When building out a site it can be hard to decide what colors to are the best and most complimentary to each other. In order to maximize the end user experience for those perusing your web page, a color scheme should be easy on the eyes as well as helpful in delivering emphasis where it is needed. Using RapidWeaver, it's really easy to bang out nice looking websites, but sometimes the color schemes can be hard to get right, if only because you can make your website any color you want.

To help in this process we can employ an easy way to bang out different colors using Adobe's kuler website in just 4 simple steps:

1) Pick a color scheme from kuler and then take a screenshot of it (snapndrag is what I use). You should get something like this:



2) To get this scheme into RapidWeaver, go into the page inspector, and, under colours, double click the color you want to choose:



3) A colors panel will come up, select the "Image Palettes" tab second from the right in the menu bar, it looks like a picture:



Ignore the top drop down menu and instead click on the drop menu where it says "Palette", you will now see an option, "New from Pasteboard", select it. This takes the screenshot you have made and transfers it to the color selection window. As you can see, its a mini replica of the screenshot you took from the kuler.com site.

4) Go through your Colours and make your selections with your new color swatch. I like palettes that have both dark and light colors so that text can display more clearly. If you don't have a lot of text, then almost any color palette will look smashing. Good luck with your new designs and colors.

Tags: kuler, tutorial, color, rapidweaver

Art workflow tutorial #1: How I soften the Impasto filter...

Theory: Slapping a photo into Snap Art is a good place to start. However, through trial and error, the use of layers/lighting, and Exposure, some interesting results can be achieved.

Objective: To create a floral piece that looks as though it were created on distressed canvas, is very old, and which simulates the gamut of wet on wet based oil painting when printed onto fine art paper, canvas, or watercolor paper.

Begin: I should start by saying that I have always been jealous of Katrin Eisman and her inherent ability to seamlessly montage images and provide overlays that add depth and meaning to her pieces. There are numerous others on the web who have mastered these compositing techniques and their experience is vast. However, with Snap Art and Exposure, what used to take hours of compositing and layering for these masters can be imitated in a few simple steps. The stock PS filters for things like watercolor and paint daubs are all well and good for adding some sense of invisible digital wizardry to plain jane photos, but Snap Art really does take it one step further as you will see in this simple demonstration. Now, we luddites can get in on some of the action these PS wizards have been using against us, and truth be told, its not that hard.

A floral with an isolated subject provides a good exposition of this technique.

Fig. 1: Here is an unretouched digital image. In this case, a ghost orchid, which happens to lend itself nicely to our needs... to create a fine art masterpiece in as few steps as possible.


Fig. 2: Here is the same image after being applied the standard Impasto, with settings below, everything else set to stock.



Fig 3: The Impasto settings, you can obviously experiment with these to your liking, but I kinda liked the effect these stock numbers produced. All the other tabs are default.


Fig 4: Since my preference is for softer, more nebulous images, I dragged the Impasto layer onto a new layer above my original photos, set the opacity to 60%, and then set the layer mode to "Difference" in order to soften and darken things a little more.


Fig. 5: The layer stack looks like this.


Fig. 6: And the history stack looks like this (ignore the snapshot).

Now, for many, the image might be far enough along to be a nice fine art piece. However I wanted to darken, add noise, and increase the red channel slightly to more imitate the gamut and feel of a canvas. This meant I handed off to Exposure and added a GAF-500 Warm pass.

Fig. 7: Here is the final piece after two passes through GAF-500 and then flattened. I find that Exposure + Snap Art to be a very powerful combination.

I hope this tutorial helps some of you generate ideas for your photographic compositions. As a photographer, I basically use Snap Art to mellow out some of my really crisp photos so that the composition looks warm, faded, on textured paper, and hand colored/painted. This plug-in has helped me achieve this with really nice results, and I wanted to reinforce that with Snap Art + Exposure together, there are almost limitless expressions available for a single piece.

Tags: snap art, tutorial

Art Workflow tutorial #2: To create the subtle tonality of a chemically processed fine art print, with hints of a watercolor....

Theory: The watercolor masters (especially the Chinese ones) all had something in common. They were able to merge the seemingly incongruous elements of the medium, transposing the tonality and formlessness of the diluted paint, while retaining exquisite detail in their subjects.

Objective: Creating the perfect montage between a sharp landscape photo and a watercolor painting, tricking the eye into believing the work is created via some fine art printing process. (Curly voice): Knyuck, knyuck, knyuck.

