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.

Enlarging Techniques

I just bumped into a nifty page on enlarging techniques published by AdoramaPix.  I think it is worth a read and may come in handy in the future, so I'll link to it:

AdoramaPix: Going Big

Using Adoramapix Referral Link

Opening an AdoramaPix account using a referral link can be confusing, even frustrating, based on the reported experience of some past travelers.  I'm writing this post as a fairly detailed, step-by-step how to page, for someone wanting to order a BarrettPhoto book.

The first step is to follow (click) a referral link to go from my web site to AdoramaPix's where an account can be created.  I include a referral link in the text describing each book and often through other means.

Please note, that I have tried to be detailed and complete, AdoramaPix may change their site at any time.  Also, some people have seen a different first screen.  I believe they always have a Join Us or similar option to create a new account which should lead to the process I outline below.

Navigating the SmugMug Gallery

BarrettPhoto images are primarily shared through our web site hosted on SmugMug.  SmugMug is wonderful and all, but the gallery pages can be a bit confusing.  It has a lot of controls to access various pieces of information.

The image at right shows a typical gallery view with all of the controls as presented on the web site.

This post attempts to clarify what the controls actually due.

EXIF Image Rating

Image ratings are essential to my work flow and management of my Smug Mug photo galleries.  Using that data in a consistent way is important to me.

EXIF is short for EXchangeable Image file Format and can be used for storing quite a bit of text information with or inside of a data file. EXIF typically stores image capture time, identification of camera and lens and many other optional fields.  This posting delves into my use of the Rating field.  Which is really nothing more than a very short integer limited to values of 0 to 5.  Those values are often represented as a count of stars (⭐️) to show a rating.

Yellowstone White Balance and Exposure

A lot of the images captured on our recent trip to Yellowstone have a nasty blue tinge.  Many of those that don't have the nasty blue tinge have really grey snow.  Both of those issues are artifacts of digital cameras, typically running in auto mode trying to take great pictures under lighting conditions that are anything but great.

Through most of our trip we had heavy cloud cover which fools many cameras into shooting at much too low of a color temperature (the variable controlled by white balance).  This results in a very blue image.  Here is an example (not a great shot, but a good example).

Image as shot: Yuck!

Preparing for a Photo Expedition (Pre-Build Smug Mug Page)

I'm blessed to be able to go on one or two pretty significant trips each year.  I always depart with the intention of building a set of pages on my SmugMug site that will host images captured by me, my family, and when I am lucky fellow travelers. Sorting, rating, post-processing and ultimately posting the images to my site takes a fairly large amount of time and effort.  Having the images appearing on the site as fast as possible is useful, having some of them appearing during the trip encourages other to participate making it even more important to me.

My desire for speed combined with my natural inclination to laziness has spurred me to create a cookbook for pre-trip prep to make posting of images faster during and after the expedition.  This post lays out the steps I go through to setup my working environment for a trip, your milage, will of course, vary.

Fixing Pet Eye in Photoshop CC 2019

Lightroom has a handy red eye and pet eye fix tool but often, at least for me, it seems like pointing in a finishing nail with a sledge hammer the results are just too heavy handed.  I ran across a couple of approaches on the inter webs and found one at digital-photograpy-school.com that inspired me to create my own step by step.

Removing Skin Shine

I'm never very happy when I have to use flash for a shot.  It is so easy to create horrible hot spots of shine, especially on people's faces. It's worst when using the built in flash. or ugly maker, that most cameras have, but even a bounce flash can create nasty bright spots.

What is a BarrettPhoto Book?

The books I create are compilations of images taken at a specific event or series of events.  My intent in putting them together is to capture memories and build something that is a worthy keepsake for the participants in the event.

Photo books allow me to utilize images that would otherwise end up in a shoebox or just sit on a disk drive into something that I am proud to share with people who may be interested in where I have visited and/or seen.

Some of the books are intended for any/all participants in a group trip, such as the Grove City Alumni travels that Linda and I enjoy participating in.  So far, I’ve produced three such books, with one more slated for June/July of 2018:

• National Parks of the High Plains, June 2015
• Galapagos, January 2017
• Machu Picchu, January 2017
• National Parks of the South West, June 2018

Consumer Reports rates Photo Print Labs - 2017

Consumer Reports recently published a rating of Photo Printing Services with some analysis.  Top quality honors went to Walgreens (98 of 100) with AdoramaPix close behind (97 of 100). The best pricing on 4x6 prints was a tie at 9¢ between Walmart, Amazon, and Snapfish.  Several labs charged $1.79 for an 8x10 (Walmart, Amazon, and Costco).  Adoramapix was competitive on pricing for an 8x10 at $1.89 while offering a higher quality print.

The Consumer Reports Article is available on the CR web site.

I am pleased to see my photo lab of choice coming out on top.

Fonts in Barrett Photo Books

My knowledge of typography is fairly sparse. I have picked up a few things here and there in classes and other readings.  I've learned enough to know it is an important element of book / page design and that I don't know nearly enough.  That said, I have settled on a few design guidelines that I think make sense and I try to follow. I'll try to lay them out here, for my own reference at least.

Freezing Flowing Water

This is old hat to many photographers, but the use of shutter speed to freeze flowing water is something worth understanding even at the risk of repeating what might be obvious.

Water in motion can make striking images.  Our eyes naturally blend the motion of falling water drops and make water falls / rapids into silky ribbons of water even when they are actually individual droplets of water.  A camera can freeze that motion, or allow it to flow, it all depends on the shutter speed.

The accompanying shot of the water wheel was shot at 1/50 of a second.  This allowed the water to move a short distance during the exposure and blurring, but not forming a long smooth silky fall.  In this case, I wanted the water to show motion, to make the shot feel like it's in motion, but I wanted the spokes of the wheel to be relatively sharp, nearly frozen in time. That's what I was seeing when I looked at the scene and that shutter speed (on a tripod, BTW) was just right.

Photography Tips: AdoramaPix

It's pretty obvious that I like working with AdoramaPix.  The books that they print are just amazing, always bringing smiles to viewers eyes and they aren't too hard to build.  So I follow what they are doing.  I also am a big fan of learning.  Nearly everyone can and should learn.  Getting better is always a solid objective.

I recently came across Adoramapix's blog that mixes these two things.  They have solid advice on a number of aspects of photography and are easy reads.  If you're in the mood for photographic learning, take a moment to visit them at their blog.