Fototastic 2009

Well, it's the last day of the year (and the decade) so I hope that you have all had a good one and are planning to see in 2010 in style.

Many thanks for your support over the past 12 months and I look forward to seeing you all here again in 2010.

Just as a quick recap, here is a compilation of the 2009 posts all neatly packaged in to a video for your viewing pleasure!






HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all.

Water Art

I hope that you all had an excellent Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year celebrations.

I have had a bit of time off work over the festive period and after watching this interesting video I thought I would have another go at photographing water droplets.

You can see my first attempt earlier in the year here.

I took so many photos so it has taken a while to trawl through them but here are the 3 that I think came out best.







If you fancy having a go at this then there is plenty of help at hand on the web. I found that this video was pretty helpful.

Cathedral Light Trails

Following on my obsession with light thought I would post another light trail picture.

Took this one a few months back but stumbled across it this evening whilst looking for something else.

Beautiful You

I mentioned in this post a while back that I was doing some photography for some friends that were starting up a website.

Well, Stace & Mags now have the site up and running. Please support them by going to www.beautyu.co.uk and taking a look.

Airbrushing - Because You're Worth It!

I have been doing a few projects recently that have involved some requested photo retouching / airbrushing. I use both Photoshop and Paintshop Pro so experimented with different techniques in each until I came up with something that I was fairly happy with.

This process does differ depending on the photo but I now use a general routine for the smoothing out of skin without making the subject look fake and also trying to keep the important details.

I was looking for a model but as no one was available I had to take a quick snapshot of myself to work on. After a long weekend and lots of late nights, a retouch was just what I needed!!!

Here is the before shot, straight out of the camera.



Here is the same shot again after some retouching.



Click on the images to enlarge as the differences are more noticeable.

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Here are the steps that I look to achieve this.

Opened the original image in Photoshop and removed any blemishes with the spot healing tool

Duplicated the background layer and applied the dust and scratches filter with a radius of about 3 pixels and a threshold of 0

Applied a gaussian blur with a radius of about 1.4 pixels

Applied some texture to the image by using the add noise filter (1%)

Added a layer mask revealing all and filled the mask with black

Set the colour to white and used a paintbrush to brush in the new smooth skin

Lightened up the areas around the eyes and brightened up the eyes themselves

Applied some adjustment layers (curves and colour balance)

This technique does seem to work better on photos of women but then we are used to them having much smoother skin than us guys anyway :)