Begin: First, lets take a seemingly banal photo and give it some real punch.

Fig 1: Here is a landscape that will serve as our subject. I am a big landscape fan, so I decided that perhaps a simple sunset scene on the water would be a nice way to really show the power of Snap Art. I chose a scene from Juneau Alaska, where I was lucky enough to go to this summer. As can be seen, this photo lends itself nicely to the watercolor filter... it has areas of clouds and less detail, and areas of mountains and islands that have more.



Fig. 2: Using the "Abstract, Pastel Colors Brush" in the Watercolor tab, under the settings menu, I adjusted the "Basic" tab to fit the settings I desired for my piece. Since I wanted the whole piece covered, I thought it might be nice to experiment, and bump the brush size all the way to 100, and boost the paint coverage all the way to 99. Since my photo already has good detail, I decided to leave the fine edge detail at 0 this time so as not to introduce artifacts that affect sharpness, but again, YMMV with how you approach your pieces.... the same goes to be said for wet brush (default) over dry brush. In this instance, the other tabs are all completely untouched. Finally, remember to click the "Create Output in New Layer" so that you can fine tune your piece and retail full control over its opacity.



Fig. 3: Here is the piece as it comes to us from art using the above settings. Again, you can play with how much coverage you like, but since I wanted coverage for my whole piece, I went with 99. This layer sits on top of the "Background" photo for now, as I go in to create a canvas effect.


Fig. 4: Usually, fine art watercolor pieces benefit from a texture layer that simulates the depth of traditional artistic media, particularly canvas or rice paper like textures. Here is a pattern I use frequently from the How to Wow photoshop book, but almost any "canvas like" texture will do. Using a pattern fill layer, I set the scale size to %323 (because of the size of this particular 6676*2425px piece) and added it on top of the watercolor layer and the photo layer. Now, its time to play with opacity and the lighting settings.


Fig. 5: At this point, your layer stack should look like this. For the the watercolor canvas pattern, I set the opacity to 53% and the lighting to darken, just enough to give it visible texture.



Fig. 6: For the Snap Art Watercolor layer, the opacity is set to 85% and the lighting to "Soft Light". This adds the subtlety we need to create the all the detail of the original photo, but realistically imitate that hand embellished piece.

Now, with our layer adjustments, we have a fine art piece with the divine abnormalities of both a hand embellished chemical process, and a masterful landscape watercolor. Viola! Mission accomplished.

Fig. 7: Before

Fig. 8: After

Please don't redistribute these images or tutorials without permission, thanks.

Tags: tutorial, snap art

I promised you all a tutorial on fine art "pen and ink" flowers a couple of weeks ago, so here it is. This is a technique that uses two Photoshop plug-ins from Alien Skin software. The first is 'Snap Art', the second is 'Exposure'. The image is from a 10 megapixel Nikon D80 with a 105mm VR.

Objective: A cross between a color pen and ink sketch and a photo. The work should look like it was created by hand on fine art canvas or textured paper while at the same time retain the best details of the original high resolution macro photo.

Here is a simple picture of a flower:

This technique works very well on subjects like florals, where an artistic approach helps accentuate the beauty of the flower. You will notice I prefer an isolated subject when using this process, I really like it when my flowers stand out from the background, but not so much so that my final piece looks like too much like a still life. I tend to think of these pieces as organic still life, the flower is isolated, but it appears with a mottled background, perhaps a more natural setting than either a solid white or black background. In this particular example, I chose a lighter pink flower that really arrests your eyes when you put in on a dark background. Its great when a background is nicely blurred like this example, as the pen and ink technique will really help the subject stand in front of the out of focus elements creating a '3D effect'.

Ok, now that we have a nice subject and realize what we want to accomplish, lets get out hands dirty.

First we are going to duplicate the layer. Layer>Duplicate This way we don't degrade the details of the original photo, and we can play with the opacity of the Snap Art filter to adjust the desired transparency of the effect. Trying to balance the amount of detail vs the amount of the filter may take some experimentation. First, run the filter. I use Settings>Tone Adjustment, contrast high.

Here are the settings for the 'Basic' tab:

Snap Art>Pen and Ink>Tone Adjustment, contrast high>Basic

These settings are a result and trial and error and reflect my personal preference, don't be afraid to experiment as you can use almost any settings in the 'Pen and ink' filter and get good results.

Here is what the Snap Art layer looks like:

Pretty cool on its own, we are going to 'tone down' this layer so that we can get back the colors and some of the detail of the original photo

After the filter is applied, select the opacity percentage and lock it in. In this example, I used a somewhat subtle 29% with the layer style set to "overlay".

