RPS Let's Edit - Composition - Depth & perspective - Joe Houghton 2025-12-06
In this live YouTube workshop, photographer Joe Houghton guides participants through a hands‑on editing session that covers a wide range of compositional and post‑processing techniques. The session begins with a discussion of depth and perspective, including cropping, rotating, and adjusting the sky to preserve detail. Participants share images that are critiqued in real time. Joe demonstrates the Nik Collection’s Silver Efex B&W film simulations, explores grain and tonal differences across film presets, and compares AI‑upscaling tools (Topaz vs. DxO), noting workflow frustrations with recent UI changes. He walks through clarity, texture, dehaze, and color‑mixer adjustments to enhance mid‑tone images, and shows how to use object masks, linear gradients, and brush tools for selective editing (e.g., removing poles, boats, and reflections). The group tackles specific submissions – a vintage Porsche, a Royal Arcade scene, a seaside pier, and a field of poppies – applying perspective correction, vertical cropping, rule‑of‑thirds composition, and targeted local adjustments (shadows, highlights, saturation). Throughout, Joe emphasizes the importance of RAW workflow, judging criteria for competitions, and the balance between automated AI tools and manual fine‑tuning. The workshop concludes with logistical announcements about upcoming sessions (AI for photographers, Lightroom Mobile, Affinity Zine, Notion workflow) and a call for community input on future tool demos.
Chapters
Okay, good morning, everybody. So we are on— I can't remember what number it is— 20, I think. Yeah, number 20. Let me share the screen.
4 in. You get— you confuse them by saying 20 because they think I haven't been to the other 19. This is 4 in this series. I've been done. I've only been to 3.
Yeah, so, so we're in, we're in number 4 of— I think it's number 4 of composition.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. So let's, let's have a look at the handout. The handout had— yeah, no, yeah, so it's Let's Edit Photos Composition, um, and it's number 4, which is depth and perspective today. Um, so the handout is there, um, uh, you know, as, as normal, um, various bits and pieces in there to, to kind of talk about different things around depth and perspective. I'll add the Zoom notes to the end of it and then put that up on the Notion page. And then you can download that if it's of interest. And that will be the final chapter in Volume 2 of Edit with Joe, which will be out sometime before Christmas. So if you like those in book form, then that will be available. I have a little request for everybody, because I have a very talented group of photographers in front of me. I'm finishing off a book that I've been working on for about 2 years on creating panels. And I know a lot of you have done panels of one sort or another, maybe for a, you know, an L or an A or an F, or just panels, you know, because I mean, there's, there's so many reasons to do panels. I'm looking for some examples of panels that I could just include in the book to talk around various different subjects and topics around creating panels and stuff like that. So if anybody would be willing to share one of their panels or a few of their panels, if you could send me, you know, an image of the panel Probably if you could size it to 2,000 pixels wide edge, that will be enough for the, for the kind of, you know, representation in the book. And obviously I'd credit you, you know, in the book and all the rest of it. So if anybody would like their panel featuring in the book and would be willing to share, then send me an image of it and I would love to get some. David?
What are the royalties, Joe?
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll invite you to my, my private island when I buy it on the back of the royalties, Mike.
Oh, private islands.
Yeah, we don't talk about those.
How many square yards?
Super.
Oh, you know, how many pictures in a panel?
There's no rules, Pia. Um, I mean, you know, if you do, if you do an L, it's 10. If you do an A, it's 15. But I mean, you can do a panel You can do a diptych or a triptych, 2 or 3, you can do 20. It's, you know, there's no rules for panels. It's presenting your images in a way that offers you another way of sharing more images, if you like.
I guess my question was, how many pictures do you want for your presentation? Oh, I see.
Well, I mean, the book's going to be about 300, 350 pages, so there's plenty of room to scatter kind of a good number of panels through that. So, uh, so yeah, you know, and I mean, look, you know, if I can't get them all in, then, then I, you know, I can't. But, uh, but yeah, the more the merrier. Um, so, uh, so whatever you've got. And a couple of, uh, failed L panels. Yeah, and that would be great. And you look, I mean, if there's a panel that you kind of tried and it didn't work, or, you know, you weren't very happy, that would also be good because, you know, send me some notes about why it didn't work or what you weren't happy with or whatever. Because again, you know, it— the book will go into kind of what makes a good panel, but also, you know, if we, if we do a section on that, that would be good as well. Yeah, so great.
Yeah.
I have a question, Joe, because I've done a lot of panels for a course by Paul Sanders, but he had to do a panel every month, but they are 3,000 on the long side. Is that a problem, or do I have to resize them?
No, no, if you've got— no, I mean, if you don't want to do the resizing, I can resize them. So more than 2,000 pixels is fine. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know, it might just be worth checking with Paul to make sure he's happy. I don't want to get into trouble, but, but yeah. They are my images.
Right.
Well, then that's it then. Yeah. Super. Right. Right. Well, that's my little, little ask over. I am sharing, aren't I? So that you can see the images. Let's have a look and see what everybody sent in. today. I'll just close that panel down. So these are the RAWs. These are the RAW files. I love that dot. And then Mike sent in a little sequence, but I don't think they're in sequence. They're all— no, they're all scattered around.
The first one is that one.
Yeah, we'll put them into sequence later on. But yeah, no worries.
Great.
So I'm just, just flick through and just show you what everybody's sent in because there's no way we'll edit all these today. But, but there's a nice series of very different images. I think, I think I've got the whole lot here, haven't I, rather than just the RAWs. And I don't really want to see the edited ones. Yeah, let me just show you the rules. There we are.
Okay.
And I mean, it's it's a very eclectic mix, isn't it? Because this is a very kind of wide set of possibilities composition-wise and stuff. So there we are. Lovely, lovely. So L brings us back and bum bum up. Well, I mean, let's let's let's start with a nice easy one for me. Just just to show. people who maybe haven't played with transform for a little while, you know, that's, that's definitely something that I'm probably going to be looking at here. So D for develop and come over here. I have my transform right at the top because if I'm going to do a transform, it's generally one of the first things I do in the workflow. So normally Transform comes down here somewhere, doesn't it? If you want to move it to the top, you can come to any of these title bars on the right-hand side in Develop and just kind of click and just right-click. Yeah. And you bring up this Customize Develop Panel option. And when you do that, the set of panels comes up here, and you can see that you've got the little hamburger icons. So if you wanted to move, transform, you could just grab the little hamburger and put it down wherever. Okay, and then now if I click on Save, it will say this will only take effect when I restarted Lightroom, and it throws you out of Lightroom and restarts Lightroom. So I'm not going to do that now. Okay, but that's how you move the order of the panels. But no. And if there are panels that you never go into, let's say you never use calibration and, you know, it's just kind of taking up screen space, you can untick it. Okay. So now once I've pressed Save Now, calibration disappears. Okay. So now if you lose something important, that's very often what's happened. The number of calls I've had from people panicking saying, I've lost, you know, whatever it is, and right-click, Customize Developer. Oh, yep, you unticked it by mistake. And, you know, you can also lose panels in like the import dialog, and you can lose panels in the library modules the same kind of way. So always try that right-click trick. The guided option is the one I almost always use. And whether you click on guided or whether you click in this little area here with the hash lines. That's the same thing. Okay, you can try auto, and it's made a fairly good job there. I mean, we look at this, the building on the, on the left, I think it's probably done a good job there. But we've still got, we've still got a bit of keystoning on the right. So auto is generally fairly good, but it doesn't normally get it quite right. You can try vertical. Okay, now that's, I think, done probably a better job of getting all the, all the things completely vertical. Okay, and then there's full, and there's level, and there's off. Okay, so, but I like, I like the control. So, so I generally go with guided, and then what I tend to do is I draw a line down. Somewhere on the left-hand side of the image. Okay. And then another line on one of the verticals on the right-hand side. And you don't have to be right on the vertical as long as your line is vertical. So sometimes, you know, you might put the cursor just to the left of the building there. And as long as you follow down the building and kind of just keep it, you know, in line with what the building should be. So that second line, when you release the mouse now, it will pop into place.
Okay.
If you've got a clear horizontal line that should be horizontal, and we don't really in this one. Okay, but let's say that there was a, there was a fence at the bottom or something like that. You can, you can also make a horizontal. Okay, and then that will force that to be horizontal. And you can have 2 horizontal lines. So you've got 2 verticals and 2 horizontals. You don't have to use The two horizontals. Okay, so obviously now we've got to we've got to just say okay, and that's the the okay button there, and then alpha crop, and obviously you've got to get rid of your you've got to get rid of the the other bits. Okay, so we want we want our skyscrapers. So let me open this up, and we'll pull that down. Make sure one thing you can't do in Lightroom is you can't tell it to fill in these triangles. Okay, now in Photoshop, you could tell it to do a, what do you call it, content-aware fill. But Lightroom at the moment doesn't let you do that. So, so just, just be aware of that. So there we are. So that gives us, gives us our starting point, doesn't it? For this. And then, you know, carry on editing as normal. With skyscrapers like this, clarity is a really good tool. So you could— I would, in this image, I would probably try and separate the sky from the rest of the image because I don't really want to clarify the sky because that's going to, like, you know, punch it up and stuff. So Come into Basic, do a sky, um, a sky, do a sky mask. That'll probably give you quite a good— yeah, that's pretty good, isn't it? Now it's— take a look, we have got a building there that it's included in the mask, probably because there's a lot of blue being reflected onto that building. So again, as always, check your masks, okay? Because that, that's a bad mask that we need to take that out. So we need to subtract And I would subtract with an object.
