6 hours to Photoshop a picture?

It's been some time since my last post. My day job plus blogging on Contest Junkie can sometimes be really tiring. Since my priority is on Contest Junkie, I will only blog on Dallas Eye when I have the time.

I've dissapeared for more than a week! So what have I been up to?


As some of your might know, Adobe recently released Photoshop CS5. As a big fan of photoshop, of course I would love to get my hands on it and try some of the new technologies.

To try out the features of Photoshop CS5, I've started working on a picture and see what CS5 can do, and how quickly. Over the week, I've spent about 6 hours to edit the following picture. It's all part of the plan of learning how to do layer masking. It's a very powerful tool where the user can alter parts of the picture without affecting the rest.

What has been done?
1) Used Content Aware to remove all distractions in the picture
2) Selected all the sky (including those caught in the tree brunches)
3) Created 2 layer mask (One for the sky, and another for the rest)
4) Created 3rd layer mask for the tent
5) Edited 3 photos seperately in Lightroom for each layer mask
6) Recombine and did various touch ups like colour balance, high pass, noise reduction, contrast/brightness, Hue/saturation.
7) Flatten image and sent to back to Lightroom for final processing.

And there! How I wasted 6 hours...

Camera settings:
Focal length: 17mm
F-stop: f/4
Exposure time: 1/1250
ISO:100
Exposure bias: -0.7 step
Handheld

Original photo:

Yeah... wasted 6 hours on what can be done in 30 mins...

My Little Butterfly Pet!

Finally, my first macro shot of a butterfly! I always wanted one, but always missed the shot as I'm restricted to the low magnification, and short focal length of my lens.

So while strolling home after a evening jog, I found a cute little butterfly on the floor at the sidewalk. It, like a 5D mark II with an L lens, caught my eye immediately and I took it home in a makeshift grass home.

At home, I took it from it's grass home, but it didn't fly away. So I took out my camera and started snapping at the little butterfly. How cooperative! I had my fill and placed it into a cupboard home, for playing tomorrow.

Want to see my new pet? Here you go!



Camera settings:
Focal length: 55mm
F-stop: f/10
Exposure time: 1.3 second
ISO: 100
Exposure bias -0.7 step
Tripod mounted

Love it?

Cute Pink Flowers!

I'm dying to get some sun. Seriously, an office job isn't the best for me. Stuck in the office, no sun, no sweat, no photos. I wished I could work as a photographer, an apprentice for a master photographer, anything to polish my skills.

Enough of day dreaming. Today, I had a crazy idea to trying out my zoom lens, 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6, on some of my favourite flowers at Hort Park. Reason being, the depth of field at 250mm is shallow, and it should make a very nice background blur. However, the sunlight wasn't strong enough and caused my shutter speed to slow, and tada! Lots of blur pictures. By the way, the rule of thumb for taking a clear picture is 1/(focal length at 35mm equivalent). Cut the story short, it means I need about 1/350 second to get a nice clear shot. So I ended up using my favourite O' 18-55 kit lens.

Now to the photo. I bet you've seen its red buddies all around singapore, along the road, in parks, everywhere! But when do you see pink ones? Enjoy this picture taken by my trusty noob kit lens!



Camera settings
Focal length: 55mm
F-stop: f/5.6
Exposure time: 1/30 second
ISO: 100
Exposure bias: -0.7 step
Handheld

Editing:
High pass
Dodge and burns
clone stamp tool
tone curve changes
Clarity
colour saturation changes
Noise reduction (x2)