Here is what my layer stack and lighting look like:

Layers Palette

"Overlay" allows the nice dark lines of the pen and ink filter to accentuate the edges of our floral, while at the same time helping darken the background and highlight the yellow portion of the flower.

Here is the result:

After toning down the 'pen and ink' layer

At this point you can flatten the image, Layer>Flatten Image, for a pass though Alien Skin's 'Exposure'.

I want this piece to be somewhat grainy and warm, so I am going to use a grainy film. In 'Exposure': Settings>GAF 500-warm.

Now we have this:

Mmmm... nice and warm, a more painterly palette

I was happy with these results, but I still wanted to 'burn' in some areas, particularly the top left had corner, which was still a little too bright for my tastes.

Here is what we have after some 'burning':

Better isolation from a darker background

Our piece is almost finished, but its appearance is still too 'clean' for me. This means a texture layer is in order, something that will make the picture look like is was created on watercolor paper or canvas... I usually try to incorporate both textures, which gives me good results on textured papers printed from my Epson K3 inkset printer.

Inserting a pattern layer, I get this:

Taken straight from the 'How To Wow' Photoshop book, this watercolor texture is indispensable when creating subtle texture on fine art pieces, you can pick up the book from Amazon, or try a similar texture of your own

After a conversion to softlight, here is the result:

Lighting>Soft Light helps to blend the pattern seamlessly into the piece

Our layer palette looks like this:

Notice the change to 'Soft Light', but you can also experiment with 'Overlay' or 'Darken'

Now we flatten the image and add one more texture:

Here is the final piece of the puzzle, watercolor paper overlay, again we integrate it by setting the lighting to 'Soft Light'

This last texture is subtle when the lighting is changed so you probably won't see it on these small web versions, but in the print, the weave of the watercolor texture adds additional organic 'feel' to the image.

After just a little dodging and burning, here is our final piece:

Not for everyone, but I like it :)

Tags: tutorial, snap art

There are a lot of tools out there for the modern digital photographer. The amount of ways one can attack a photo in the development stage is now greater than ever, and even the most seasoned veterans of the digital darkroom can sometimes get intimidated by the sheer number of options. This dizzying array of programs and utilities serve to confound the inexperienced developer, and force them into a workflow from which there is no escape, simply because it is the least confounding. We are, after all, human beings, and we tend to run to what we know is safe. I find this safety unfortunate, because one of the things I notice most when someone shows me a photo taken with a digital camera is lifelessness and lack of panache. Sure, the digital camera can reproduce with great clarity and resolution the exact scene as it appeared to the human eye, but whatever happened to taking chances? Certainly, digital camera makers have a tough choice... on the one hand, they wish to make a device that captures a picture perfectly with good focus etc etc (these camera manufacturers are in the market for one thing, to make money), but on the other, these same technically "perfect" cameras neglect to reproduce the spontaneity of film, or the creative potential of a Holga. Lets face it... without a creative workflow, many photographers stumble into the post processing phase with a singular objective: to achieve the best possible rendition of their experience, as true to life as when they experienced it. We sharpen the photo and boost its saturation and contrast, we fall into the trap...

It's time to take a stand against these perfect snapshots with unlimited depth of field and unparalleled clarity.

Now, I am not proposing we all abandon the inherent beauty of a perfectly rendered scene, but, with so many good photographs out there, the main differentiation between most photographs in the future will not be their representation of perfection, but rather, how they achieve sublime imperfection. This is where Exposure comes in.

When I was a kid there was this thing called film, and we used it to take pictures. The cool thing about film was that you never knew what you were going to get... there was no reviewing the images on the little LCD screen and we relied on someone else (gasp) to develop what we had shot. Depending on where you were in the world, the photos you got back from the developer could be a little on the warm side, a little overexposed, a little blurry, and after 5-10 years could look radically different from the day which you picked them up from the photo lab. All of this was cool, because it gave the photos personality. Fast forward to today. The digital age has ushered in the perfect photo. But it also begs some questions: What about the imperfect photo? Where did it go? What if there were no mistakes in photography? Would it get boring?

This is a subjective review, I am not out to be impartial here, nor do I expect to quantify my analysis in a way that might satisfy those pixel peepers that populate so many online photo forums. This is not about being modest either... I know what works after some years with digital, and while you may not believe my assertions, you will be hard pressed to find someone more empassioned by them. That being said, lets deliver the meat and bones.

