Musings on Photography

From the comments on this post:

Suppose you want to lighten or darken an area of an image … with curves, you either make a precise selection using various methods and then make the curves adjustment, or you make a curves adjustment and then create a mask to apply the curves adjustment. Or … with Dodge and Burn, you make a curve/mask adjustment in one step, ie: the darkening or lightening applies only where you put it. What a simple way to add a vignette.

The key words here are ‘precise selection’. They’re key because I never (what, never? Harrrrrrdly ever!) use the lasso tool and the other ’selection’ tools.

What I do is use quick mask mode to quickly ‘paint’ a rough selection. To do this, I hit ‘q’ or click on the button with the round circle on it (below the color swatches in the tool palette) to enter quick mask mode. Then I pick the right size brush, set the flow rate to whatever I want, and just paint on the image where I want to make the change. If I want to change a large area, I’ll select it and use the ‘fill’ paint bucket to paint it solid. Toggling the color between white and black lets me fix up mistakes easily. And when I have some area painted, I switch back to regular mode by hitting ‘q’ or that button again. The not painted area is now the selection. To make the painted area be the selection, I hit shift-cmd-i. That lets me make a rough selection in just seconds.

From here, I create the curves layer. The selection is now the mask for that layer, and I rough in the curve adjustment I want. It can be anything from a straight burn or dodge to a complicated curve or color adjustment.

Best of all, as I adjust the curve, I can watch the image change (I have ‘preview’ checked). This is important not because I can stop when it’s right, but because I can make sure I’ve gone too far. This is a trick I learned in the wet darkroom. It’s easy to make an adjustment, think it’s about right, and then discover later that you weren’t bold enough. The solution to this problem is to always go past the optimal change. Then use the opacity slider on the layer to ‘dial back’ the effect until it’s just right.

Now, I can look at the image with the edit in place. If there are places where I want the change applied but didn’t get in the rough selection at first, I just click on the mask, select black as the foreground color, and set the flow rate low (say, 5%) and then paint on the image. I’m actually painting on the mask, so I’m actually changing the area the mask controls. If I go too far, I switch to white and correct the mistake. It’s pretty easy to get it right.

Having the burn/dodge or whatever other adjustment be a layer is a big help, because I can toggle the layer on and off. That lets me make sure I’ve made a positive change, because I can easily test “Which do I like better - A or B?”

Hours (or days, or years) later, I might decide I want to adjust that burn or dodge. If it’s a layer, it’s childs play to see what I did before (I can SEE the layer mask) and to change it. If I’d just burned and dodged the bejeebers out of the image, I’d have no way of easily seeing what I’d done.

Sometimes I’m very confident I know what the curve shape I want will be. In those cases, I create the curve layer first. By default it applies to the entire image, so I set it with the preview turned off. Then I click on the mask icon on the layer palette, so that my subsequent actions paint on the mask. I then fill the mask with black so that it doesn’t apply anywhere. Then I select white as the foreground color, pick a brush, and start painting the effect onto the image. With a low flow rate, you can build up different levels of effect, so it’s easy to feather the effect.

A lot of the editing of images I do involves what I think of as a gradient mask. In the wet darkroom, you can do burns and dodges with a gradient by moving the burn/dodge card or tool. In Photoshop, I get the same effect by painting a gradient onto the mask for the curve that adjusts the image. You can get some of the same gradient effect by creating a soft light layer, filling it with neutral grey, and then painting a grey to white/black gradient onto it to do a burn/dodge. But again, the curves layer is usually just as convenient and a whole lot more powerful.

In Photoshop there are usually four or five ways to do the same thing. Dodge & Burn is just another tool and another way to apply a simple, quick adjustment. Like all tools, it works in some situations, but not others. This is a bit like debunking the Levels command, because you can do the same thing in Curves.

Sure. There are more ways to skin a cat than there are cats. My goal here isn’t to get the rest of the world to always tackle things the way I do. It’s to argue that if we’re only to have ONE tool, at least let it be the one which is vastly more powerful, instead of the one which can handle only a small number of simple cases.

And, for what it’s worth, when I’m teaching students to use Photoshop, I tell them to ignore the levels command. Better by far, I tell them, to pick the one tool which does it all, and master that tool. The curves interface is vastly better designed that the ‘levels’ interface, and does everything that levels does easily. By using the more powerful tool, students learn to think of the image contrast and tonal range in the context of the tool they’re going to use to adjust it both globally and locally. It just doesn’t make sense to learn a number of tools that each handle a special case (levels, brightness/contrast, burn/dodge) when they can learn one tool that gives them all those sub-tools with a uniform, easily mastered interface.

In my experience, the problem most people face with Photoshop is not that the task of editing images is hard. It’s that Photoshop offers such a complex and overwhelming set of tools that people can’t get a toe-hold on the thing. The trick is to explain that there’s a very simple subset of tools that offers them ALL of the editing power, and all they need to do is learn those tools and ignore all the rest. The primary editing technique I teach is curves layers with masks.

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day will fall on April 27 this year.

Learn about it here.

Find out how to participate here.

See what people have done on Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day in previous years here.

Be there. Aloha.

Colin’s post on Photostream got me thinking about style. Or maybe we’re discussing Style, not style. Who’s got it, how important it is, how you get it, how important it is to have one (or maybe two, or three…)

Style is a dangerous word. Paul’s rule: beware of holding discussions about words with too many meanings (22 in that definition at dictionary.com, four of which are verbs (three transitive, one intransitive)).

It’s worth going to that link, and reading the definitions. They’re all sort of aligned, but still all over the map. And, I suspect, we let all those other meanings overlap the meaning we’re really discussing. Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad, but if we’re to think things through clearly, we need to be alert to the possibility that different participants in the discussion are talking about different things. [note the discussion in the comments on Colin's post, all of which seem to center around 'exactly what do we mean when we're talking about "style"?].’

So when I’m talking about style here, what I’m discussing is ’style’ meaning:

a particular, distinctive, or characteristic mode or form of construction or execution in any art or work: Her painting is beginning to show a personal style.

One of the things that I think is interesting is that this sort of style is a byproduct and not a goal. In my email to Colin, I wrote that I thought the quest for style was like a game called “Doggie Zen” I play with my dog. I take a treat, and hold it in my closed fist. The dog, of course, tries to get the treat - poking at my fist with his muzzle, pawing at it, doing tricks. And the game is this: the way to get the treat is for the dog to back off and sit. As soon as he stops trying to get the treat, he gets the treat.

And style is like that. If you’re working toward having a style as I’ve defined it above, I think you won’t get there. I think style is the result of a sort of refinement in the way you photograph things. It’s not the visual appearance of your photos - that’s some interaction between your developed style and the subject matter. The visual appearance is going to change when you change subjects - and I think it’s sensible that it does.

So how do you get a style? The answer, I think, is to make a lot of photographs of things about which you care.