Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The Christmas of Shipping Problems



  1. An order of funky t-shirts that was ordered on December 2nd has not shown up. The company responded very fast, but obviously they won't be here for Christmas.
  2. An order of (nice things) ordered December 4 arrived on December 23rd, forcing me to have to wrap it at the last minute. 19 days is actually much worse than postal times. Way to go UPS!
  3. An order of a technical device went missing after shipping, and Fedex had no clue where it was. I had to follow up with the company a number of times and the package was never located. I got a refund, but not for the full amount (they omitted to refund me for the shipping) and we had to scramble on the weekend to find the product locally.
  4. On December 4th I switched my Adobe Creative Cloud from a single-app subscription to their photographer's option, which included both Lightroom and Photoshop for $10/month. Today, I got notification that I had been billed $20 - it seems that the single-app subscription was never cancelled, so I would have been paying $30/month instead of $10.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Photo Processing Again


The experimentation with colour post-processing continue.

In the first one here, I created two luminance masks, and applied a green and pink layers, the green masked to the shadows, the pinks to the highlights. I then tried to tone afterward, and I don't like the result much.

In this second one (which is really about the 5th version) I toned the photo first - an overall curves adjustment, then a dodge/burn layer and a high pass filter layer. I flattened those down, then made two luminance masks as above and applied them to a green and a creamy-pink layer. The result is much better - however there is still an overall loss of contrast in the image and I need to figure out the mechanics of Exclusion.


Thursday, December 12, 2013

A Portrait

This is straight out of Lightroom with a filter that supposedly emulates Technical Pan.  It doesn't really - Tech Pan had this marvelous creaminess to it that I can't describe, and I don't know how to emulate in Photoshop.

But I still like this!


Wednesday, December 11, 2013

More Sand

We are busy getting geared up for Christmas. Chris is off, but I will be working.

In practice that isn't so bad. I'm off Mondays, so I'll work Tuesday and most employers send people home at noon or so on Christmas Eve. So I will really only work one full day, which will be the 27th.

Christmas is stressful.

I offer a monochrome view of a boy on a sand dune. Billions of tons of sand are fun.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Black and White

I think this works well in black and white. The original is largely monochrome - the boy is wearing grey pants and the shirt is shades of grey, the sky is grey overcast, and the sand is soft gold.

There was another person in the image. I have removed them (well, her) for purely compositional reasons. I think there is an artifact of that process still visible - something I missed this morning. I will have to look at this in more detail again.