Photoshop Tip: Go Wild with Color Controls

Learning to use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, or any other photo-editing program for that matter, takes time--there is a relatively long learning curve, especially if you're new to editing. Many photographers who have worked in traditional darkrooms in the past pick up editing skills faster that those who have never worked in a darkroom, but still, there is a lot to learn. But that doesn't mean that you can't have some great creative fun along the learning path--you can.

One fun way to get to know what things do in an editing program and to get some cool illustration effects as you learn is to just experiment--let your imagination run wild. You really can't hurt your computer (or yourself!) by playing with editing controls and all programs have a "reset" button that lets you go instantly back to all default settings. So no matter what sticky corner you back yourself into, you can undo it very quickly. Remember too, in Photoshop you can always get rid of the last step just by going to Edit>Undo or unravel many steps by using the Edit>Step Backward command. If you are going to experiment with an important image, however, you should "duplicate" (in Photoshop it's just Image>duplicate) the image first and work on a copy. That way no matter what creative rabbit hole you plunge down, your original image is safe.

Among the most fun (and easy) controls to play with in Photoshop (and other programs have these or similar tools) are the color control tools. With just a quick push on a slider or a click on a palette option, you can transform the most mundane of images into very colorful and imaginative new images. Sometimes what you'll create will be wild 1960's Peter Max-looking "art" and other times it will be utter garbage, but no matter what the end result, you'll begin to understand just what each different tool does--and you'll begin to see how, in specific situations, those tools that you're using in your creative sandbox can also be very useful to correct and enhance photographs. You can manipulate the hue/saturation control, for example, to turn any photo into a total abstraction in seconds, but in time you will find yourself using it to fine-tune colors and hues on almost all of your images.

To create the blue version of Saint Denis (from the facade of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris), I used just three simple tools: First I used the "Posterize" tool to reduce the image to just five distinct tones (you can choose the number of tones or colors that you want); then I used the "Gradient Mapping" tool to shift the entire image into a blue palette (in that tool you simply click on a color swatch to see the effect instantly on your image); and then finally I used the "Hue/Saturation" control to saturate the blues even more. That's it. Three clicks to take it from the straight image below to the colorful one above.

Don't be afraid to experiment with any controls in your editing program. The sooner you get past the fear that you might "ruin" something, the more fun you'll start to have. And if you love color like I do, you're going to have a great time surprising yourself by just clicking and dragging and sliding those color controls.

Collect Photos of Weird Things

Almost everyone collects something, whether it's books, baseball cards, old 45rpms or (heaven forbid) pieces of burned toast with Elvis' face on them. The trouble with collecting actual things of course, is that things take lots of room. I collect photography books, for example, and trust me, pretty soon either some of the books are going to have to go or I'm going to have to add on another room.

But one way to collect things without actually storing them is just to photograph them. Then you can have a collection of something and it won't take up any room at all. Also, by just collecting pictures of neat stuff it's much cheaper and you can also collect stuff that you can't necessarily run into a store and buy. I started collecting photos of unusual manhole covers, for instance (like this one that I found in Paris near the Eiffel Tower) and I've discovered that there are some really interesting and unusual manhole covers out there. I even found that the ones on my street have the town name and the year they were installed engraved on them. Cool! But even if there was someone selling them, I'm not about to start hauling them home.

As with all collections, the stranger or more esoteric the object is, the more fun it is to collect (and the more eccentric your friends will think you are). Then once you have an interesting collection going you can print pictures of your prize possessions and the only room it will take up is a photo album or two.

By the way, you won't be the only person collecting whatever sorts of odd stuff you collect photos of because I guarantee someone else is collecting it too! How do I know? A few days after I posted this shot of the manhole cover on my Flickr photostream someone invited me to add it to their group of...you guessed it, manhole cover photos.