Yeah.
And then you can just draw maybe a square around that area there. Boom. And it's just removed, removed that from the, from the mask. So we've got a pretty good sky mask. Now, is there some in there? Let's have a look. Go to white on black. So that 3 dots down here. And then white on black. So anything that's white is the sky mask. So see, we've got lovely, lovely— we can see the sky through the top of that building. That's fine. Everything's nice and sharp. But this is— this building here has got a bit of masking. See this white and this white here? This shouldn't actually be in the mask if we just want the sky. So again, we might subtract using objects and just say, take that completely out.
Yeah.
And you can be generous with the framing of the object.
Yeah, because you're using the object detector. Okay. When, if you use that square option, then, you know, it's gonna say, oh yeah, yeah, you know, I'm gonna select that object within the square.
Boom.
gone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, this is something to just remember to be very, very picky with your masks. Because otherwise it just, you know, and again, even there, you know, we might just say just don't include that, right? That was too big a thing for it to pull that building there. But let's just pull that out for Right, so now we've got a much better mask of our, um, of our sky. And you start with the good one, you know, you start by building up a really good mask. And that's why I very often take the time with this first mask and really get it absolutely right. Okay, so the sky— so that's the sky now. And now if I flip and if I duplicate and invert that mask to everything else, I've got a really, really clean buildings mask, you know, foreground mask, because I've, because I've worked the sky one really, really hard. Okay.
Yeah, yeah. The left of the streetlight, you know, a little bit there, is that, um, little haze there? Yeah.
Yeah, no, no, I missed that bit. So yeah, you'd need to— yeah, there's a little bit of— there's still a little bit of haloing, isn't there? So we'd probably, you know, if this was going to be for a competition or whatever, I'd probably go in and spend a minute or two tidying those up. Yeah, good, good, good catch.
Okay.
So now I'm in the foreground. Let's come back to color overlay so that we can see what we're dealing with. Yeah. And I I've— so I can do whatever I like with that foreground now, you see, and it gives me— it gives me the foreground. Okay. I could apply my, my clarity now just to the foreground, but then, you know, it's going to clarify everything. And I don't know that I want everything clarifying. So I might just create a separate mask and do it— do an object selection. But this time, rather than the square, I'm just going to use the, the draw around. So I'm going to, I'm going to draw around the building here. What happened there? Undo that. Create new mask object. Okay, so draw around the building. And as long as you aren't just on the edges of what it is that you want, okay, like that, it should make a good selection. Okay, so that's, that's a really good selection of just that building. And now you can just apply a change to that building. So watch what happens when I press clarity.
Look.
Boom, just pops it out. Yeah, so clarity and texture on buildings will just really pop them out. And I'd kind of do the same thing probably on this one because these 2 are the big kind of, you know, attractions, aren't they? So again, select object. Let's try the square. Let's try the square selector this time and see, see whether it'll just pick out our building for us.
Boom.
Yeah, absolutely fantastic. So that's, that's that. So there we go. And you know, if you wanted to, you could bring this up a little bit brighter to kind of match the brightness of that one, perhaps as well. So we might just pop the highlights a little bit on it. And then exposure. And now those 2 look kind of slightly more similar, because this one was a bit mucky before, wasn't it? Mucky and drab. So, and then maybe go back to the sky and just see whether we could do a little bit of, you know, playing in the sky. Now, even if we didn't do the sky as a mask, might come into the color mixer. And just darken off the blues a little bit. Just, just kind of give a little bit more punch to that sky. Yeah, if you want to, if you want to change the blues and make them a bit bluer, you can do that, or desaturate the sky. So I'm going to punch the blues and the aquas up a little bit, just, just to give a little bit more contrast between the background and the foreground. Stuff like that. So there we are. So that's Transform. Okay. Is this one that you sent a JPEG in as well? Right. So let's—
No, I just sent the raw.
You just sent the raw. Okay. Right. So there's nothing to compare with.
Joe, do you save the developed photos somewhere? The ones that you played with?
This is interesting. I had this conversation with Olive the other day. So If I get a photo that I've edited of my own, I mean, when I bring them all in, I go through, you know, the shoot, and ones that I'm planning that I will think are good enough to go and edit, I give a 1-star to. When I've edited them, I change that to a 2-star. So I'd give this a 2-star, okay, because it's now been edited. And then if I'm going to use this, because I mean, I don't use all the shots that I've edited, but let's say that I'm going to include these in a book, or I'm going to know, include them in a club competition, or I'm going to send it into the RPS or whatever. Okay, then I need to save them as a, as a finalized image, if you like, because at the moment that finalized image only exists in the Lightroom catalog. Okay, because there's the raw file, and then there's that set of instructions of all the things I've just done sitting in, in the Lightroom catalog, but this image doesn't exist anywhere outside of that. right now. So if I want it to, I need to export. So I just, just, just go and come on to the image, right-click, go down to Export. Okay. And then I have a folder called Print Photos, which is under Pictures. Okay. And that's where all my exported images go. Now, other people do things differently. I mean, some people will, will, will kind of create a JPEG or a TIFF file of that finalized edited image, and they'll save it in the same folder. So one option is just put it in the same folder as the original photos. You know, and that for a lot of people, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, you know, that's where my original photo is. That's where I'm going to keep the edited copies, because now I've got the 2 together. Okay. I just go with a Print Photos folder, and then, you know, I'd put this into a new folder. Yeah, called, you know, whatever. If there's one, if that already exists, it will just put the photo into the Buildings folder. If the Buildings subfolder under Print Photos doesn't exist, it'll create it and put the image in. You must be careful when you export any image to add that tick. to add to this catalog. It's not ticked by default. And if you export an image to a folder on your hard drive and that isn't ticked, the image is there on your hard drive, but Lightroom won't show it in the catalog. It's kind of like Lightroom doesn't know about it. So I think that's just a little bug that they should fix. That should be automatically ticked. And then you, you know, you can choose to rename it. Okay, you can choose whether you want it as a JPEG or as a TIFF or as a, you know, an original, in which case it just copies, copies the original. So typically it'd be a JPEG, wouldn't it? And then width and height here.
Yeah.
So here's where you can decide how big your image is going to be. So, you know, I mean, you know, maybe, maybe I'll send that kind of 4,000 pixels wide edge. I don't need to do the, do the height. If I just put the width in and that'll get— it'll keep the same ratio. Okay, so whatever the ratio is, I just, just generally specify my width and whatever. And then I, I normally in the post-processing show in Finder, and, and that's showing File Explorer on Windows. Okay, and, and what that does, so when I hit the export now, that will Create that buildings subfolder under Print Photos. It'll export the file, and then Finder will pop up in a second. There it is, and there's the photo. We can see it's a 4,000 by 3,672 pixel image.
Joe? Yeah.
I was told on Thursday by somebody Really?
You were told on Thursday? Yeah. By someone else. By someone. Yeah.
To keep Resize to Fit unchecked, and then you've got all your pixels then.
If you don't resize, it'll export to the same image size as your original image. Okay, but you know, your original image, it might be 7,360 pixels or whatever your camera captures on the sensor. Yeah, um, I— my exporting, a lot of my exporting I will do to put into, say, a book or a publication or whatever. So I'm thinking very often, okay, that's going to be an A4 wide page, you know, it's, it's maybe 6 printed inches wide at 300 dots per inch. That gives me 1,800 pixels that I need the width of this image. Okay, so I'm generally resizing to a specific size because I know what it's going to be used for. But if you're not, if you're just exporting it to keep, you don't have to resize it, and then it'll just export at the resolution of the original image.
Right, okay.
So that, you know, it's good advice unless you've got a specific reason to resize. Okay, yeah. Okay.
Joe, my question was actually more around in the context of this course. Do you save the ones that you've been playing during the presentation somewhere so we can have a look at how it would compare to our own modifications?
Oh, I see. Well, I mean, they're all in the folders.
But they're in your Lightroom.
Yes, they're in my library, but I haven't exported them back out. Yeah. No, I mean, I think, yeah. Now it's, that's so, so if we went back to say, here's, here's the top of let's edit photos. So we've got 600 images in there. Okay. If I do G for grid, here's all the images that we've played, that we've had to play with. Some are mine, some are yours. Da da da da da da. Okay. Now one of the things you can do in the library filter up here. Yeah. And if you don't see that library filter in the library module, it's the backslash key that opens it, or you can go View, Show Filter Bar. Okay. So under here, one of the options is edited images. Yeah. So I suppose what I could do is I could go to Attribute and then Is it this one? Which I haven't used this filter before, but I know it's here. Original photos, that's virtual copies. What's that one? That's videos. There is, they're edits. Okay, there we are. So all these images have got some edit done to them, if you like. Okay. So I could select those images now and export those to a folder. And, you know, that would, that would be the, the, the edited images. But I mean, I suppose what we, because of the recording and stuff, what we, we normally do is, you know, assume that if you're gonna want to go and do that again, you'll watch the recording and kind of follow through.
