Setting Color Pallet for Korea & Japan Book

 We recently returned from a trip to South Korea and Japan with Grove City College and Notre Dame alumni.  I took my camera grabbed lots of pictures, solicited fellow travelers for copies of their favorite shots and will be creating a book using Printique's services as my publisher.  

My current task is picking a pallete. I sometimes play with a color wheel for colors and then dip into a different tool to develop variations. The web site I used to use to help me with this seems to have hidden itself behind a paywall much to high to warrant my climbing it for literally one palette.  After some googling I have come up with a coupel of new sites that should do the job for me.  This post is to share those sites and document them for my future use.

Before delving into the tools, a moment for my opening color thoughts.  There are a few things I want to achieve with my book colors:

1. Change from recent Barrett Photo Books
2. Logical connection to trip
3. Light colored page backgrounds
4. High contrast color band (sometimes more than one)
5. Dark text color for use on background color
6. Light text color for use on color band

Photoshop: Auto-Fix Colors aka Color Tint (PIXimperfect)

I recently ran across a post in the YouTube PIXimperfect channel that ran through how to make 5 specific photo improvements with Photoshop.  All of them have application and I want to learn them.  This post walks through how to Auto-Fix Colors technique 1 from the videos.  The example removes a blur cast from an image that resulted from shooting through a tinted window.  

Sample Images for the video are available here.

Unmesh flies through his steps, I'll be taking the video apart to get the steps to a form that I can use.

Silky Flowing Water

I am often torn when going to shoot a waterfall or other rapidly flowing water as to whether I want to freeze the water's motion or let the water blur to create a smooth result.  Both of the approaches can create great results.  Knowing how to capture both styles is, of course, essential to making the choice.

Creating a Waving Flag

I have from time to time wanted to make an object, like a flag appear to be waving or otherwise in motion.  I recently bumped into an online tutorial aimed at exactly this task.  So, I of course wanted to try it out and figured I should post about the process for future reference.

The tutorial is on YouTube -- Photoshop Tutorial: How to Make Your Own Waving Flag

I'll be keeping my notes on the process on this posting. 

Proofing a Mixbook Book

 I have been using two different printers for photo books for the past several years.  I tend to use Printique (formerly AdoramaPix) for my "serious" books, those where I anticipate wanting full spread images and top quality printed images.  

I also like using Mixbook.  I find it easier to use and less expensive, though the lack of a practical lay flat option and my perception of their print quality keeps me from using them for books where I know I have top notch images.  

Covid-19 has me delving into my archives to create new books of events well in the past.  Mixbook is the right choice for me on these as: 

1. My images back then tended to be a bit off -- no need for big prints.
2. Ease of book creation is more important given potential volume and time constraints.
3. Lower cost encourages more generous allocation of pages for marginal materials.
4. Thinner finished size takes less bookshelf space.

One of the advantages of Mixbook over Printique is the ability to collaborate and review.  This post will delve into that a bit deeper.

Removing Annoying Foreground Fence

 As I have been working on my shots from a family trip to Alaska in 2006 I ran across some interesting shots that were totally ruined by nasty foreground fencing.  All of the images are from an animal park, taken through the fences, also as I was with a tour group I was forced to shoot through the fence.  I captured images with a fence dominating my view but I remembered just seeing the animal.  Rather like the following pair of images.

Making Water Wet

It's been a while since I posted to this blog, by "a while" I mean more than a year.  Lots of reasons, but I'll skip those and get right to the subject of this post: Making Water Wet (in Lightroom).

Why in the world would I need to make water wet, it is that way naturally, isn't it?  Looking at raw images, apparently not always.  Water in a RAW image can look flat and dull.  For that matter sometimes pavement or rocks would look better with a bit of a moist glisten. 

I just picked up a technique courtesy of Scott Kelby in one of his videos that literally can make water (or stones, or pavement) look wet. 

(tl/dr summary) -- Use local adjustment brush and set contrast and clarity to 100 (yes, pin to the max) and brush on the adjustment.