PictureCorrect.com: How to Make More Precise Selections in Photoshop: Topaz ReMask

Creating masks/selections within photos can be difficult, tedious and time consuming, but good masks make it easy to replace unwanted backgrounds, create compositions and more. ReMask is a helpful Photoshop plugin designed to help photographers through this issue and is considered by many to be the holy grail of Photoshop tools. If you spend time working on and perfecting your photos in Photoshop now is a good time to give ReMask a try as it is currently 20% off this week only. Deal found here: Topaz ReMask at 20% Off

Topaz ReMask for Advanced Photoshop Selections (Click to See How It Works)

Thousands of photographers use ReMask every day to replace backgrounds, create composites and make selective adjustments.

Performance Highlights:

Masking Made Easy – Using the brush tools, simply paint over elements to create a trimap – ReMask will do the rest! Five different previews along with side-by-side comparison screens make it easy to see where your work is perfect and where touch-ups are needed.

Easily extract even the toughest elements — hair, foliage, and transparent materials.

Spend More Time Creating – Activate the Magic Brush for clean and accurate refinements. Simply swipe the brush, then sit back and enjoy the show. ReMask instantly recalculates the section based on characteristics of your keep and cut areas. There isn’t a better tool for making a perfect cutout.

Make Landscapes Skies more Engaging

Make Selective Adjustments so your Subject Will Shine

The Secret to Perfect Masks – Have you ever spent hours or days trying to mask a wedding veil, tree, or your curly-haired niece? With ReMask, you’ll never walk away from your computer with furrowed brows and tired eyes again. The Color Range and Transparency Brushes are designed specifically for these situations so you can focus on what’s important: Deciding which colors stay and go. These tools are especially useful for hard-to-mask areas like hair and fur.

Select and isolate photos subjects for further adjustment (see examples here)

“Our main focus is to give you the best quality mask from minimal user interaction. Compared with Photoshop, ReMask doesn’t need tedious brush work to get a high quality mask. You only need to roughly outline your subject and press ‘Compute’.” -Ben Ma, Topaz Senior Software Designer

How to Get ReMask for a Discount Today:

Topaz Labs announced that they are holding a flash sale on ReMask this week only for 20% off. The tool is very easy to install and then appears under your filters menu in Photoshop or other programs.

Deal found here: Topaz ReMask at 20% Off

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PictureCorrect.com: Interesting Photo of the Day: Giant of the Valley

If you enjoy landscape photography, especially snowy landscape photography, why not try and get a shot with a different perspective like this one from dan_discovers?

Dan took this spectacular image on the descent from Giant of the Valley in the Adirondacks on the trail at the beginning of sunset. Rather than go for the usual wide-open vista of the snowy landscape, Dan chose to concentrate on a small part of the scene instead, and it really works.

“Giant of the Valley on the Descent at Sunset” (Via Imgur. Click image to see full size.)

The sunset colors are amazing, and the framing of the snow-covered trees provides great contrast. Dan says he prefers to go there in winter, as he thinks it’s much prettier, and it isn’t as crowded as it is in fall, when lots of people go to see the foliage turning color.

The hike to the summit was a long and arduous one, says Dan, but I think it was well worth it to catch an image like this.

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PictureCorrect.com: Eye-Catching Portraits on a Boring Background Photo Tutorial

Stuck at home? Lost for ideas? Have a boring wall? Think again. You may have everything you need, boring wall notwithstanding. What you’re missing is a fresh perspective. Highlight Your Wrinkles demonstrates:

Apart from some artificial lights, you’ll need a few pieces of foam core, which you can find at a hardware or craft store.

Cut some shapes out of the foam core.

Place the foam core against your external light source to cast a checkered shadow on your model. See how creative you can get with a pencil knife; the shapes will ultimately determine how the images turn out.

Experiment with the placement of the shapes. Moving them closer or farther away from light changes the shape and intensity of the shadow.

Try different props and experiment with the camera angle.

Your plain, boring background is no longer plain and boring!