Yeah.
So, okay, let's go back to our— where are we? That one, isn't it? Yeah. Should 10 be down? Had a busy week this week, did 4 talks this week. So depth and perspective. Well, the next one's very much a perspective And depth shot, isn't it? Don't know whose this one is, but D for develop.
Mine, I'm afraid. Oh, Peter.
Yeah, but it's a great example of a super leading lines converging point taking us to the thirds intersection. I mean, if we put the overlay up, Arthur Cropp. Yeah, there's the overlay. Okay. So, you know, I mean, you you'd probably classically want to put this. I think we'll go 16:9 because it's a nice kind of panoramic image, isn't it?
Yeah.
And then see whether we can get, you know, even just at 16:9, just losing that top little bit there. The houses are pretty much now bang on that thirds point there. We've got the Lovely, the lines taking us into the shot. A little bit of sea. The sea is, I think, pretty much level. Not quite. There we are. Level up the sea. So I'd kind of start with that. Do the crop first because you're throwing away pixels. Okay. And then set the white point. Quickest way to set the white balance. Isn't it Shift and— Yeah, Shift and double-click on the whites. Boom. Okay. So that's the easiest way, just Shift and double-click. If you want to do it the visual way, you can just do it this way. Okay, until you start to see that little highlight on the box up there. Or the kind of better visual way is you hold the Option or the Alt key down. So hold the Option or the Alt key down. And now as you drag the white, it starts all black and anything that is blown out white starts to appear on the black. Okay. And then you just pull back and that's the white point. Okay. So there's 3 different ways there of setting the white point. And you can also set the black point the same way. The black point doesn't actually probably need setting setting. Look, the histogram runs pretty much into the black, but no harm, just Shift and double-click. Yeah, it's pulled it back just a fraction. Okay, so just those 2 changes completely changed the look of that image from something very gray and dull and kind of, you know, boring to kind of much more punchy. I think I'd changed the setting to give me some underexposure for something and not changed it back. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And we all do that.
Yeah.
But you didn't want to blow out the sky, did you?
That's right.
You were shooting to the right, but not very, very right.
Yeah.
I did it. I did a talk earlier on in the week. I think I've done it to the RPS called kind of, you know, how to shoot better photos and rescue the ones that didn't work. And this is, this is one of those, isn't it? You know, it's kind of like, yeah, oh, didn't get that quite right in camera. Thank goodness for RAW.
Yeah.
It's a very— it's a very form shot, this as well, isn't it? So, I mean, I would, I would perhaps wonder about black and white because it's a timeless shot. There's nothing saying this is today. It could be a century ago kind of thing as well. So that's nice. But as an example of really good kind of leading lines in composition, you've used a good depth of field. What are you at here? f/11, f/8, f/11?
Probably.
Let's have a look. Oh, f/9. Okay.
Right.
Yeah. So pretty much everything's in focus all the way through. They're probably— the horizon's probably a little bit blurred, but, you know, you've got good depth all the way through here, which is, which is lovely. Yeah. So, so that's good. And then, and then you would, you know, play around now, maybe get a bit more out of the sky. What would we do? I'd probably try and make a little bit more of the steps. If we were going black and white, I'd kind of paint in some light on these steps, maybe. Whether we could have a little play with linear gradients and see what we could do with here. Now, now, linear gradients would be difficult. Probably, probably just do it with a brush. Just do it with a soft brush. So big feather, pull the flow down to maybe 60 or whatever. Density we can leave at 100. Flow is how much gets put down at any one point. Okay, so, so I'm just, I'm just going to kind of draw a line in there, and then I'm going to bring the brush size down a bit. I'm going to draw a line a bit further. Okay, there we are. Okay, so, and then down a bit further so I can just take it down to the end and just run like that. And if you do that, now you can just play—
Yeah.
A little bit with that, and it just kind of creates a more subtle leading line. Very much probably gonna use clarity Because look what clarity does to that. It just is lovely. It brings out the blacks and the whites and the detail of the stone and stuff like that. And if you pop the texture on those steps rather, then these ones are less kind of gritty now, which take the eye to the, you know, the clarity more and stuff like that. So again, this is subtle use of moving the viewer's attention in the frame. And then the line is taking us down to here. And then maybe just, you know, paint that effect. You see, paint that effect on the houses.
Yeah.
It just punched those houses up a little bit now and stuff like that. So that's nice. And then probably just a sky mask just to see whether we could get a bit more out of the sky with maybe a bit of dehaze. Yeah, yeah, there's lots of— there's lots to play with in the sky. So we can either go for the end of the world, or we can go for something a little less worrying. Yeah, for that. But, you know, and given that we've gone to black and white, you might also then want to just pop into black and white and punch the blues down, you know. But is this a JPEG, or is this a— no, it's a RAW, isn't it?
RAW.
Yeah. But yeah. Okay. Well, it's quite a hazy day, so the blues are coming through clouds, so it's not going to work. If those clouds were white on a blue background sky, then pulling the blues down would give you that red filter effect. But yeah, something like that. So what did you do with it, Peter? Did you give us your— Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
Similar.
Similar.
Oh, not too bad. Yeah, great mountains and all that.
Yeah.
Oh, well, all right. So you've made more of the sky. I did. Yeah. I think it's gone a bit crunchy. It probably has, I'm afraid. Got to be careful, careful with, with the sky because skies break up very easily if you just overdo it. So, I mean, you know, maybe just come back into that sky mask and just run texture and clarity back a little bit to the left and soften the clouds off again, because really the clouds want to stay soft. This is where you want the detail. Yeah, yeah, sure. Just to set the two off. And be bold, you know, be bold with your tones in a black and white. Mine's gone, you know, my blacks have gone a bit blacker. I would probably punch even up even the whites a little bit more just to give the black and white that, you know, that pull, that punch, and that impact. Always, always want to avoid grey. But it was a grey day, wasn't it?
It was.
It's Greystone, it's a grey beach, it's a grey day. So it's difficult to get away from grey on this one, isn't it? Yeah. Super, super. Thank you for sending it in. Lovely. Okay, let's see what else we've got. I've got it. I've got a dog. Talk about this wonderful dog.
Unfortunately, this is not my picture, but I thought it was a great—
You were gonna— yeah, this is—
—perspective.
Is she Dutch? She is, yeah. Apparently she took this, the dog was standing on some glass.
Apparently she took it underneath with a wide-angle lens.
I just think it's a fantastic photograph. Yeah, yeah. And I spotted it, and I mean, I know her work, so I thought, yeah, yeah, let's include it. Let's show everybody just in case they're not aware of Elke's work, but it is— she does a lot of this looking up at dogs and kind of getting the amazing expression. But isn't it fantastic? Fabulous, isn't it? It really caught my eye, this one. Yeah, yeah. And the color and everything, and the clarity and sharpness of the dog and whatever. Just wonderful.
I just thought it was worth sharing.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. That was a super share. So that's lovely. Um, what else? What else have we got? What else have we got? That's it. That's it.
Could we just go back to the dog a second? Sorry, I turned to mute. I'd rather— I want to know how she orchestrated the clouds.
I think that might have been a replacement sky.
3 on each side.
Yeah. Yeah, I wonder. I wonder whether it is a real sky or whether she just dropped it in. I think I went to a talk of hers and she did say she dropped it in on this one. Right. Well, she's done it very well then, because I mean, if you look at that dog, that dog is beautifully masked, every little whisker and hair and stuff. There's no haloing around the dog. That's a really good sky mask conversion. But yeah, it's super, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah. Wonderful.
If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
Yeah, although there's an Irish photographer who lives out near the Skelligs, which are those very pointy islands that you sometimes see in shots from the west of Ireland. And he spent like several years living on that coast waiting for the sun to set between the 2 Skelligs. And he finally got the perfect image and everybody said, oh, that's Photoshopped. And he was most put out. He was about to admit that everybody was saying it was Photoshop. So yeah, who is that, Joe? I'm trying to remember, Steve. I will— when I, when I do, I will, I will tell you. Um, Skellig's— he's in Ballinascolig, so he's just, just off there where he lives. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's only a few miles from you. Yeah, I must have seen his images then come up on Yeah, he's got a shop, I think, in Barnerskully.
Oh, is it Peter Cox?
No, no, it's the other one.
Okay.
But he does lovely big coffee table books, limited edition coffee table stuff. Yeah. So, okay, it'll come to me. When it does, I'll let you know.
Thanks.
This one caught my eye. Whose is this? This is lovely. I mean, just as a form—
Oh, it's mine. Sorry.
Jan. Yeah, wonderful. Where's this one, Jan?
Iceland.
Iceland. Oh my goodness. Right.
The concert hall.
Yeah. Yeah. In Reykjavik. Right. Yeah. I mean, lovely detail shot. It's almost abstract, isn't it? And I think the thing that really, I really like about this is you've included I think that's a mistake. Well, I don't think it is, Jan. I think it actually makes the shot. Because, I mean, otherwise it's one of those regular geometrical building shots.
Yeah.
