I am teaching a workshop on shooting Pinup photos, next Thursday Dec 10th. If you are local and interested, sign-up and join us. Details can be found on Meetup.com

Stumbled across this blog post today and it has some great information.

http://www.noupe.com/photoshop/60-most-wanted-photoshop-tutorials-brushes-psds-and-resources.html

Just browsing though it, there are way more than 60 tutorials. In fact what this is, is a list of 60 lists of tutorials. So this list represents 1000s of tutorials.

A lot of the tutorials cover the same topics (I counted 12 talking about HDR), but there are some real gems in there. I especially liked some of the tutorials in 50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials

I purchased a Canon 5DmkII yesterday so I’m am selling my Canon 50D body and an EF-S Lens.

Canon 50D - includes box and all items that come new - Canon battery, manuals, strap, CDs, cables, charger + an extra battery. Purchased on 10/2/08 and has about 28K clicks. Still looks great, no significant wear or scratches. Price - $875 including Paypal and shipping in ConUS

Canon EFS 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM Lens - comes with box, lens hood, lens caps, and instructions. This lens has been used for a total of 3K shots and is in great condition. No scratches or blemishes on the lens. Just purchased a 5DMkII so no longer can use this lens. Price - $850 including Paypal and shipping in ConUS

Ni Ki Cruz Photography Mediacast [09-199D]: Photo Walk Conversation with Craig Colvin

I participated in the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk yesterday and had a great time. Carlos of Ni Ki Cruz Photography did a video inteview with me after the photo walk and you can watch it on BlipTV

The Photo Walk was a lot of fun, I got some great photos which I will posting soon

Stumbled across this blog post today and it has some great information.

http://www.noupe.com/photoshop/60-most-wanted-photoshop-tutorials-brushes-psds-and-resources.html

Just browsing though it, there are way more than 60 tutorials. In fact what this is, is a list of 60 lists of tutorials. So this list represents 1000s of tutorials.

A lot of the tutorials cover the same topics (I counted 12 talking about HDR), but there are some real gems in there. I especially liked some of the tutorials in 50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials

I was talking recently with another photographer and he was showing me his portfolio, it was very nice and I asked him about his post-processing techniques. He explained his a very elaborate technique that produces incredibily sharp and colorful photos, and said he does it to every photo. I then asked what he was shooting these days and he explained he had not shot a new photo in 18 months. When I inquired why, he explained he had a huge backlog of photos to post-process and until he had processed all of them he couldn’t afford to shoot any more.

While this is an extreme example, I know a lot of photographers, who have a large backlog of photos waiting to be post-processed. I often find myself in a similar situation, shooting 2 or 3 days a week, 1000+ photos and then not having the time to do all the processing I would like. If you are in the same boat, here are a few tips to reduce that backlog.

- Cull, cull, cull. After a shoot find the 3 to 10 “hero” shots (this is a term I picked up from Fredrick Johnson who does the TWIP podcast http://frederickvan.com/).  These are the ones I work on. If I have time I can always go back and select more. (BTW this doesn’t apply to family vacation shots, there I narrow it down to 50 to 75.)

- Reduce your post-processing steps. My full post-processing involves making adjustments in Lightroom for exposure, contrast, vibrance, etc. Then going to Photoshop for cloning, dodging/burning, skin smoothing etc, then back to Lightroom for cropping, adding vignettes, etc. Many photos can get by without doing the Photoshop steps. I try to determine when I import the photos if I intend to do the full Photoshop treatment and often determine that just a quick fix in Lightroom will be sufficient.

- Automate your post-processing steps. Create actions in Photoshop to do your common retouching steps. Create a Droplet for common tasks like resizing, or adding watermarks. If you find yourself repeating the same multiple steps on every photo, figure out if it can be automated into a single step. If you use Lightroom use presets. I setup presets for Lightroom that make the incoming photo look like the JPG preview coming out of the camera. On import I apply that preset to all of the photos and often don’t have to do any other adjustment to the photo.

- Use Plug-ins. I used to remove noise and smooth skin manually in Photoshop. This was a tedious process and was taking the bulk of my post-processing time. I recently purchased NoiseNinja and Portraiture and reduced my post-processing time by 45 minutes.

- Know the intended Audience. Do you really need to do all that post-processing? Yes, it makes the photos look better, but perhaps they would be fine being “good enough”. This often depends on the intended audience for the photos. If the photo is going go into your portfolio used to attract new customers/models then you should take the time to do the best possible, but if it just a bunch of shots from a party with friends, yes, you could make them look perfect, but your friends aren’t going to care as much as you do. Let it go, often it’s more important to get it out there quick than perfect.

I still have a backlog of photos to process but using the above techniques it’s getting smaller and smaller. More importantly it doesn’t grow significantly after each shoot.

My new photography web site is now ready. It is primarily to display my portfolio of photos in a little more organized fashion than flickr. Check it out at www.craigcolvinphotography.com

Beverley

Originally uploaded by Moose408

My post-processing work flow has been fairly stable for the past 6 months. This is actually a fairly long time for it to be stable as work flows should evolve over time. Well it’s time for it to evolve because I recently discovered a flaw in the flow.

My normal process was to import into Lightroom, do the RAW adjustments, crop, rotate and then move into Photoshop for the final processing, then back to Lightroom for exporting. This has been working very well, but the past few weeks I have a couple of instances where I need a different aspect ratio for the photo. My original crop wouldn’t work and the change involved a large crop. Since I had already done all my Photoshop post-processing on a smaller crop, this presented a problem.

My options for increasing the size of the photo where to either edit the Photoshop file, stretch the canvas and then paint/clone/etc the background to fill in the missing pieces. Or re-crop the photo in Lightroom, then redo all my edits in Photoshop. Neither of these were ideal.

So based on recent experience I am changing my work flow so that cropping is the last thing I do before exporting. I will do this in Lightroom on the final Photoshop .psd file, so that it can be changed easily. This should give me the maximum flexibility going forward.

We’ll see how it works.

Golden Gate Bridge

Originally uploaded by Moose408

I have uploaded new photos from the Keeble and Schuchat Alcatraz Workshop to my Flickr account.

I have been trying to pare down the number of photos I post to Flickr from a given event and was hoping to get it down to just 3 or 4 photos but there were so many photos I liked and realized if I didn’t post them they would just be hidden on my hard drive forever. So I think I ended up with 16 new photos. But each bit has been lovingly handcrafted for your viewing pleasure.