At least I can say that I haven’t done this (yet) when photographing my daughter.

This is a seriously close call, but she still made it in time!

(via PetaPixel)

A while back I had written up a post and some Script-Fu for GIMP to emulate the colors I was seeing from very expired Polaroid 600 Instant film. That older post is here:

Not too long ago I finally got around to picking up a decent manual flash for exploring lighting and speedlight techniques. I picked up a Yongnuo YN-560 Speedlight Flash for Canon and Nikon, and my friend Sean was kind enough to send me his old radio triggers to play with. I was mostly all set to start exploring the world of off-camera lighting…

I have looked around quite a bit for a good method in GIMP to smooth skin for portrait work. I did find a few tutorials, but they all were mainly concerned with using Gaussian blur with a layer mask to “smooth” the skin. The results were almost always less than satisfactory.

Similar to using dodging and burning is something I like to call “Contour Painting”. It’s basically dodging and burning (d&b), but with an eye towards contours of the subject in a photo. I will use this very often in shots with skin, and a great example of this would be a nice cheesecake pin-up style image!

I recently had a party at my house for some co-workers of my wife, and managed to get a few of them to let me shoot some quick photos using my DIY ringflash. These are the results.

Considering that I constructed the ringflash from 2 bowls bought at a dollar store, and an old plastic cup, I’m pleasantly surprised at the results. I still need to place diffusion material over the front to help soften the light a bit, but the overall effect is pleasing. I’ll have a DIY tutorial on how I built the ringflash, as well as my softbox shortly.

The rest of my DIY ringflash tests are here in my Flickr set.

There was a recent thread on the GIMP users forum at Flickr on how to generate luminosity masks (and use them I suppose). I figured I would chime in a bit here with how I generate and use them in my own workflow. There is an older and interesting discussion about Luminosity Masks by Tony Kuyper that was referenced in that thread, and this is a translation of sorts for GIMP users that want to accomplish the same thing. The original tutorial by Tony is here: Tony Kuyper’s Luminosity Masks Tutorial

The basic premise of luminosity masks is to allow you to modify elements of a layer masked to a specific region of luminosity (or value). If I wanted to control the colors in the shadows of my image without modifying the mid tones or light tones, then this is the method you want. Similarly you can adjust just the mid tones, or light tones without affecting the other regions as well.

If you are new to layer masks (or need to brush up), I recommend you head to Getting Around in GIMP - Layer Masks to brush up first, then come back.

An occasional question comes up concerning the use of Layer Masks for really controlling your edits to an image, and I thought I would approach the basics in this post. This is really a primer before moving into a much cooler topic - Luminosity Masks for controlling tonal ranges in a different way. (The Luminosity Masks tutorial is finished and can be found here!)

On a side note, this is also a method many people use for selective coloring an image. They will generate a desaturated version of their image, then lay a color version over it with a layer mask. You could then use the layer mask to only allow the color version to show where you painted it. (I am not a fan of selective coloring personally, but I’m not writing this post for me…)

My local independent movie theater the Crescent Theater in Mobile, AL is running a Shocktoberfest movie series of some great horror films. They just so happened to include one of my favorite films of all time in the list, Young Frankenstein!

In my previous post on Color Correction, I outlined a method for finding the lightest and darkest values in an image using Colors → Threshold. What I may not have mentioned in that post was that the process described will actually level balance your images for you automatically if you follow the steps (choosing the darkest and lightest pixel values to represent black and white in your image).

If you were just interested in basic level adjustments, I thought I would cover that here.