Yeah. And then you've got this round streetlight kind of sitting there, which breaks all the rules for the rest of it. And I think that's lovely. I think it's a lovely little counterpoint. And it's the reason that I kind of picked the image to kind of bring up, because I thought that was an intentional thing. But serendipity is wonderful. And I went to a concert there, which is amazing.
Even better.
Yeah, brilliant. Yeah. But I mean, just wonderful geometric forms and line and shape and color. It's just fabulous, isn't it? So it works on all kinds of levels. This is an abstract image, architectural image. It's, you know, it works in so many different ways. So yeah, well done. It's a lovely mistake. Yes. Would that we could all make mistakes that good, Jan. Yeah. Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I don't— I wouldn't edit it.
Wouldn't you?
I haven't edited it, actually. No, I don't think there's anything to edit. This is one of those shots that just works out of the camera. Oh, wow. You know, I'd cut that little streetlight off on the left. Doesn't matter. Don't do that!
No, no, no. It looks like a half-smiley face.
Yeah, but I like— I love that. I mean, that little— I don't know what that is in the top there. I might just lose that. Just make that black bit go. Yeah, it is part of the building, but it just catches my eye a little bit. You look at it and say, what's that? What's that? Is it a bit of muck, or is it kind of—
Yeah.
But everything else, I mean, it's fascinating. And I mean, you just follow around the lines and the squares and things, and then there's this really weird kind of line here. And I'm, you know, it's like Escher, isn't it? My mind's trying to get around it. Yeah, yeah, just like breaking my head. So, uh, and, and if, if an image can break your head, it's doing well, right? Thank you. So yeah, I think that's great. Absolutely super. Thank you. All right, so yeah, so I'm not, I'm not going to edit it, but I just think it's okay. I haven't edited it. No, no.
But I will look at that little blob. Yeah, not the streetlight.
I'll leave that in. Just take it out. Yeah. Somewhere I've always wanted to go, I presume. Is this the Grand Canyon?
No, it's Canyonlands, which is similar in the same sort of area, but not actually the Grand Canyon.
Yeah, it's just wonderful, isn't it? What would we do with this? I mean, again, it's a lovely image straight out of camera. Dehaze is going to give you a little bit more punch back if you want it. And you'll always get more out of a long image across, you know, a lot of area because there is always water in the sky, even in a dry kind of deserty place like this. So dehaze is going to give you punch. Um, now that might completely kill the atmosphere, that, you know, David might be wincing and saying, God, he's going to do that dehaze again. Yeah. And actually it was a hazy day and that's, that's exactly how it should look, you know. Well, no, the part of the reason I sent it in was that my initial inclination, of course, was yes, to dehaze, because one wants to see the detail right to the back. And you can see some mountains beyond the mountains once you've dehazed. Yeah, just here. But on the other hand, as you have said, maybe there is a perspective that comes from more mist rather than less mist. And I wanted to see what you wanted to do with it, really. Yeah, I think what I would probably do here is I would kind of hedge my bets a bit. So I would use a linear gradient, and I would come up from the bottom. I'm going to hold the Shift key down while I do to keep it horizontal. Okay. And I don't want to dehaze the back wall, but I do want to dehaze the front. Okay. So there we are. And if I can feather that off a bit more so that the feather really starts here and kind of just goes up to there. So now anything we do is going to only affect that first bottom 2/3 of the image. Yeah, so now we could dehaze, and that will clarify and give us more punch in the foreground, but still give us that lovely soft look. And you can, and you know, you can now move that around and see what it does. So there's dehaze and there's not, yeah, being applied, you know, further up. So you can kind of bring that down to, to where it works. So now you've got a little bit more going on, I think, in terms of clarity and not non-clarity and stuff. So O for overlay, H for the lines, O for overlay. Yeah. And so that's that. Not gonna change the crop because, well, we can't go 16 by 9 because we'd lose the sky and those far mountains. And that's part of the story. it's got, you know, it's got the width includes this. Now you could, you could say, well, if we went 10 by 8, we could kind of just get a vertical of maybe— no, that's 16 by 10. 10 by 8, nice and thick.
Yeah.
You know, and you could make more of just you know, just the valleys going through, but I think the original crop is better. I think it was just, it was right in camera, if you like. So, yeah, wouldn't actually change the crop at all there. But I'd say I argue with myself as to whether or not I've got the horizontals right, because the mountains might not be horizontal. That's right, they're undulating, aren't they? Yeah, absolutely. So, and there's nothing to say what should be vertical and what shouldn't. So then really it's just where do you want the eye to go, isn't it? And maybe this lovely butt here might be a thing to just pull out a little bit more. So then, you know, how do we bring this up a little bit more? So maybe a radial filter on it. Just to bring this out a little bit more. H gives us the lines, and I'm gonna feather right into just that bit of it there. And let's see what we can do with it. So we could just give it a little bit more, maybe white, just a tad. Yeah, and certainly Texture. You see what texture does? See the difference? It's just bringing up. And if I zoom in a bit more, hold the Shift key down to move around. So let's, let's try that texture. So you see, it just brings it out, and that's just going to guide the eye to it because it's the sharpest thing in the midground now. Yeah, if you do clarity, you're going to darken the darks and you're going to— so a little bit of clarity would just give some of the blacks a bit, bit more black. That's fine, something like that. So now let's see. So before and after that mask, before and after, just a little bit more punch. And I think that brings the eye perhaps to that a little bit more than it would have done before. We've got, you know, we've got this line taking the eye up there, we've got that line taking the eye in there, and, you know, this is now the sharpest thing in the shot. So we're unconsciously being led to that. Now, you could also maybe, if you really wanted to kind of start getting really fancy. You could just do a very soft brush and just maybe run a brush around this line here and just raise that up just a fraction, just something like that. So again, you kind of don't want to know that it's been done. But if you just did that, you see, it's just now it's another line taking us towards the butt, isn't it? Stuff like that. So again— Joe, sorry, on that mound, could you use object, an object mask there? I just wonder if that would go around it precisely. I was just thinking when you were drawing the radial gradient and then you started to Increase exposure or whatever. Okay, so it got— it was kind of grabbing some of the background as well. Yeah, so that would give us the mound better, and then we need to just add a little bit in here. Yeah, so, you know, we could add with another— with same brush. Yeah, so just push the rest of it. Yeah, because there was— it did, you're right, Steve, it grabbed a little bit of the background. So that would, you know, just— so yeah, you could kind of just clarify that mound specifically now, and then you could just run that against, you know, the clarity and everything. Yeah, that's a good call. Yeah, I thought it wasn't detailed enough, you know, from the background, but yes, you're right, it grabbed most of it. So that probably would have been a good thing. I don't know, Certainly, it's a better way of grabbing the object. I still like the radial filter because it feathers. But, you know, so did that feather actually affect you? And even if it did brighten the background a little bit, does it look like it was done?
Yeah.
If it's visible, Then yeah, you're right. It just goes to show how many different ways there are to do it. There's so many different ways, that's right, and there's so many different tools to use. That's right. So that's it. And I mean, I don't know, it would work just as well, if not better, in black and white. And now it becomes an Ansel Adams. Yeah, I went to Yosemite on the same trip, you're right.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I mean, look at that, you know, the, the, the, what, the, the brights and the darks and everything, and the shapes are coming out more, aren't they, in that, in that shot of the black and white. So, uh, so that's rather lovely.
Yeah.
But again, I mean, you're all getting too good. There's, there's very little editing to be done on a lot of these shots. They're already, they're already super, you know, as soon as they come in, which is, which is wonderful. Did you do Did you send me a processed one? I did, yes. It won't look terribly different from the original, I have to say. I did dehaze the background, and that's why I said, um, and there's more detail visible there. But I didn't think of doing that. Yeah, I didn't. Yes, and I got rid of some of the sky. But, um, yes, I didn't think of doing the butt. That was, um, that's a phrase I don't want to use too often, but I mean, thank you for doing it. That's all right. Indeed, yes. I think it's B-U-T-T-E, isn't it? Yes, yes, yes. That big, that big, yeah.
So yeah, but super.
That's great. All right, L for lights out or lights on again, G for grid, and then we'll come back just to the raw files. Super. How are we doing? You know what time it is. It's mince pie time. Oh, because there's no scones in the house, but there are mince pies. And it's Christmas. So let me pause. Let's find the pause button.
For the what? For the augmenting?
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, well, there's a possibility there might be, might be a little talk on what you can get out of one of those things. We'll see. But as I say, I'll report back. Maybe I'll rope Olive in as well. Okay, let me share my screen again. I rather like this. I rather like this one. This, this just kind of popped out at me when I was going through them all. So let's just see DeFi Develop. It's kind of very graphic, isn't it? What do we do here? Do we leave him as a shadowy figure, or do we reveal him? Yeah, there's, you know, there's lots of, lots of different possibilities for this story, aren't there? I think one thing I would probably do is right at the bottom, those 2 little uplighters, and this one, they're kind of drawing my eye a little bit. So I think I'd probably lose those. Now, do I lose them by cropping? Because you can do— you could do that. You could— let's just, let's just, just do, do something like that. You could do that. And now we've got, you know, that we've got that reflection on the, on the reflection line, and it just gets rid of those. Or if we wanted that dark area as a bottom to the image, you know, almost like a matte. We can— we could just lose those with, you know, with a— with an erase or whatever. Um, I don't know, I'm gonna— I'm gonna go boringly symmetrical and use the crop. Okay. Yeah.
