issue I have to work on. I believe in myself where I am comfortable, but have less faith in myself where I am not. But getting a second senior shoot under my belt, thanks to Nathan and a wedding under my belt thanks to Chris David, I believe in my abilities more and more each day.
  11. I received a negative comment on one of photos that I posted on Flickr. I actually responded to negative comment to try and figure out why my photo was rated so low by this person. His response was to my inquiry was, "I just didn't like it." So rather let it eat away at me, I took joy in the fact that the majority of others did like it.
  12. I have not done this yet, but it is coming soon.
  13. I posted an entire series of articles on my blog  on the death of creativity and I have received some feedback, both in person and via email. This means my voice is being heard and people are responding.
So for the rest of this long photogeddon post, I am just going to show you the remainder of photos from today.


Photogeddon - In the Grain

Photogeddon - Paranoia

Free Lightroom Preset: CMS-Skin Softening

Before Skin Softening
I won't be blogging much today as I have 1200 wedding photos to sort through and prepare to deliver to Chris David from yesterday's wedding shoot. But I thought I would give away another preset for everyone to download and use.

Skin can be a bugger to work with, especially in Lightroom. The secret to working with skin in Lightroom is using the Local Adjustment Brush.

Skin by nature is a porous heavily textured surface that can make a photograph look soft and inviting or gritty and hard. Soft and inviting is not always what we want on men and gritty and hard is not what we want on women.

I have addressed the need for making women’s skin soft and inviting with the CMS-Skin Softening Preset for the Local Adjustment Brush.



A Closer Before Look

The image to the right is the original image that has been pushed to a near high key state. But when you look closely at the photograph (click on the photograph) you can see that the model has pores in her skin and some blemishes. To make her feel beautiful, I will smooth her skin out.
Getting a little closer in and we can see the details a little better in the image on the right (click to see the larger version of the close up).
 
 
 
To address this we will apply the skin softening preset to the local adjustment brush and paint over her skin surfaces to clean up the blemishes and pores.



Skin Softening After
In applying the brush I used the following brush attributes:
Brush Size: 6.3 through the cheeks, nose bridge, forehead and chin and a 2.3 for the upper lip and between the eyes as well as between the eyebrows and hair.


Feather: I set the feather of my brush to 52. This allowed a smooth transition between the smoothing being applied and where it wasn’t applied.


Auto Mask: Is set to off.


Density is maxed out.


When applying, do not apply over the eyes, lips, nostrils or eyebrows. Allowing these features to shine through allows the skin to look even softer in contrast to these areas without over softening the skin.


Skin Softened
 Any blemishes not corrected by the softening process can be cloned out afterwards. Like with any local adjustment brush, only apply the brush after all basic global adjustments are made.



Download Here


To install the preset, copy the file in the zip (xxx.lrtemplate) to your Local Adjustment Presets folder on your computer. If you don't know where to find this folder, open Lightroom. Click on the Edit menu and select Preferences. Click on the Presets tab and click the Show Lightroom Presets Folder... button.