Photo Quickies

• PhotoQuickie also has hazy photos from China, perhaps this approach will fix them, but we don’t count on it.
• Another challenge we find is to stabilize our camera when we don’t have a tripod, here are some great tips especially a bean bag!
• A Photoshop tutorial to post-process portraits in a Lichtenstein style. PhotoQuickie tried it but it takes some dedication to get good results.

PhotoQuickie first read about the Lomo effect from the A-list blogger Kottke, way back before we were even interested in photography. It seemed a bit neat, but we had no idea why we would want to use something like that, nor why it made photos better.

Well, PhotoQuickie was fooling around with Photoshop the other day, and decided to take a new stab about the Lomo effect. What is the Lomo effect anyways? Well it is the style of photography produced by LOMO cameras, frequently characterized by vignetting on the corners and saturated colours. PhotoQuickie understands better by seeing an example, so here is one:

Post-processing your digital photos with this effect is rather easily done by following a tutorial such as this. PhotoQuickie quickly got tired of following these instructions over and over and created a Photoshop action as suggested in the tutorial.

PhotoQuickie has had more success (to our eyes at least) however with this slightly more challenging tutorial to achieve the Lomo effect, which uses curves. I suggest trying a few with the former then moving on the to latter to get a much better presentation.

Read more about: lomography, many things lomo,

PhotoQuickie has been going on quite a few trips lately, to places that we’ve never been to before, so it is with much enthusiasm that we take our pictures. Besides the weather, the one annoyance for us is the sheer amount of tourists at well, the tourist attractions. They, for the most part, share PhotoQuickie’s excitement of being somewhere new and are taking photos as well. So our photos are littered with shutterbugs blocking the beautiful views.

The trick that we have found to solve this problem is to wake up bright and early to get the best shots. While there are still some early risers around, we stand a better chance to take a fabulous, people-free picture. PhotoQuickie works for our shots, and this is no exception. We would love to be able to relax and sleep in!

PhotoQuickie’s days of stumbling around bleary eyed, trying to see through the viewfinder may be over with the help of Tourist Remover that we found while surfing. It seems very magical but we’re not too sure whether we would completely embrace this option (we think there must be a catch somewhere).

PhotoQuickie has been experimenting with tilt-shift photography, well that is to say modifying some of our photos with a tilt-shift effect. What is tilt-shift? Well PhotoQuickie can’t really give you a complete definition, but pictures with this effect are easy to identify; the objects in focus look like little toys.

Given proper source material, applying the tilt-shift effect can have startling results. Being still an amateur, We hardly have good results. So here is a blog with tilt-shift photos that PhotoQuickie finds amazing. Another great source for examples and help is the Flickr Tilt-shift Minature Fakes Group.

After seeing some examples, PhotoQuickie was enthusiastic about trying this ourselves. We looked for some tutorials online and found excellent step-by-step instructures to duplicate the tilt-shift effect in Photoshop (a key step that is missing is to invert the selection before the lens blur). The second option we encounter was to build our own tilt-shift lens (of course we are too poor to buy a TS lens, and have lenses of higher priority to buy first), but that seems somewhat ghetto to our eye.

Read more about: What is a tilt-shift lens, tilt-shift photographers and their work,

Recently, PhotoQuickie was taking photos indoors at an event, and being the observant photographer, we changed our white balance to the little light bulb icon (which stands for tungsten, the material of the wire in a light bulb that generates the light). Unfortunately, our beautiful photograph had a strongly blue tint.

We opened up our photo editing program, today’s choice being Photoshop to try and fix it. To our surprise, fixing white balance is actually very simple. We opened the image, the went to the “Image” menu, went to the “Adjustments” option and selected “Auto Color”. That’s it! and it worked like a charm.

Seeing how it was not complicated, we tried to do the same thing in Picasa, the photo organizational tool from Google. Again, it was done with a click of the button; double click the image and select “Auto Color”. Although PhotoQuickie has a warning about a feature of Picasa, which is alternatively a pro and a con; the editing changes that we made in Picasa are not saved onto the original file, and so to send off our fixed picture to friends and family, we would need to select the picture and use the export function on the main screen.

Read more about: White Balance, Fixing WB in Photoshop

Personally, PhotoQuickie hardly has any black and white photos but we look forward to having some fun with this neat utility.

Recolored is an application for Windows which helps you do the reverse of the greyscale option in Photoshop; it adds color back to your pictures. It’s currently in beta and free for non-commerical use, so download it and give it a try before deciding whether to buy the commercial v1.0 release in the future.

PhotoQuickie thinks that we’ll make some black and white pictures, and then recolor them in a different color scheme. Very trippy.

PhotoQuickie has discovered a neat little utility created by the intelligent minds at Microsoft Research which will let us easily create the perfect group picture. We sometimes take multiple shots of the same picture in the hopes that our shakey hands will be surgeon-like for at least one picture. Now we can take the best elements from all our shots and make a photo worthy of framing.

Well, we hope. PhotoQuickie hasn’t had a chance to try this out yet. Let us know how it works!

Download Microsoft Research’s Group Shot

PhotoQuickie has been busy in the new year, but we wanted to drop a note about a link we came across this morning on how to take professional photos without a professional.

Rather than take the odds of accidently taking an amazing photo, Lindsay Landis demonstrates how by using a little technique and a little photo editing, we can show our photos at our next family gathering without being embarrassed.

PhotoQuickie’s noticed an interesting thing in our world, surprisingly many buildings seem to be influenced by the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Extremely skeptical about the sanity of this idea, we did some research into why the buildings centered in our photos were straight and those near the edges were crooked.

PhotoQuickie can happily confess that it is due to a phenomenon called Barrel Distortion and not a new trend in architecture. Quickly, barrel distortion makes the outer areas of our photos curved due to the spherical nature of the lens. Here’s a cropped example.

The building on the right is more or less straight (PhotoQuickie can assure you that we were not drunk while taking this picture), while there is a noticable gap seen in the blue rectangle between the building and the vertical line.

There is hardly anything that PhotoQuickie can do about our camera’s barrel distortion (aside from keeping it in mind when buying a new camera). For the photos on the other hand, we can doctor them with our favorite photo editing software. PhotoQuickie’s friends who are using Photoshop can try these easy tips from Ken Rockwell to fix up barrel distortion in their photos.

Read more about: Barrel Distortion,