October 28, 2010
October 22, 2010
Kick it up a notch–Maybe two
A friend of mine had a party recently with half of them being musicians who spend the evening playing Rock and Roll, Blues, Jazz and whatever else catches their fancy. While they played I took pictures. I don’t use my add on flash as much as I’d like and this provided a great opportunity. The basic setup is shutter priority with your shutter set to a 60th sec. I haven’t liked the results because the aperture is usually wide open resulting in a shallow depth of field. I’ve found that’s okay if you have one subject in the image. With more subjects in the image and a shallow depth of field, one subject will look fine but the other subjects will be less sharp and that annoys the heck outta me. So I set the aperture priority to f8.
I got a lot of nice shots but I was looking to do a little more with a few of them. I’ve got a lot of Presets in Lightroom but none of them really caught my fancy. Then I viewed Episode 247 of Photoshop User TV. Scott Kelby explained a tutorial creating a bleached bypass effect in Photoshop. Duplicate the background layer twice. Then desaturate the middle layer and change it’s opacity to 80%. Switch to the top layer and change the blend mode to Overlay. Quick and easy and a nice effect. Bringing the image back into Lightroom, I did some minor adjustments and then used a Develop Preset that mimics the look from the movie “300” and I was done.