For further training: The Art of Portrait Photography

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PictureCorrect.com: Aperture and Shutter: Science of the F-stop

We all use cameras in our day to day lives. However, most of us know nothing more about the devices than “point and shoot”. If you ever wondered how to take portrait photos of a subject with a blurred background, or how they take those pictures of trailing lights or water across a landscape, keep reading.

Light. We see it every day, and just like how we see light, a camera does the same thing. In dim light, our pupils dilate to bring in more light, so we can see better. In bright light, our pupils contract to restrict the amount of light so we can see without being blinded.

Photo by summertime.sadness; ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/100-second exposure.

A camera will do this same thing. The aperture of a lens is the opening at which light passes through. For most lenses, this opening can change based on the camera’s settings. These opening have been standardized into specific sizes, called aperture stops, or F-stops.

If you’ve ever bought an SLR camera, then you may have seen the F-stop numbers and not know what it meant. You may have seen it represented like so: f/2.8 – f/5.6. This means that this lens makes a range of openings from the 2.8 stop to the 5.6 stop. Just what does it all mean?

Follow me closely: The larger the F-stop number is, the smaller the opening is. In other words, the larger number represents the lower end of the scale, less light entering the camera. A smaller F-stop number means the opening is larger, more light entering the camera.

Photo by Deraman Uskratzt; ISO 400, f/1.8, 1/1250-second exposure.

Aperture goes hand and hand with the shutter. The shutter is what lets light hit the film (or digital receiver). Remember, the aperture controls how much light enters, and the shutter lets that light hit the film.

Shutter speed is simply the length of time that the shutter remains open to let light hit the film. It is directly dependent on the aperture and the F-stop, because the amount of light entering the camera through the aperture determines how long the shutter remains open. With each F-stop, the shutter speed will increase or decrease in step. Naturally, a larger F-stop number (remember, smaller opening), requires a slower shutter speed. A smaller opening means less light is reaching the film, so it needs more time to create a picture or exposure.

A smaller F-stop number (remember, larger opening), requires a faster shutter speed. Less time is needed to create the exposure.

Opening and closing a shutter is like opening and closing your eyes. If you open and close your eyes quickly, you can not see very much, and only what’s immediately in front of you may be in focus. However, if you leave your eyes open, much more may be in focus. This same principle applies to- you guessed it, the F-stop. How much of what’s in front of you that’s in focus is called depth of field.

A smaller F-stop will have a faster shutter speed, thus it would have less of a depth of field than a larger F-stop. This means that smaller F-stops (larger opening) are great for portraits, where the main subject of the photo is a person. By the same coin, larger F-stops (smaller opening) are great for landscape shots, where there is huge landscape that is the main subject.

So how to we go about making special effects?

Let’s say, for example, we want to make a car or a fast moving person appear to be frozen in time, with no blur. We would want a quick shutter speed, because a slow shutter speed would capture too much light, essentially capturing too much in time, blurring the shot. A quick shutter speed would also mean a smaller F-stop. This would also mean that we have a diminished depth of field. Bottom line: Quick shutter speed = smaller F-stop number = more light being let in (larger opening) = less in focus (smaller depth of field) = frozen time, focused subject, blurred background.

Photo by georgemoga; ISO 100, f/4.0, 5-second exposure.

Let’s say we see a fountain. We want to show the water as moving and flowing. If we take a picture with the settings in the previous example, we would see droplets of water frozen in time. We want to show movement, and encourage blur in the water. So what do we do?

To begin on this example, we have to know what causes blur. We already know depth of field blur, but what about motion blur? When the camera opens it’s shutter, it makes a permanent impression on the film (or digital receiver). If the shutter is held open too long and the subject moves or the camera moves, this shows on the film as blur, almost like smudging a painting. So rest assured, when a photo is blurred, the camera is functioning as intended!

For this photo, the only thing moving should be the water. Any slight movements of the camera will ruin the whole effect. The F-stop would need to be a high number, which would mean the shutter is left open longer because there is less light reaching the film. More of the picture would be in focus as well. Slow shutter speed = larger F-stop number = less light being let in (smaller opening) = more in focus (larger depth of field) = illusion of movement at higher F-stops, focused subject, focused background.

About the Author:
Chris Sawyer, aka “Zacarias” runs a technology based discussion board, hi! Technotic (site currently down) Technology based discussion boards.