Find Funny Signs

For some reason signs always seem to catch my eye when I'm traveling--but then again, I guess that's why people put up signs. Duh! What really catches my eye though are the funny signs. Some signs, like the one for a "new, safe heat treatment" that I found (in English, oddly enough) in Paris is meant to be funny. Paris had had a long, hot summer and the whole country was suffering serious heat problems. This ice cream vendor decided that he had the secret treatment for all of that heat: eat more ice cream (I couldn't agree more).

Other signs are unintentionally funny--like conflicting one-way signs that don't allow you to drive in either direction, or a "Watch Your Step" sign inadvertently posted near the edge of the Grand Canyon. In any case, the key to finding funny sign photos is just to read lots of signs and, of course, having your camera with you!

Photograph a Stained-Glass Window

Photographing stained-glass windows is pretty simple and the photos can make a great addition to a digital slide show or to your Flickr Photostream, etc. There are only two inherent problems in photographing stained glass and they're obvious: there's not always a lot of light and, if they're in a church, they're often up high and hard to frame tightly. Fortunately most churches are rich enough these days to have a lot of different windows and you will almost always find a few that let you get close enough to fill the frame.

I tend to work in the aperture-priority mode when photographing stained-windows because I want to be able to select an f/stop that's small enough (typically f/8 or smaller) so that I have enough depth of field to keep the entire window sharp. Unless you're working on a very sunny day, however, the glass (especially darker colors like dark blues and reds) sucks up a lot of light, so you may have to bump up the ISO quite a bit (I shot this scene at ISO 800) in order to retain a shutter speed fast enough to prevent camera shake. Since most churches won't let you use a tripod, this is a case where vibration reduction can be a big help. You can work in a straight "auto" mode and get good results, just keep an eye on sharpness from edge to edge.

The lens you use will depend on how close you can get to the windows and whether or not you want the entire window or just a close-up segment. In Notre Dame, for example, the Snowflake window (show here) is up very high and you need a moderate telephoto to get a frame-filling shot. I've shot in other cathedrals (the Dom in Cologne, Germany for example) and churches where I've been able to walk right up to the window. Cathedrals and churches aren't the only places you'll find good stained glass, by the way, I've also found tons of it in college campuses, like Yale.

Wherever you find your stained glass, just take your time, try to fill the fame and check your exposures on the LCD. The important thing is to work when the lighting (outside) is even and try keeping the camera as steady as possible.

Be Hip, Shoot from the Hip

During the 1960's there was a breed of photographer called "street photographers" that roamed the streets of big cities (most notably New York) taking very impromptu and hyper-realistic images of city life. Their style of photography was to shoot from the hip, rarely (if ever) using the viewfinder and instead, just pre-focusing on an area, using a small aperture to get lots of depth of field, and then wading into crowds and capturing whatever the camera saw. Though their work might have seemed casual and random, in fact, these photographers were really street journalists who learned the very difficult skill of being able to photograph strangers without being noticed and thereby creating extremely honest and unfiltered photographs.

I often try to imitate that style of photography when I'm traveling. Rather than carefully composing well-balanced scenes of street life, I prefer to put on a wide-angle lens, set a small aperture (using the aperture-priority exposure mode) and then shoot without looking through the viewfinder or LCD. I shot the photo here, for example, while sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Paris and I really just wanted an honest shot of the locals sitting around me. So rather than bring the camera up to my eye and draw attention to myself (and my camera), I just casually held the camera at my side and fired several shots. It's possible someone noticed what I was doing, but I doubt it. When you are holding a camera at your side, no one thinks you're taking pictures with it. I love the authenticity of this shot, the very casual nature of Parisians at lunch.

Next time you're out in the city (or even at a holiday party), try your "street" shooting skills out. Just put the camera on auto, use a wide-angle zoom setting and shoot. Don't worry about composition and framing, the fun and un-posed nature of the shots will more than make up for a few crooked frames or out-of-focus areas. And by the way, if you'd like to know more about street photography, check out Mason Resnick's very interesting site. Mason is a great street photographer and also teaches a course in street shooting at the (online) Perfect Picture School of Photography. You might also want to look at Joel Meyerowitz's fantastic street work. Joel is one of the originators of street photography, one of my heroes in photography, and his work is amazing.

