Back From China

3 weeks
35 pounds of camera gear
in a sling backpack
100 degree weather
100% humidity

resulting in

lost 3 pounds
~3800 photos
24 gigabytes

See Flickr for the shots as they trickle through my workflow.

Color Enhancement & Sharpening - Part 3

Part 3 covers the use of curves and shows a different type of curve fot the color enhancement.

This one is hosted on Google videos since Youtube has a 10 minute length limit. Sorry to those who have subscribed to my Youtube channel. I'll try to figure something out.

Part 3 is Crunching Away

I think I've figured out the keyframe zoom thing on Premiere. I find it easier to use the Effects Control window. I had thought that right clicking on the clips would get me to the right context menu, but that just led me down a rat hole.

Now it's crunching away, 9 more hours to go. The Camtasia editor computes faster, but the results are junk, as evidenced by part 1. Plus the Camtasia editor barfs after you get too many edit points in the project file. Memory leak!

Color Enhancement & Sharpening - Part 2

This was delayed due to issues with the Camtasia video editor. Apparently they don't support the features listed on the box. I did this one with Premiere. Sorry for the jerky zooms and transitions, I'm still learning.

Video Generation Troubles

I have run into some glitches in generating the videos.

It turns out that if you want to use any of the great features of the Camtasia editor, you end up crashing every 10 minutes. Camtasia has all the features you could want for this kind of work, but if you get to many edit commands in the project file, it gets unstable. Pretty nasty.

Their tech support has nicely said, if it hurts, don't do it. Bite me.

Color Enhancement & Sharpening - Part 1

Color Enhancement and Sharpening

I've done a 3 part video tutorial on how to get brighter colors and sharper details in a photo. These methods are variations of what is outlined in the Flickr group Photoshop Support Group. This is the place to go for helpful advice without the flaming of newbies that goes on in other places. A very friendly place.

Part 1:
Enhance the colors by adding a curves adjustment layer and use the layer mask and opacity to control the effect.

Part 2:
Duplicate the background and sharpen the photo. Use a mask to keep parts from getting over sharpened. It is rare that one level of sharpness works across the entire photo.

Part 3:
An alternate approach to the curves shown in part 1.

Photo Tip of the Day...

Or tip of today. Whichever.

After taking pictures on a tripod, (not OF a tripod), turn off mirror lockup right away. This way you won't embarrass yourself the next day when you are trying to take a headshot of your boss for a web site.

3-Layer Orton Lanterns Photo Featured on Photojojo

Photojojo has featured my Lunar New Year Lantern photo when they linked to my 3-Layer Orton tutorial video.


The Photojojo post is seen here.

Camelia Generated using the 3 Layer Orton Effect

Really better if you view it large on a black gackground.

3 Layer Orton Video Tutorial

OK........

The video is uploaded. Enjoy!



The Flickr Orton group is here.

A discussion thread is here.

3 Layer Orton

I've just recorded a video that shows how I am now doing most of my post processing.

-It was captured in one take, a little less than 10 minutes long.

-I installed Adobe Premiere Elements, 15 minutes.

-I learned how to zoom in on the video using camera controls, 30 minutes.

-I edited the titles and the zooms, 60 minutes.

-Rendering the video? Priceless, or about 23 hours and still going.

That will teach me to do this on my main PC (1.7G Pentium-M). Unfortunately, Premiere isn't compiled for the native Itanium instruction set, so I can't run it on my 64 Socket Itanium system. That's 128 cores. I figure it would render in a few minutes on that box.

Oh well.