Ron Martinsen's Photography Blog

Showing posts with label Textures. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Topaz Labs Texture Effects 1.1 Update Now Available – Save up to 28% off Topaz Products! (new coupon codes)

Burning Dust Effect

If you were one of the many people who attended my Topaz Labs “Advanced Texture Effects Techniques” webinar then you probably noticed some new features that weren’t available in your copy. That’s because I was using the new 1.1 release, which is now available to the general public.

If you missed my webinar, here’s the video recording of it:

I also recommend that you check out my Texture Effects Review for an in-depth video tutorial of Texture Effects.

This product is so much more than just another texture overlay app so I demonstrate how it can be used alone to do powerful layering to create fine art images. If you don’t own Photoshop, you’ll definitely want to check this product out!

Here’s the before and after of the image edited in my video review using Texture Effects1.1’s new “Weather” texture presets:

New Rain Texture featured in 1.1

Where to order (SPECIAL OFFER)

CLICK HERE to learn more, get a free trial or order yours today!

My readers can always save 15% off ANY Topaz Labs product using the coupon code:

ronmart

For the remainder of the month you can save even more off Texture Effects with a special $20 off deal using coupon code:

EASYTEXTURE

This last deal is only available for a limited time. Once it expires you can still you can use my discount coupon code to get the best price on the web on any (or all) Topaz Labs products. Here’s a screen shot to show you how to use coupon codes:

Enter the coupon code and click Apply Coupon

You may also be interested in adding these textures to your product as well:

Textures also available separately here
See my discount coupon code page for discounts on this!

Disclosure

If you make a purchase using links found in this article, I may make a commission. It doesn’t cost you a penny more, but it does help to support future articles like this.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

REVIEW/Tutorial: Topaz Labs Texture Effects 1.0

Texture Effects User Interface

If you are familiar with Analog Efex (and if you aren’t don’t bother), then think of this as everything that products offer and much more. It begins with an extremely powerful user interface that allows for complex layering on par with Photoshop in an app that can run stand alone or integrated into Photoshop, Lightroom, etc… It goes far beyond by allowing nearly endless customizations that made me quickly realize that this is really the ultimate preset building tool that just happens to support your textures, borders, light leaks and more.

Take 15 minutes to at least watch the video tutorial, but read on to see why I really like this product!

Video Tutorial / Demo

A video is worth a thousand words, so here’s both a demo and a deep dive tutorial on how to use this powerful product:

Click here for the YouTube Page

Here’s the before and after of the image edited in the video:

You can download this preset from within the Texture Effects Grid View Browser and searching the community presets for the word ronmartblog.

Product Tour

Main Interface (Click for a larger view)

When you start the product you are greeted with a user interface that will seem familiar to Impression and Glow users, but this is a significantly faster and more powerful variant. Whereas Impression was painful to use because it was so slow when it first came out, Ii never had any performance issues on my 5 year old system with Windows 10.

At its core the user-interface is designed for users to browse the massive library of over 130 customizable effects to create great images in a single click. However, the power of this product lies in its customization which starts with an extremely advanced layering system that is faster and nearly on par with Photoshop:

Example Adjustment Stack

With support for duplicate layers, show/hide, delete, reset and drag & drop reordering – this is the best layering system I’ve seen outside Photoshop itself.

In addition, some adjustment layers support custom masks and there’s global mask support (handy for Lightroom users). Here’s what the masking module looks like for both:

Masking Module

Within the adjustment layers are lots of options, but one of the more powerful ones is the namesake Textures adjustment shown here:

Texture Adjustment Module

Textures can be used with support for modifying the look and feel as well as blending mode and opacity of the texture. To help manage your textures, an extremely handy Texture Manager is available as shown here:

Texture Manager shown with
Trey Ratcliff's Textures (sold separately – discount available)

If you are like me and many other photographers you probably take photos for use as textures and have them scattered all over the place. This is FINALLY the product that allows you to collect them in logical order and actual use them in a powerful way!