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PictureCorrect.com: Interesting Photo of the Day: Mystery Dog Accompanies Hiker in Himalayas

Maybe our canine friends enjoy beautiful scenery just as much as we do. In today’s featured photo, a stray dog seems to take in the majestic expanse of snow-dusted Himalayan mountains:

Stray dog joins hiker on Himalayan trek. Photo captured by Sebastian Wahlhuetter. (Via 500px. Click for larger image.)

Photographer Sebastian Wahlhuetter captured the shot while hiking in the Himalayan Mountains. He related how the dog was a constant companion to him and his traveling partners over the course of their week-long trek:

This dog just appeared out of nowhere and followed us for an entire week during our trekking trip in the Himalayan outback. He always used to sleep in front of our tent and guarded us in the nights. When I decided to get up at 4 a.m. to climb the next 5000 m peak for sunrise he accompanied me as well. On the top he was sitting for the entire 30 minutes on this place looking straight into the countryside. I’m normally quite reserved towards dogs, but this one became a real friend to me.

Wahlhuetter used a Canon EOS 5D Mark III camera at f/11 and 1/10 of a second.

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PictureCorrect.com: A Photographer’s Parable of the Broccoli Tree

In this day of social media, photographers have more power than they know. Unfortunately, once our work gets seen—and especially if it gets loved—things don’t always go they way we would like. Perhaps one of the most poignant examples of this is the story of the Broccoli Tree, as told in this brief but compelling video by the vlogbrothers:

The Broccoli Tree was a beautiful willow tree on the shore of Lake Vättern, Sweden that reminded photographer Patrik Svedberg of a stalk of broccoli. In May 2013, he began taking a photo of the tree on his daily commute to work. When he first posted it to Instagram it got just a handful of likes. Over the next few years though, his images of the tree began getting so many likes that he decided to create a dedicated Instagram account for it: @thebroccolitree.

From there he kept on, photographing the tree through the changing seasons, weather, and times of day. Eventually the tree had thousands of followers, most of whom would never see it in real life.

But in this world where sharing can happen at such a huge scale, there’s always the chance that it will reach someone who will delight in tearing down that which is loved. Maybe out of spite. Maybe out of a deep need to be noticed. Whatever the reason, the more people who share in the beauty, the more likely it will be found by the wrong people, too.

“Given enough time, such people will always cut down such trees.”

And in the end, you’ll wonder whether you should have shared at all. Should you have kept the beauty of the tree private, trying to keep it safe from the dangers of too much fame? Or was it worth sharing, since it became so much more than just about you? Hank Green of the vlogbrothers (and narrator of this clip) has this to say:

“The truth is, if we hoard and hide what we love, we can still lose it. Only then, we’re alone in the loss.”

If you’re finding yourself mourning for a tree you’ve never seen and perhaps never will, be comforted. The Broccoli Tree is a willow tree, and willows grow very fast. So fast, in fact, that cutting them down to a stump is a frequent park service practice–they quickly grow even more branches. Maybe not as quickly as we would like, and it still is a grievous crime, but if you’d really like to see it, it’ll be back in the not-too-distant-future.

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PictureCorrect.com: 5 Portrait Posing Tips for Men

How are men supposed to pose for photographs? It can be very difficult for some men to be in front of a camera. So, Pye Jirsa from SLR Lounge created this video to deliver five posing tips for men:

According to Jirsa, you want your male subjects to expand their presence and express masculinity. Here’s how to achieve that goal:

1. Open their stance with feet shoulder width apart

Have the toes pointed slightly outward.

2. Shift the hips to one side

It doesn’t matter left or right. Shifted hips create a more natural, relaxed pose.

3. Take a deep breath

This expands the chest and contracts the stomach for a more bold appearance.

4. Relax the shoulders

Let the shoulders hang back.

5. Do something with the hands

Try putting one hand in a pocket and letting the other one rest.

Notice any difference in the model’s posture and confidence? In just a minute, you learned five very easy ways to switch it up and instill some life into your male portraits. From here, you can adjust the position of their face and expression as you wish.

Did this tutorial help you at all?

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