Um, I love those 2 people in the window.
Yeah, yeah, they're adding to it, aren't they? The 1, 2, 3. Yeah, they're rather good. And I'm looking at these, I was just doing the V there for black and white, but actually there's a nice pop of color, isn't there?
Well, the whole thing looks black and white apart from them.
Yeah, apart from those 2. So, so I think we'll keep it in color even though I was—
We have used Photoshopping them into color.
Yeah, well, I mean, you could— you— we can certainly— so, so he's, he's got this blue— what blue is it— shirt on or whatever. Now one thing you can do, you know, is you can saturate that up a bit more maybe. So I mean, just, just pop a little radial gradient over him and let's just see whether we can just pop that color even more. Yeah, so you can just, just warm, you know, just, just, just kind of really, really get it to pop out. And then if we move across to her, can we do the same? Is there a bit of red? Is there a bit of red? Yeah, in her midriff. Okay, you see, I don't see the But just kind of saturate that up a bit more, just to pop them a little bit more. Yeah, yeah, they do. Now that is bugging me. I think we're gonna have to do— let's come out of mask. I don't agree with the popping, by the way.
Okay. Personally, it detracts from the man.
Okay. All right. Yeah. But I'm gonna leave him. I'm gonna leave him in shadow. I'm not going to bring him out because I think that's the mystery is part of the story there. Yeah. I mean, maybe maybe you you could say those are now. Yeah, detracting from him, possibly. That bit is doing my head in though. We've got to get rid of that. So what's the best way of doing that? Probably just to remove. Let's just do a remove on that. And that bit there as well. Okay, let's just see whether we can— yeah, that's better, isn't it? And that bit there, I don't know, can we, can I, can I just lose that as well? It's reflected out at the bottom now. Oh, it is, isn't it? Yeah, okay, all right, well then there we are. I'll do that. Bum bum bum.
What does anybody else think about the one on the edge that looks like a computer or something?
This one?
It's not a person, is it?
It's not. Mel, if you want it gone, it's gone.
I asked what everyone else thought.
No. No, it's better with it.
You want it?
Yeah, it gives a leading line in.
Yeah.
Doesn't it? The 3 of them, I think. Something like that. Yeah. Might just punch the whites up a little bit on the image as a whole. I think let's just remove it. Yeah. I mean, maybe just let's just see. Just raise the whites a bit and pull the blacks down a tad. I don't know, too much, too much, and we get— we lose the detail on the frontage, don't we? It's just, yeah, it's just a really, really interesting story. Just make that big. LL. Doing very little. We've just done tiny little changes.
You didn't go to straighten at all?
No, I don't think it needs it, does it?
That didn't worry you that they were slightly off?
What are slightly off? They're not, but it's not great. They're not straight there. And if I straighten those, These will be off because they're on a kind of fishbone, aren't they?
Yeah.
But the surfaces, that's it, the reflective surface.
That's right. It's obviously not quite kind of straight, is it?
I mean, in cropping, you could perhaps just make the— just adjust it to get the top one straight and ignore the bottom. But if you put in a digital straightener, it'll mess it up, as you said.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if we— oh, what have I done there? Boom, boom, boom. I went to grid.
Where's Del?
Where is it? Where's he gone?
Top right.
Top right. Oh, there he is. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So if we go off the crop, just rotate slightly. Let's just come back in then. Well, if I rotate that one right, that one's going to be wrong. Now what we could do is—
I meant rotate the frame.
Yeah, but that's still going to— so we make the— you see, that makes the bottom wrong when the top's right.
Yeah, but the bottom's reflection, it doesn't matter.
Okay. Or what we could do is we could use the tool here, and we make that right, and we make that right. And that kind of brings those both in. But you see, then we lose that gap at the top, which I think added— I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think it— I mean, to me, it doesn't really matter that the lines are off. I think that kind of just being off adds a little bit of dynamic to the image for me. I don't know. And this big dark empty space. Again, I love it. I just love it. I think it's a really powerful image, this. Um, yeah, I think this—
this— I personally would still take those 2 figures back to what they originally— I think they're a bit too poppy.
Yeah.
Personally.
Yeah. Um, this—
sorry, I keep pointing at anything everyone can see. The figure in the middle is, is, is what, you know, even though he's not 2/3, it doesn't matter. He's absolutely Spot on.
Him. Yeah, he's wonderful, isn't he? Yeah, he absolutely is. So if we went back into the history, where did it— was the remove spots, was it? No, no, it wasn't. Yeah, so we could go back and put those in, but then you'd have to kind of redo the rest of the history. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, but that's it. You see, there's so many different ways of looking at an image, aren't there? Um, and, you know, seeing what, what works and what doesn't.
Um, Joe, just talking about that for a minute, can you not go back to the history and remove one item? No, you can't. You have to go—
okay, no, if we— if I come back and I want to get rid of that, that saturation adjustment, which I think was her— okay, yeah, I don't think— no, I can't. You see, you can't just take that one line out.
Okay.
And I don't know why that is because, you know, you should be able to, shouldn't you? Because it's, you know, it is just one change, if you like. But no, if you create a snapshot, it creates everything up to that point. But if I come to that point and I now make any further change, it removes everything above.
Okay. Yeah, I presumed that was the case.
Yeah. So, uh, yeah. Whereabouts?
Sorry, I don't know whose picture this is, but what is that reflection? Reflective, um—
Yeah, is it a seat or a—
because it's, uh, it's my picture. Um, oh yeah, yeah. And it was taken, um, in the City of London, um, in this, this sort of— I suppose, I don't know, it's a sort building complex.
Yeah.
Um, and you walk in and, and there's this sort of, um, you can actually look down to the next floor down through this thing.
Yeah.
So it's a sort of, I suppose it's a big sort of glass-topped construction.
Yeah.
You can look down at, you know, the floor, the floor below.
The floor below. And you used it as a, as a, as a reflector. Yeah, yeah, there's a mirror. It's a cracking shot.
I really like it, Oliver. It's beautiful.
Thank you. Wonderful eye, Oliver. I mean, just to, just to see it. Yeah, minimal, minimalness changes.
You know, funny, when I edited it, I went the other way.
And let's see what you did. Let's see what you did. Well, you haven't got it. Oh no, Olive.
What I can do is, um, I'll upload What I did do, um, because it's completely different, what I did was brightened it all up.
Ah, did you bring the van out?
I brought everything out. And so what you have is, it's just interesting to see this as a completely different image, and it just makes you realize that editing— because you've got a Coke tin and you've got all—
Oh, look, yeah, these come, these things come out of the wall now, don't they, when you brighten everything up. Yeah, yeah, look at that. And, and the shadows and stuff. And if we amplify that whole— yeah, yeah, that's, that's interesting.
No, they're all lined up.
Yeah, yeah, there's all that lined up. Yeah, which, which kind of works as well. I don't think it's as powerful though. I think, I think the minimal one is, is far more mystery storytelling than than the brighter one.
Yeah, but it's— I mean, it's interesting.
It is, isn't it?
Doing it that way, because I would never have thought of doing it that way.
No.
Could you flip it into black and white for a moment? What, like that?
That's interesting.
Oh yeah, but it only works in the original for me.
Yeah, but that's, you know, again, it's different. It It's bringing out different things, isn't it, now?
Yeah.
It's a completely different story now. You know, now we're looking at him.
Yeah.
Kind of, you know, kind of, yeah, kind of wondering about him. They're much more obvious now, aren't they? Now we've got this intrusion at the bottom and the top that we didn't see before, that kind of pattern that was just black before, and all this was black, wasn't it? So we've got— there's a lot more busyness now in the image.
Yeah.
Um, and I think that was what I liked about the previous edit, was it was, it was all, you have to make the story.
Yeah.
If you like. Whereas here you're giving, giving the viewer everything, if you like. Um, yeah, yeah, but brilliant. Yeah, you know, what a wonderful image that we could take it so far 2 different ways and, and get so much difference out of it. and stuff. Yeah, lovely. Thank you, Olive.
Pleasure.
Now, is there anybody that we haven't edited their image for a good while? Who's put stuff in today? Mike, which ones are yours?
Mine are the 4 black and whites of the street scene.
Oh yes, okay, right. So there was—
This was— this is— I was standing at a the, the BART station, and, um, I just saw this group, small group. Actually, one seems to be there twice. I don't know why. Um, but it's this small group of people with the curve, and I just, just loved it. Brilliant, bright, bright light. Um, and then I suddenly realized the girl in the top of that was walking down the road.
Yeah.
I'd seen this other girl get out of her car and not— and suddenly realized they were they were meeting.
Right.
Beautiful expression of love and joy seeing each other. And one that's missing is where they actually hugged. It's not as good. The best 2 I like were the 2 you've got here on the left.
Yeah.
But then the end of the story was they're getting in the car and the other 2 people are walking up the road. And that was just the 4 shots I took. And it was all taken, um, on FP4 and, um, scanned.
Right. So, so is this, is this kind of recent, or is this years ago?