In addition to textures there’s support for keeping track of your borders and more. Like Analog Efex Pro and others, there’s also Light Leak support but again with support for the texture manager to keep track of any you have made or collected over time…

Light Leak Adjustment Module

Viewing all of the presets can be a challenge, but the effect grid view browser shown here makes it much easier:

Effect Grid View Browser

With support for filtering as well as viewing online community contributions, it is a great way to see how YOUR image will look with the countless number of effects available. Thankfully there’s also options to sort by newest and most downloaded as well as searching by name.

This is a well thought out UI that just works great right off the bat. I love it and now want to see these features in Impression and Glow!

Conclusion

Initially I didn’t think too much of this product, but when I jumped in and user the interface realized it was a lot more than I expected. While it is sold as a texture product, it’s really a powerful multi-layer preset tool that offers community integration as well. In fact, I wish they would have taken the best of Restyle, Impression and Glow and merged them all into this one product with this fast and powerful user interface.

By the time I was done, I started to think that this is much of what onOne Software has been trying to do for years with its products like PhotoFrame, Perfect Layers, and more (now part of Photo 10) – but this one does it without crashing and is fast and easy to use.

Don’t let the simpleton name fool you – this is a powerful product that is worth a look. It’s also an amazing bargain, so at least check out the free trial! I highly recommend this product even if textures aren’t your thing as it makes for a great preset builder!

Stand alone or integrated it works the same – and it’s very fast! Lightroom users are going to love this!

Where to order

CLICK HERE to learn more and order!

From now until November 20th you can use the coupon code TEXTUREFX to get this amazing product for under $50! Afterwards you can use my discount coupon code to get the best price on the web on any (or all) Topaz Labs products. Here’s a screen shot to show you how to use coupon codes:

Enter the coupon code and click Apply Coupon

Disclosure

If you make a purchase using links found in this article, I may make a commission. It doesn’t cost you a penny more, but it does help to support future articles like this.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Photo Thoughts – Beezerker Overhead (Background Replacement)

Mouse over to see before, mouse out to see after Copyright © Ron Martinsen – ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Mouse over (or click on iOS) to see the before shot

I was recently doing a shot for a client where I wasn’t charging full price because they agreed to use one of my reject photos. I told them I could clean it up a bit and they could use it at a reduced rate because it wasn’t one I was going to be selling regularly like the others in the same series. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but sometimes we bite off more than we can chew!

The problem with this shot was that I had bumped the rotating knob on my 5D Mark II from manual to Aperture priority so the camera was taking shots at f/5.0 for 1/30 sec on ISO 100. Fortunately I was using my 16-35mm lens at 23mm so they came out clear, but the depth of field was terrible and the shot honestly was rather boring and unoriginal. That said, it did show of some important features of the product so it served a purpose and was still worth a sale.

When you hover over the original it seems pretty simple – just clean up the floor, give the color a little oomph and sharpen and voilà done. Well perhaps, but I’m a bit obsessive compulsive at times so I had to do more to make something I was happy with (and I’m not easy to please).

Here’s a look at my layers palette (after some work in Lightroom 3) after 8 hours of photo editing in the evenings over the last few days:

My Photoshop file after other Lightroom enhancements

Oops – so much for a quick sale on an okay shot! Smile with tongue out

So here’s what I did in Lightroom:

First boosted the exposure (+1.25) and enabled the camera profile for my lens camera combo to get my raw file looking okay.
Next I enabled lens correction to get rid of distortion caused by my 16-35mm lens.
After checking the clipping regions I decided to add 76 points of highlight recovery and 33 points of fill light.
I tinkered with the white balance but decided I liked the in-camera results best.
While I don’t show it here, I also cropped in closer to cut a seam from the concrete out of the photo.

These changes got me ready for Photoshop, so I exported my photo a Smart Object in case I wanted to make any more changes while in Photoshop. I always export as 16-bit ProPhoto so I have the most colors available while photo editing.