Exposure is a photoshop plugin that relies on the premise that there are those of us who wish to deresolve our photographic experience (yes, deresolve, its not a word, just something I made up) and enhance the imaginative experience. When people look at my most recent photos, they are not seeing the best possible version, the definition of "best" being a photos radical truthfullness, its attention to detail, and the clarity of its subjects. Instead, my newest photos serve me through their creative interpretation of a particular scene and the fact that they are discordant with reality. While I am not out to be a rebel, the subtle but profound change to my photos has forced me to come to a serious conclusion: imagination is more powerful than truth.

Wha?

We can all argue the definition of a good photo. We can all assign points to things like color, form, and symmetry. But where does that leave the human condition? Lets face it, to really achieve perfection in a photo we must rely on our own inherent creative interpretation of a particular scene. When we look at the great painters like Monet or VanGogh, we realize that their finest works are not the ones which represent reality, but rather the ones that misrepresent it. The greatest artists the world has ever known are not famous for details, instead, they are known for their conspicuous attraction to bending the rules, and blurring the lines.

It's time to blur the lines in digital too!

Here is a typical example of a frame I want to process in Exposure, its just a little to dull for my tastes.

Fig. 1: Straight out of the camera... here is a frame from halloween. Lets face it, Mike was definitely not going to win any beauty awards, but the funky red colors and weird lighting in the background will serve us well for this conversion. Take notice of the somewhat flat skin tones and the effect of the flash on the frame, slightly on the grey side out of the camera in my opinion.


Fig. 2: What's that you say? Cross-processed Agfa Optima might be cooler looking (pun intended)? Well I thought so too, and now we have more of an art-house pic, or colors that make us think this is from a bad horror movie.


Fig. 3: Here we have an example of more subtle effects... contrast, saturation and grain are all added with the Fuji Provia 400 filter. Skin tone is the biggest benefactor, showing a slight shift in color to the warm side and a noticeable increase in contrast. While this effect may not be to clear for these smaller web-sized images, I can assure you that the final print of this Exposure processed frame is quite different from the original, straight out of camera. Just look at the crops below.


Fig. 4: 100% crop as shot, straight out of the camera. A nice clean image from the D70 at 320iso. But its lifeless! The bad lighting lighting and flash exposure combine to make the shot plain dull, and even though its clear and technically accurate when looking at the histogram and correcting the WB... skintone is a little lackluster. This is just the kind of shot that Exposure seems to relish.


Fig. 5: This is the same 100% crop processed through the Provia 400F filter in Exposure. Lifeless it is not. We can clearly see that some of the stitching on the dog collar and leather top is washed out by the filter, but at the same time a nice graininess has been introduced to the image, lending a more organic feel to its overall presentation. This, I believe, is the more natural frame, because it contains the look so prized by film aficionados. Grain and color have been given a boost at the expense of extreme detail. Is it worth it? I seem to think so.

The above examples are just a smattering of the possible effects one can apply to digital photos with the Exposure plugin. Over the next few weeks, more and more of my most special shots are going to be reprocessed using Exposure, and certainly almost all of the new ones. While not all shots will benefit from its use, extremely detailed landscapes come to mind, most of the shots I take do yield a subjective improvement when given the Exposure treatment.

At $199 this plugin is not cheap. But, when you think of the engineering effort and research that went into creating some of the filters, it really is a bargain. Not only does it mean you get wonderful color film conversions, but I haven't even covered the B&W films or even the Infrared films the plugin offers. With dozens and dozens of presets all yielding subtle creative effects, Exposure allows the busy photographer to dispense with hand processing desired image effects individually in PS, and with its batch feature, can put an end to the ultra clean, grainless B&W batching that wedding photogs use to bang out their B&W's.

Fig. 6: Just look at the sheer number of creative effects at your disposal as seen at the left of this screenshot from Exposure. the interface serves to streamline the creative workflow, providing a nice option to preview your work before assigning a filter.

Conclusion: Exposure is merely the start of radical change in the way digital photos are processed, the rebellion against pristine photos has begun. Not only does Exposure add imagination to photos, but, in some instances, it produces effects that are entirely unprecedented and quite sublime. If you want to push your photos through the same old tools be my guest, but you are cheating yourself out of a creative experience that is similar to being in a darkroom, only now, you have to wait seconds to see your results rather than minutes. Highly recommended.

Tags: exposure, post processing, film, plug-ins, photoshop