Um, '22.
All right, okay. So you're shooting film kind of now? This is not always—
Yeah, yeah. In fact, I've just disposed of my, um, monochrome because, um, I'm going to go back to purely film and scan it when I need to.
Right, right. Fantastic.
I, I—
it's the fact that they keep replacing digital cameras, and, um, I prefer to stick with the same thing.
Just stick with the same thing. Yeah, yeah.
I've just had my old Olympus has just been refurbished.
Right, wonderful. Yeah, yeah, I've got an old OM-2 upstairs that I need to put some film in next year and play with again. Yeah, wonderful.
Yeah, this is taken on, uh, an F6.
Right. I mean, from an editing perspective, there's very little I would do with these. I mean, okay, you know, if you wanted to, you could kind of sort the verticals out and stuff like that. But I think if we start editing these in digital and do all the normal kind of clarity and contrasty and stuff, we'll kill them because they've got that beautiful film look.
What I did was, especially with the central Yeah. Um, which is— I, I took it in a bit. Um, these are, these are the originals, not the— uh, no, I kept it, kept the format vertical.
Yeah.
Um, and just trimmed in the, the awkward bits on the right. I took that building out.
Yeah.
On the right, annoying. And straightened up the— with the, with the tilt thing, the, um, building on the left.
Okay. So yeah, if we crop that one out.
And I think we'll do the woman at the bottom out, as I recall.
Yeah. You might go maybe 10 by 8. It would do that for you, wouldn't it? We lose the sky then, don't we? So let's open it up. Let's put the sky back in just so that you've got that detail. And then we rotate To the column. So something like that.
And I think it's not shown in this because you can't see it, but the 2 girls sort of got a bit quicker in their motion as they sort of got closer.
Yeah.
I just loved it.
Um, yeah, wonderful little story, the, the, the shots. Yeah. Um, yeah, but she hasn't even got to close the door of the car. Now look, yeah, yes, there are— there we are. Yeah, yeah, it's lovely. It's absolutely lovely. And yeah, that— the joy, the expression on the face is just lovely, isn't it? Yeah, wonderful.
I don't tend to over— as you may have guessed, um, produce my, um, post-produced No. I try to keep it as close as I can in the camera. I've got an old Nikon scanner which I use.
I mean, one of the things, you know, with your kind of shooting, if you— I don't know whether you use Nik. And I mean, I'm not going to do my normal texture kind of crazy thing with structure here. But one of the things that Nik has—
Nik?
Nik Silver Efex.
All right, okay.
So this is Nik's black and white editor. But one of the things in Nik, and I think I've— sorry, Nik. Yeah, there we are. It's in the top left-hand corner there. Nik Nik Silver Efex. Okay, um, they've got lots and lots of different film, um, lots of different film kind of simulations. Now I'm just trying to find them because I don't normally use them, and they've moved everything in version 8. It's like going into Lidl and they've moved the beans.
Let's have a look. You buy things on the way you didn't— weren't going to buy.
Yeah, that's right.
But the thing is, if I'm scanning, I already have the film effect.
You have. Yes, you have. Yeah. So here we are. Look, different kind of grain that you would get from different types of film. And as you apply each one of these, so you see there, that's the Kodak HIE. Watch the road. You see, we're getting much more grain on that one. So, so it just gives you a look. So you see, you see, let's, let's turn it, turn it all on. Right. So let's do that again. So there's the grain. Okay. And now we'll see, we'll see the image changing subtly. You see that one particularly there, the Kodak. look, HIE filter, it's bringing in a lot of that kind of original grainy look. The Rollei is getting— there's a bit more tonality in the, in the road and stuff. Um, so there's quite a lot of different, different options in there that you could, that you could apply, you know, which would give you slightly different film stock looks if you wanted.
My son— one of my sons raves about his Fuji that does this in camera.
Yeah, yeah, all the Fujis. I mean, their, their, their, their, um, little recipes in camera are just beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. So, but yeah, so that's, that's, that's fun, the, uh, the film grain, um, stuff. Um, but there is actually a film stock. It's not just the grain. Somewhere, somewhere in here And as I say, they've they've moved everything, so I don't know where it is now or whether I've even got him got got everything turned on. There are there are some other options for for film, so I just thought I'd show you that anyway. I'll close without saying thank you. Yeah, that's fine. G for grid. Lovely jubbly. What talk to me about this car? What's— who sent this in? Yes, it's me, David. Wonderful. Yes, what a beautiful car. Um, it's not mine.
No, it—
the reason, if you go to the next image, right, um, early one morning, uh, last year in the middle of July, uh, about half past 6, I went out to go photograph, uh, the mist on the water meadows. And I sort of had the camera around my neck, turned around, and saw this. So I put my finger on the button quite a bit and just left it on the button. Yeah, just sort of— and it was a 1/125th at about f/8 or something like that. Yeah. Um, and I— you don't see many of those around because it's an— it's a very early Porsche. Is it? It is a Porsche, is it right? Wow. Yes, it is. It's one of the very early ones, I believe. Um, and obviously got some lovely leading lines, but they're sort of around the back. And really, I wondered what to do with it, which makes it better. And as you see, as it got closer, um, it was, it was moving even out of focus. Yes. You know, is that focus or is it motion blur? It's probably— Yeah, yeah, I'd like to say it was, but The reality is that it was actually out of focus, I think. Let's, let's improve it. Let's drop it into Topaz. Let's see, let's see what Topaz will, will do. And I haven't, I haven't updated Topaz for a few weeks, so it'll probably shout at me, but let's, let's see. I must admit, I am seriously considering switching away from Topaz into DxO. After their— I'm just not impressed with their current image stuff. And they've gone to this credit model as well. It's not something I'm particularly happy with, but we'll see. So let's just let it do its thing. So if I turn on autopilot, Then that'll make some options. So it's just saying upscale it. Was it a small image? Right. So what have we got? We've got before and after. So it's actually, it's giving us a lot more detail.
Yeah.
But I'm not seeing a whole lot of kind of, you know, more new sharpness and stuff. Now, again, they've just, they've changed all the interface. So here we are, choose something else. Okay. So we might try sharpening. Yeah. Let's try sharpening. And you got— But I mean, there should— I want a motion blur. Oh, here we are, lens blur. That lens blur, let's see. You've got motion blur below. Yeah, motion blur. There we are. Yeah. So let's try that. So that's motion blur. That's lens blur. Natural. Now, so motion blur is doing a little bit of it, but now let's try the strength. So what's that giving us? See, quite a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at the difference. So let's do a before and an after. Before, after. Mickey Mouse now driving the car. Oh my goodness, look at that. Yeah. Oh my goodness, isn't that awful? Because, I mean, the car looks quite a bit better. I mean, look at this, look at the line on the car along there. I mean, it's really sharpening the car up beautifully.
You know, it's a beautiful car.
It is. But as you say, yeah, I mean, it's mangled the, um, mangled the front, hasn't it? A little bit. But, but yes. Golly. Recover faces. Yes, let's see whether we can recover the face. Okay, well, that's a bit better. Okay, so now we've got a sharper car and we've recovered the face from all the lines. Okay, so there we go. So yeah, so I mean, it is, it is quite a difference.
Yeah, it is.
It's kind of, it's got it And I mean, the front of that car is, relatively speaking, moving quite fast now, isn't it?
Yeah.
So yeah. He's doing about 30 miles an hour. Yes. So 1/125th of a second, he's moving a fair way. Yeah, that's right. So there we go. So you can include the hair and the neck or not now in the face. Recognition, that's new. There we go. Okay, and then we— and then if I export that back, that drops that back into our grid. So now we've got before and after. Yeah, it's better, isn't it? Yeah, it's better, isn't it?
Yeah.
I don't know where my zoom's gone. Rotate, flag, look, what's all you? There used to be a zoom in, or was it X and Y? That's what I want. Yeah, there we are. Right, okay. So compare. I might bring that one down. It's about right. Yeah. So that's, yeah, it upscaled it as well. That's why it's not comparing the 2. But yeah, I mean, there's quite a difference, isn't there? Yeah. Between that and that. So yeah, maybe we don't write Topaz off completely yet, but it is, yeah, I'm not happy with it. They just seem to have gone backwards with the new Photo Studio. It's not Intuitive. So, anybody else hasn't had an image edited for a little while? Ken, which one are yours? Where are Ken's? I'm looking for Ken. Right, that one. So these, these 3 are Ken's. Okay, lovely. Which one would you like me to edit, Ken? Which one would you like me to play with? You're muted. You'd have to unmute. I think the poppy field, actually, because I could never do anything with that. It always looks kind of flat and boring, and it really shouldn't. So you want me to edit a field full of red flowers, do you? Thanks a lot. Yeah, well, I couldn't, I couldn't make anything of it, so I was hoping you might give me something. Somebody who can't see red. Yeah, okay. Oh, sorry.
Try a different one then. Oh no, no, no.