Mouse over to see before, mouse out to see after
Before/After Lightroom Modifications (cropping not shown)

Here’s what I did in Photoshop:

I started off by spending a lot of time cleaning up the floor using Content Aware Fill on my MacBook Pro using Photoshop CS5. I had to do small segments for the best results, so it was a little slow but the results were good. I then used the healing brush (mostly) and the clone stamp tool to finish up the remaining floor flaws and minor issues on the motorcycle.
The floor was looking good but still ugly so I just did a light Gaussian Blur to hide the remaining flaws. Of course to do this I had to create a mask just for the floor, so that’s where the time sync began. It looks simple, but the details around the edge of the motorcycle (including wires and spokes) it took some serious time. Most of it was done with tricks I learned in Scott Kelby’s amazing The Photoshop Channels Book but there were still a few stubborn spots. For those I experimented with Mask Pro and Remask 3 and both helped with some of the tough spots, but neither could fix the most challenging problem – the spokes.

The reason why the spokes were so hard was because I shot at f/5 so they were blurring out which meant there weren’t strong lines at their edges, so I had to hand paint those parts of the mask. Thank God for the Wacom Tablet as this required me to zoom in to 491% and have a tiny 5 pixel brush so I could get all the fine details masked. In some cases I had to guess because it was hard to tell where the spoke ended and the concrete began. This won’t be a billboard shot, so exact 100% precision isn’t necessary – if it was I’d pick another shot or do a reshoot!

Masking 90% of the motorcycle took 15 minutes. Masking the spokes and rear kickstand (which was very out of focus) took A LOT of time. Total masking time – 5 hours (estimated)
With a good mask things are easy, so it was all smooth sailing from here right? Uh, well almost! Next up I moved back to my PC and CS4 (where I’m just more comfortable) and used Noiseware (default setting) to get rid of some of the noise caused by a hot sensor from a day of shooting under hot lights and a lot of live view.
With a clean floor and a nice mask I used the most popular filter I know of that is loved by pros everywhere – Nik Software’s Tonal Contrast from Color Efex. This gave the image some oomph, but it wasn’t appropriate for the metal “torso” of the motorcycle because it caused the metal to look like it was tarnishing.
At this point I thought I’d just throw a texture down on the floor and call it a day. Of course, what texture should I use? Fortunately I own the StuckInCustoms Textures Ultimate Package so I had a lot to choose from. I ended up using 4 of them at various opacities (shown above) in a Soft Light blending mode. I also had one of my own that was variant I had created before using other textures from my StuckInCustoms package.

I was happy with my floor but it wasn’t exactly the shade I wanted so I made a gamma adjustment using an Exposure adjustment layer.
I stuck all of these changes in a group (and nested the stock textures in a group for this article) and applied my mask to just apply it to the floor. I then adjusted the opacity of the group to 73% to make it look more like a floor rather than a floating texture.
With the floor done I sent out what I had to some friends to get advice and one pointed out that my floor wasn’t reflecting in the metal – DOH!!!!! What now??? Fortunately the fix wasn’t too hard. I just combined all of my texture layers into their own layer WITHOUT a mask and then showed that layer at a low opacity over the tonal contrast layer. I merged those two and then I created a black mask to hide everything. Next I painted in the areas where I wanted it to reflect (side surfaces, but not top surfaces) using various levels of opacity with my brush while masking. The result was enough to convince a small sample audience that I had shot on a cool painted muslin floor panel so I was happy and moved on.
I used Color Efex to create a vignette around the edges to keep the viewers eye in the image and I used U-Point controls to keep the vignette off the motorcycle (important). It seemed okay so I sharpened the image using Sharpener Pro and called it a day.
Once again I sent the photo out for feedback and the feedback mirrored my own thoughts – it was still a little flat and the eyes wandered around the page. To fix the wandering eyes problem I used Apply Image as shown below to darken the image up:

