Retouching and Post Production

VSCO teased the Instagram and mobile photography community this weekend with a promotional video for their upcoming new app called ‘VSCO Cam’. Promising huge improvements over its original program, VSCO aims to take the mobile editing community by storm with its latest update. Best part of all? It’s free.

Do you ever feel like you're not hanging around enough celebrities? Maybe you wish you were court-side at a Laker's game sharing an emotional moment with Kobe, or maybe you'd rather be wrapped around Kim Kardashian like couch upholstery? If any of these things are true, you might be Peeje T - a pretty creative guy with a pretty good sense of humor and a knack for photoshopping himself into pictures with the likes of Jay Z, Beyonce, Rihanna, Alisha Keys and Kobe Bryant, among others.

In this interview, I speak with Russ Turner, a photographer who is relatively new to shooting fantasy portraiture, but has already received awards and praise for the quality of his work. Russ talks about working with costumed models, how he incorporates Photoshop, and shares some of the places where an aspiring shooter can get started doing photography in this genre.

Merek Davis today announced the release of the image enhancing Mextures app for iPhone. Over the last year iPhone photographers have downloaded Mextures textures more than 200,000 times directly from Merek Davis’ store and tagged 140,000 images on Instagram; now they have an iPhone app to more easily create and share visually stunning images. I have got to say that after buying and playing with the app this morning, this is one that you don't want to miss out on.

I am a keyboard shortcut junkie. Anytime I can find a way to do something quicker using a keyboard shortcut I will force myself to use it for a few days till I have built it into my workflow. A few of my favorite keyboard shortcuts are found in the Lightroom Crop Tool. I love sharing these tips with other photographer friends and watching their eyes light up as they realize some of the great features built into the Lightroom Crop tool which help speed up their own workflow.

Finding a great retoucher (if you use one) can be a pretty daunting task. Most photographers end up doing their own - picking up techniques and tricks along the way. Ashlee Gray is a beauty and fashion photographer and [primarily a] retoucher based in New York whose clients include Tresemme, Starbucks, Rebecca Minkoff and Gatorade. As a photographer, her images are beautiful, feminine and even delicate. It's that same underlying aesthetic that she applies to her retouching- yet still managing to retain the unique style of the individual photographers she works with.

There have been fewer hotly debated topics in the past six months than Adobe's move to the cloud. Many creatives really like the new cloud, but others are steadfastly against it. I actually have seen some very harsh arguments that might even surpass the flame wars between Nikon and Canon enthusiasts. As hard as it might be to believe for some of you, Adobe does listen and is addressing some of your major concerns with the cloud-based software system.

Beginning this Thursday May 30 - June 1, creativeLIVE will host photographer Aaron Nace as he teaches compositing 101. Aaron has taught photography and photo manipulation to millions of people for over five years. In this 3 day comprehensive workshop you'll wake away with a better understanding of how to conceptualize an idea, plan out your composite, photograph and light each piece of the puzzle, and artfully combine the many parts using Photoshop.

Aaron Nace at PHLEARN teamed up with professional product photographer Rob Grimm to demonstrate how a super high-end watch shoot would be put together. Check out how Grimm takes numerous shots and combines them into one advertising-quality image.

Canon has recently come out with their short film, "Rhythm of Life' showcasing their new line of cine lenses. Shot with the Canon C500 director, Dean Hargrove and cinematographer, Steven Poster ASC, explain how the different cine lenses affect the footage and change the color and feel of your shots. The BTS video was shot with the Canon C300.

Benjamin Von Wong has finally wrapped up his long and productive European tour, Von Wong Does Europe. The very first shoot that he was able to do was also ironically the last to be published and for good reason. It will blow you away. Taking over 60 hours to retouch Ben collaborated with talented retouching guru, Chester van Bommel.

The New York Times is being forced to examine their policy in regards to retouching on their images. Of course, they stand by the fact that manipulation of their news images "strictly forbidden.” But recently, they received backlash when the cover of their [style] magazine T had what many readers felt was a fashion model that looked 'shockingly thin' and 'underage.'

This might be an extreme take on the all-too-common client request of "get it done quickly," but it serves as an excellent benchmark of what can be done in a short amount of time. Odds are, you won't ever be asked to do a full post-production retouch in such a short amount of time, but the idea behind what Aaron Nace of PHLEARN is showing here is solid: with the right tools and knowledge you can streamline your workflow with extreme effectiveness.

So as a lot of you have probably seen, you can now record full 1080p 14Bit Raw video on the Canon 5D Mark II and Mark III. This is truely incredible. However, you can not just import the video and get to editing right away. To be able to use the RAW video, you have to convert the RAW files to DNG. Here is a quick workflow tutorial on how to do that. It's really not that hard to do, just a little time consuming.

If you're not tuned in to creativeLIVE right now, you should be! Today through Saturday May 18, creativeLIVE is hosting award-winning portrait photogrpaher, Brooke Shaden. Brooke is teaching some great tips to create eye-catching works of art without any flash or expensive studio props.

Excuse me while I pick up the brain fragments scattered across my office. In the last few months, there have posts and chatter about raw video recording being enabled in Canon's popular DSLR through new developments in Magic Lantern's firmware. It appeared to be only useful in bursts of less than a second, but now news is coming out now that they have unlocked the ability to record, without issue, continuous raw video at 24fps.

UPDATED 05/14/13 9:50 AM PT: I have received word from a source that the reason these original totems were made were effectively replacements for the box imagery that Adobe will no longer be producing since... well... there are no more boxes. If you recall, CS6 had a lot of imagery surrounding faces (just look at the cover of Adobe Photoshop CS6). Moving to Adobe CC, the team wanted to try a different angle that was more expressive, abstract and fun.

Of course many of us want to always nail a shot in camera, but sometimes things happen. Maybe it looked great on your camera's LCD, but entirely different once you got it on your computer. Maybe your sensor is too small and shallow DOF is hard to nail. It's for these cases that Aaron Nace at PHLEARN does tutorials like this one, where he shows how to adjust depth of field in post.