We'll go with this now. You've set me a challenge now. I wonder whether we can do something with— maybe we can do more with the sky and have a blue-red kind of thing going on. I mean, red, white, and blue with the clouds even would be rather nice, wouldn't it? I'm thinking a vertical crop. Would probably be better because then we get more accentuation of the layers. So let's see. Now if we do that, we want some of the blue sky. So let's, let's try that. Let's see what that gives us. Let's go down to Color Mixer. And see whether we can make— is the blue— is this— it's not. Oh yeah, okay, right. So we can darken that, see whether we can get the blue a bit more. Okay. It looks like it's breaking up a little bit, isn't it? Is this, is this a, no, it is a CR3. All right, so we might need to just denoise as well then. I think it's going slightly purple. Is it purple, Steve? Thank you. Yes, it is. Yeah, well, that's fine. Maybe we can tweak that. in the temperature and tint. So, oh, that's perfect, isn't it? I know it's not. I know it's not. So, so say when.
When?
Okay. All right. But yeah, come from that to that. that, you know. So that's not bad, is it? Um, let's see what else then. Um, if we did a little bit of dehaze, that gives us even more.
Yeah.
Okay, so now we're really getting a bit of pop out of those clouds, aren't we? Which is rather lovely. I'm gonna— yeah, I'm gonna go easy on the clarity though. Um, but that's, that's made a huge difference.
Yes.
To the top. I certainly want to lose that awful pole in the middle there. Joe, can you just remind me what the before and after is without using Y? You were doing that. It was the backslash key, Steve. Thank you. So we'll just get rid of that horrible pole. You know what I might even try and do is just get rid of that whole, that whole grassy bit. Just, just replace it with this. We could probably do that with just a clone and just see whether we can. Yeah, look at that.
Yeah.
So that's, that's cloned. That's cloned the trees. Rather nicely. So that'll do. Yeah. And then, I mean, in terms of making more of the foreground linear gradient, maybe up, up, just, just to cover that, that area there. And then let's see what we can do with that linear gradient. We can maybe go too far on this. And then I don't know. I mean, you know, in terms of the red and stuff, we'd pop the reds a bit more if you wanted to, stuff like that. But something like that.
Yeah.
Ken?
Yeah, that's so— yeah, that's fine. That's good. That's interesting. It's actually kind of what I tried to do, but I didn't do the vertical crop. Okay, let's see what you— I took some of the foreground out so there wasn't so much green in the foreground. Did you send yours in?
I did, sir.
Oh, good. Well, then let's, um— oh yeah, okay. And Yeah.
But yeah, I could have done the sky more.
Yeah.
And I got rid of all the telegraph poles like you did. Yeah, you got rid of the telegraph pole. That's right. And then you've, yeah, you've cropped out kind of that, because there's an empty patch there, isn't there? Yes. So you've really just focused on, on where the red is most, which is lovely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm sure that this is just jumping out to you, is it? Because it just looks a kind of muddy color to me, that front. Yeah, no, so. Yeah, so who knows what I'm missing out. Yeah, and I don't see Ray. Super. Okay, lovely. Who else hasn't had a— who else hasn't had any What about Lesley?
She sent in some.
Lesley, yes, you sent some. Yes, I sent in some. Hold on, let me find them. I don't know where they are. Have a look. I think they were towards the bottom. Yeah, dot, David, Chris. Yeah, there's that one. There's one of an arcade where your arrow's on. That one, yep. So that one. And that one. That's Olive. Sorry, the one of the bridge going over the water and loads of trees, that one. Those 2, yeah. They're yours, are they? Lovely. Yeah. Okay. Will we do the arcade? I think the arcade is definitely one we should do. First thing I would do I mean, it's a little underexposed, I think, even. But what you've done is you've shot to protect the highlights. And even though, even though the highlights go all the way up to the end there, I think we can just, just pull, push the exposure a little bit without blowing any of the highlights. It'll give us a little bit more main light.
Mm-hmm.
So that's, that's the first thing I'd do. We can fix the verticals. So let's just do the transform. And we'll take a vertical. So that should be one of them. And then I'm just doing them by free by eye here. There's the second one. Okay, so now we're, we're straight on and you see the floor. If we want that floor, we can use the line there on the floor. And say, well, if we wanted that to be straight as well, you know, kind of, then that sorts the tweak out there. So now they're straight on and the floor. And if you wanted a second one of those, you could do the same thing, although that's odd because it's going round a bit. But there we are. Okay, so there's using for.
Clarity.
It's going to give us a nice bit of pop on this particular image because it's all midtones. You know, most, most of the tones in this image are midtones, and clarity is always going to work really, really well on midtones. It'll whiten the whites, it'll darken the blacks a little bit, so you can push the clarity a good bit up and then just raise the shadows to get the detail back out of the crisp tree and the Royal Arcade sign and stuff like that. And texture will just give you all the micro detail. So that's rather nice. And then, I don't know, you might want to just pop the trees a little bit. Let's do a— let's do an object selection, see whether it'll pick that tree up, or those 2 trees. See whether it's clever enough. Oh, look at that! It's ridiculous, isn't it? How good it is! And we maybe just give those a little bit pop the whites on them. Yeah, just brings them out that little bit more, doesn't it? Something like that. And then it's kind of what do you want to do? Do you want to play with a little bit of kind of walk walk the walk the viewer through with a brush? You know, soft brush and kind of you know walk walk the viewer around there. Just raise that up a little bit, whatever. Give the you know give that slightly brighter brighter run through. You could you could do the same thing with the with that lovely wall there. Maybe just darken it. And give it a bit more detail, stuff like that. Yeah, just bring it out that little bit more. Yes, I think that's really nice actually, Joe, what you've done, because I think the eye is drawn too much towards those signs above the various shops. By highlighting the first floor, I think that's—
the eye obviously is drawn a lot more there.
Yeah, and I mean, that's lovely, isn't it? I mean, that lovely old stonework for me is the draw. So, I mean, we've got the Royal Arcade, and kind of almost those trees take you up. Yes, that's right. To the second floor, don't they? So, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's it. Did you send in your version of that? Oh, I didn't. I just sent the rules, I'm afraid. Well, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah, that's absolutely fine. Super. All right. Can you tell us, Lesley, where it is, please? Yes, it's Worthing. It's Victorian, that arcade, and I just saw it and I thought it was just so unusual.
Yeah. Lovely.
Yeah, it is. It's lovely. Yeah, so super. Okay, Chief Gridlet, whose is this one? Oh, that's another of Olive's.
Yes.
Well, let's see whether there's somebody we haven't done, because we've done one of yours already, haven't we, Olive? We've done Ken's, we've done Olive's.
Oh, that's Chris. He's not here, but—
Okay, well, Chris has put in—
He's gone to Surrey with his pictures as well.
Right, okay. So here's here's Chris's three. Mel, pick one of Chris's for me to edit.
The the um can't think what it is promenade thing into the sea. Into this one. Top one. Yeah, sorry. Linmouth. What's it called? Pier.
Linmouth. Right, okay. All right. First thing is we need to sort the horizon out, um because it's it's wonky. Um so again just. Take a line along the sea, get it absolutely straight. Boom. So we're sorted there. Okay, um, there's nothing exciting in the sky, and we can lose a little bit of the foreground. So I'm gonna go 16:9 because it's nice panoramic crop, um, and that allows me to maybe use that line at the bottom there, down into that corner. It's a bit tight though, isn't it? It's a bit tight. Let's, let's just raise it up a little bit. There we are. And I mean, then we can play with the thirds line and maybe put the sea on the thirds line, which might work. I'm not sure that I'm getting a whole lot from the hotel. And if I bring this in, we can use our rule of thirds as well. and now have the tower on that third intersection point. So that now maybe works a little bit better. We can look in something like that.
Okay.
And everything— and by sacrificing those other bits, what we're left with is bigger. Okay. So we've actually got quite a nice— we've got that line going kind of, kind of down to there. We've got this line coming into the corner. We've straightened things up. We've got the tower again. I want I want to make more of the of the sky. So let's do let's do the same thing that we did before with the sky. See what we can get out of it. So hue not so much, but definitely the luminance. the sky. Yeah, the blue luminance, maybe a bit of the aqua. Aqua's not making any difference, but the blue, the blue is, isn't it? And let's try a general dehaze on it as well. That'll give us, give us a bit of pop. Is it, is it the right color? Yeah, it's Yeah, yeah, okay. So straight away we've, um, we've kind of amplified the sky. And then what do we do? Do we make, make a— make more of the curve perhaps? Um, this is very dark and heavy. So maybe let's just raise the shadows. Let's see, that'll probably just— yeah, look, we can get lots of much more detail back just using the shadows thing there. That's nice. And then, yeah, let's just do a brush now. Let's do a brush, but this time with the brush, um, I want to auto mask it, and I'm just going to do a big brush to see whether we can just get it to just pick up the pier. So, oh, um, overlay. So there's the overlay. Oh, my flow's down, isn't it? There we are. So flow, um, and what do I want to do? But I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna whack the exposure up so that I can see where I'm brushing. Okay, so if I did that, is it caught? Is it grabbing the edges? Quite well, quite well. A little bit of bleed because my brush is too big, but you see, I can just pull up the, the stonework. So that's really all I'm trying to pull up. Yeah. And then if I want to just hold the Option or the Alt key down and get my minus brush, then I can just take out, take out the stuff I didn't want, including brush a bit smaller. Just come in here and over there. Okay, and now let's put that exposure back where it should be and see what we want to do. It's probably clarity. Clarity gives, gives me a nice punch on that stone. We didn't have before. Before, after. Yeah, it's maybe a little, little bit overdone, but it's, um, it's kind of getting right now. If it's too overdone now, I've made those changes, all those different changes to texture and clarity and dehaze and all the rest of it. Come all the way back to the top and just back the whole thing off a bit. Yeah, and that just backs off the whole recipe in one go, one slider. Yeah, it's— this is a very underutilized tool, this top slider. So anything that you've done to any of the sliders in this gray area down here, okay, this will increase that effect As a whole recipe or decrease it.