Notice that I applied my layer at the bottom inverted so it just applied to the floor and I used a 80% opacity soft light layer of a RGB image. The net result of this is that it darkens your image by using copies of the RGB channels as a blending mode source. This I pretty complicated but well demonstrated (using the LAB channel) in Scott Kelby’s 7 Point System (a must read).
Now my floor was good but I wanted to give that vignette more oomph. What i really wanted was the “Edge Effects – PC Vignette 2” from Lightroom 3, but I was in Photoshop. So I just saved my file, went to Photoshop and exported my file as a PSD (full size, no sharpening) and moved that layer into my stack. I now had my nice vignette and I used a layer mask to block out the parts I didn’t need.
I placed my logo and lowered its opacity to 37% so it didn’t attract too much attention. I added a drop shadow to make it easier to read against the texture. It’s there, it’s readable (at the intended output sizes) but it isn’t obnoxious.
I dropped in my logo and printed it just so I could get an idea of how it would print (this was for a magazine). The first result was terrible because Relative Colormetric was the wrong rendering intent, but it also pointed out that my image was too dark (oops, forgot to do my mandatory brighten). I saw this on the display, but I was tired and not thinking. I boosted my curves by one square as shown below which is what I always do when I finish editing my photos as I have a tendency to edit too dark (my problem – not my equipment):

While this shot took me a lot longer to fix than I planned, I’m happy with the result mostly thanks to my textured floor. It gave this image something it was sorely lacking – some color with some oomph. As the person who shot the photo (and you now that you are in my head) I see plenty of flaws, but it’s good enough for the intended purpose.

In case you are wondering, the total file size was 977MB on disk (1.3GB in memory in Photoshop). I rather waste disk space than waste time by having to redo everything if I need or want to make change somewhere in my workflow later, so I keep my layers (and describe them well).

A Word about Sharpening

There are three times that I and many others sharpen their image. The first is pre-sharpening which is what I do in Lightroom (very light), the second is creative sharpening (i.e., getting it to look as sharp as I want it to look for my artistic intent) and I did that above as one of my last steps. It should be my last step, but sometimes shit happens and it just doesn’t work that way. Personally I don’t lose sleep over it, but purist will faint when they see that.

The final sharpening is when you size your image in its final output size and you export it to the web or print it. If I’m exporting to the web I usually just use Lightroom 3 and choose the Sharpen Screen High setting (sometimes I may have to dial this back). If I’m sending I to the printer then I’ll do print sharpening with Nik Software’s Sharpener Pro as shown below:

Print Output Sharpening WILL look ugly on screen but the Nik defaults
for your paper and printer resolution make it idiot proof

Printing

I needed to print this image to see how it would look for my client who intends to print it in various magazines and publications. I was pretty happy with the background so I decided to make a nice print for myself to hang in my studio. I did a 16x24” (at 300ppi) for printing on my Canon iPF6300 using Lexjet Sunset Metallic paper.

To start I had to resize my image as shown here:

I trust Perfect Resize 7 for my critical resizing projects

Here’s my printer driver settings for this job (note screen capture software doesn’t portray colors accurately):

Perceptual “Matching Method” using the Lexjet Sunset Metallic Media Type are the way to go!

Borderless looks great and I don’t mind the minor resizing
by the driver to get the bleed necessary to do this

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed seeing this behind the scenes look of how I edited this photo. The books and tools mentioned in this article were a critical part of the process so I highly recommend them. I really do use the stuff I recommend and here’s proof as to how.

I’d love to see your thought process and learn your tricks. Feel free to post your Photo Thoughts on the forums. If you have any trouble with the forums be sure to mail me using the contact info on this web site.

Disclosure

I may get a commission if you purchase the products mentioned in this article. Thanks for supporting my blog by using my links and discount coupon code page!

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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Topaz Labs Texture Effects 1.1 Update Now Available – Save up to 28% off Topaz Products! (new coupon codes)

Where to order (SPECIAL OFFER)

ronmart

EASYTEXTURE

Other articles you may enjoy

Disclosure

Thursday, November 12, 2015

REVIEW/Tutorial: Topaz Labs Texture Effects 1.0

Video Tutorial / Demo

Product Tour

Conclusion

Where to order

Other articles you may enjoy

Disclosure

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Photo Thoughts – Beezerker Overhead (Background Replacement)

A Word about Sharpening

Printing

Conclusion

Disclosure