Raise the ISO Speed in Low Light

Virtually all digital cameras have a flash that provides instant light in situations when the existing or "available" light is very low. Flash is handy, but it's rarely very attractive. The reason is simple: the light from a built-in flash is coming from the same place that you're standing and it provides a flat, often over-powering light that pretty much erases the mood of the ambient lighting.

Fortunately digital cameras provide an alternative to using flash and that is the ability to raise the ISO speed when you encounter dim settings. The ISO setting is merely a rating of a digital sensor's ability to respond to light and the higher the ISO, the more sensitive it becomes to low light. In the film days you had to buy separate rolls of film for different situations: a low ISO film speed for bright daylight and a faster one, such as ISO 800, for darker surroundings. But digital cameras, bless their little microprocessor hearts, have an "adjustable ISO" that lets you change the ISO speed from frame to frame.

In other words, if you were photographing the exterior of a cathedral in bright sun, you could use a relatively low ISO, such as ISO 100 (the typical default speed of many digital cameras). If you then wanted to move indoors, where the light is extremely low and flash is not allowed (or very desirable), you could raise the ISO high enough so that you can shoot at a safe handheld shutter speed. To photograph the candles in Notre Dame in Paris, for example, I raised the ISO to 1600 (the maximum for my Nikon D70s camera) and was able to shoot handheld at 1/60 second without any need for flash. Had I used flash the candle light would have disappeared and I would have gotten a great deal of glare from the votive glasses.

Incidentally, the benefit of using lower ISO speeds when light allows is that the images are free from digital "noise" which is the grainy-looking appearance that higher ISO settings often create.

Many cameras have an automatic exposure mode (usually the green "A" mode) that continuously adjusts the camera's ISO setting as the light intensity changes. Read your manual to see how your camera handles setting different ISO settings. Knowing how to adjust that setting will provide a lot more flexibility in changing lighting conditions. There is a more detailed explanation of ISO speeds on my main site.

Find the Beauty in Found Objects

I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but I see still life compositions almost everywhere I look. A vase of flowers on the windowsill? Grab the camera. A pile of old tires in the garage? Wow, great shot. I remember spending a half hour shooting a variety of compositions of a flattened rubber dinosaur that I found at the dump once. I'm sure the people at the dump thought I was nuts.

The subject itself doesn't much matter when it comes to making interesting shots out of found objects, it's finding a clever and simple way to present them to your viewer. What attracted your eye to the subject? Was it the combination of shapes? The patterns of light and shadow? Or did the objects seem to define a universal theme? I was drawn to the still life of glasses and silverware at a sidewalk cafe in Paris for all of those reasons--shape, lighting and theme. The minute that I spotted this informal still life I knew that it defined the Paris sidewalk cafe experience for me. I shot the image without even getting out of my seat and I didn't arrange anything: the shot is as I found it (though there's nothing wrong with making adjustments in the subject if it suits your vision). If something strikes you as an interesting gathering of found objects, go ahead and shoot it--you just never know what you might find.

Discover Architectural Details

Whenever I teach a class in photography the first assignment I give students is to photograph a piece of architecture. The practical reason I have for doing that is that everyone can find a building easily, while not everyone can find a great sunset or a pretty farm scene at will. Also, buildings don't run away from you the way your pets or other people might. Once you spot an interesting building you're pretty much free to explore it from as many angles as you can think of and in all kinds of different lighting and weather.

While overall views of buildings can be interesting, the real beauty of architecture is in the details. Whether it's the sign that says "Spike" over the doghouse door or the ornate embellishments of a cathedral, buildings are rife with photogenic detail. For example, I spent an entire afternoon photographing just some of the thousands of tiny details on the facade of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The shot of the figure here is just one of several hundred exposures I made. A zoom lens is a great tool for shooting details because the wide settings will let you photograph things like arches and doorways while the telephoto zoom settings will let you snatch more inaccessible details. No matter what the subject, grand or simple, spend some time with your building and watch as its personality and aura change as the light changes in direction, color and intensity.