Wow.
Yeah. Forgotten that. You've been through that before, but— Yeah, yeah. Just brought it to top of mind again. Thank you. Joe, could I just ask you, when you did the steps on Peter's shot, you used a linear gradient first to draw you in and then used the brush afterwards. So I just wondered why the difference? What's the— what was the thinking? That's all. I just hadn't used that brush technique with the— for a little while. So I was just pulling a different—
Oh, okay.
Just a different tool out of the toolbox.
Okay.
That was it. I'd be looking around at the corners and the sides now and just, you know, if I was kind of gonna pop this into a competition or whatever, is there anything that's bugging me? Is there anything that's annoying me? Half a boat down here, I might just try and lose. So I might just, for instance, just tell that to remove that boat there. Where's my brush? Got a reflection as well, Joe, hasn't it? I don't know. Yeah, there is as well. Yeah. So let's just— hey, can you lose that? And it's supposed to be better at reflections now, removing things like that. But see whether it'll just fill that in and get rid. So you've got 3 options. 1, press the H key to get rid of the lines. 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. I think 3, because that leaves us the reflection of the other boat, doesn't it? Yeah, which is nice. Yeah, so that just cleans up that little bit there. Lamp post on the extreme left. Yeah, I wondered about that. It's not quite straight, is it? 1, 2, 3. It's either 2 or 3, isn't it? Yeah, maybe, maybe 2. Yeah, on there. Now, do we want to just bring out that side of the— I mean, we could, we could get a bit more detail out of that side of the tower if we wanted to, just, just raise it up a bit of clarity or whatever. But I think it's, I think it's all right, isn't it? Um, so yeah, that would probably be it. I think for that one. Anybody else do anything different to this? Can I just ask you, when you were talking about doing the side there, would you, how would you do that? This side of here?
Yeah.
Right, let's zoom in and do it then. It's what we're here for, Steve, so let's do that. So let's mask it with an object to start with, because I think if we use object, it'll probably So I just want to mask that side of the building.
Very good.
I'm not sure about that bit there. Subtract, subtract that bit. Yeah, there we are. Okay, so that's that side of the building now. Yeah, so if I— now I can raise the shadows on that side and get a bit more out of it.
Okay.
Yeah, and I can probably just clarify texture. And then look at the texture, you're just getting all the stonework, all the brickwork. Yeah. And whites will also give you that. So before that, let's Z out. So before the mask, after the mask. Yeah, it's still in shadow, but you've got more out of it. Yeah, yeah, more detail out of it. Very good, thank you. So that's, that's what I would do there. So we started with that, ended kind of with that. So again, it's just increasing the contrast. And don't forget, raw files will very often lack that punch. Now, if you were out and you took the same shot with your phone, it would look much better on the phone than your fantastic expensive SLR or mirrorless camera, but the mirrorless camera is shooting RAW. So, you know, we have to come in and do that editing and stuff like that. Yeah. Now, what would a judge pick up if you presented that probably that boat there would be picked up as having probably blown highlights. So again, just be careful with that, you know, just check that kind of thing, particularly where you've got white. So if we came over again there, I'd probably do an object mask, run it over the boat, and then just pull the highlights down. See, and by pulling the highlights down, you've got all that detail back, and it's, you know, it's not now white, kind of white, white, overwhite. It's— so the detail, the difference there on that one. Yeah, you know, it's it's kind of bright bright, and then you're just taking it down, and you're not going to get hammered. There's another point there. So that's that. Okay, I think that brings us up to pretty much twelve o'clock, doesn't it? What a super set! Thank you everybody for sending all those in today.
Very good.
Wonderful. Mel, what was our last— what was our last session? Is Mel gone? No, she's there.
No, I'm here. I'm thinking. Just one moment, Joe.
Color and mood. Color and mood. Last one. Color and mood.
Right, lovely.
Okay. Well, that's it. There's a challenging one for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, let's see what we can get in terms of color and emotion and mood and stuff like that to take us into Christmas. Lovely.
I was going to say that this is the last for this year. Apart from the one that Joe's doing on December 12th. Have some of you booked for that one? 100 Ways AI Can Help Photographers.
Indeed. Yeah, hopefully that should be interesting. That's gonna be— it's gonna be a different talk because we're not gonna be looking at AI image generation in that. We're gonna be looking at all the other stuff that AI can do to help you as a photographer. So things like creating shot lists, or, you know, I'm going to Amsterdam next week, give me a walkabout tour for a photographer, you know, that kind of thing, all that kind of stuff. stuff that they can help with. So that— I wrote a little book of about 100 ways you could use photo, you know, AI for photography. So it's going to be using some of those ideas and just going through them. So a bit of fun.
Is that going to be videoed? Everything, everything we do in DI workshops is videoed. If you've got a better offer, Oliver, you get the Notion document and that's where we pop the recording. So if you just register for everything, you'll get a recording for everything. Right, brilliant. And that's a freebie on the 12th. And then our next workshop with Joe is on the 3rd, which is the Lightroom bundle— the, sorry, the Lightroom Mobile.
Oh golly, I'm gonna have to do some work over Christmas.
You are. You've got to use Boxing Day And then we're just getting some more talks in for Friday mornings with Joe. We've got one called Haven't Got a Notion, which is all about the Notion documents and how to use them yourself.
Oh, wow.
Learn more about that.
That's 9th of January.
We've got an Affinity workshop making a simple zine.
Yeah, that's 27th of February. And Affinity has just changed. So it's now no longer kind of 3 separate tools, it's a single tool now. So that'll be the new Affinity, which is free. So that's, yeah, we'll just do a single Create a Zine, a couple of hours doing that. Yeah, so that's the 27th of Feb. Are they up on Biletto yet, Mel?
Not quite, no.
Not quite.
I only did it yesterday, Joe.
Yeah, well, that's right, we only agreed the dates yesterday, so yeah.
I've got the I haven't got a notion ready to go, but yeah. And then I'm in talks with Joe to do one on videos. Video—
Yeah, turning images into videos, kind of, you know, using all these new fancy AI tools and things like that.
And I'm going to line him up for a panels talk because he's writing a book. He might as well do the talk.
Yeah, well, I've got a talk, but yeah, I'll update it with the new stuff from the book. And if you have got Yes, send them. I'd love some panels. Yeah, great.
So in the chat is the Jotform that if I— if some, some of you've already done it, which is really lovely, thank you so much. It helps us.
Yeah, because we're always looking for new ideas. Yeah, you know, and I mean, if the stuff that's working or stuff that isn't, or if you're getting bored with things or whatever, you know, you want more. More hands-on workshops, you want more kind of specific tool-based things or whatever. And I mean, you know, if there are tools you want us to cover that we haven't covered previously, um, I mean, we've never looked at Luminar, we've never looked at ON1, we've not done a lot on Affinity, a little bit. Um, you know, I'm, I'm always up for going and playing with the tool and then kind of putting something together to you how it works. I'd love one on PhotoEphemeras. Oh, on TPE?
Yeah.
Yeah. Oh yeah, I have no idea how to use it, and I think it would be a godsend. Yeah, well, I could— You were describing the photographer who's trying to go with the Skellix, which I should be looking at next week, but, um, but lining that up, he probably could have done that with PhotoEphemeras. He probably could. Yeah. Let me let's find it. Let's phone Irish photographer.
Can I just wish you all a happy Christmas and I'm off to fit a water softener.
So, mate, happy Christmas.
See you in the new year.
Go and buy a tree instead.
We've got you haven't got Irish. Yeah, Irish photographer. Norman McCluskey. Okay. There we are. That was his shot.
Okay.
And that's a real shot. That's not a Photoshopped image. And he spent years trying to get that. So Norman McCloskey is your man, Stephen. He's local. Great. I'll have a look for him. I didn't know him. Yeah, he's good. He's good. He's released 3 or 4 books now.
Okay. So, yeah.
Cool.
Um, I've been a bit late to the Let's Edit, and this is my first session or the first course that I'm doing. Okay, is there any chance to get the older ones, the previous ones? Yeah, if you, if you talk to me, write to me, digworkshops. Okay, I can, um, I can ask the questions. Talk to Melanie.
Yeah, that's right. Mel, there's some dates you talked about. Will you put something up with them all So we can—
yeah, they'll definitely be in The Pulse that comes out once a month. Do you get that, Steve?
I think so.
Yeah, you think so? You only think so?
You know me, Mel.
I do know you. I'll probably have to ask you anyway, but there you go.
Yes, I do keep putting them out. Okay, if I just get your telephone number, I'll just telephone.
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