My GPS Camera Phone

Photos can appear out of nowhere and when you least expect it. Because of this, its a good habit to remember that the phone you probably have in your pocket has probably got a camera in it. Take it out. Snap a picture. Amaze family and friends!

This is the case with many photos on this site, but shooting pictures was the last thing on my mind for this photo. I was heading to the parking lot one morning to get something from the car and the light was streaming into the stairwell, casting all kinds of long shadows and highlighting small details, like these tiny bumps in the walls. In normal light, this texture is barely noticeable, but the shadows cast in the early morning light give the wall a depth and feel it otherwise wouldn’t have.

Use shadows to your advantage. Look around in the morning or late afternoon and see how traditionally plain objects can take on a whole new persona with a little bit of shadowy emphasis.

Yesterday, I posted a shot of the moon rising into a deep blue evening sky. It was reminiscent of some NASA photos I’ve seen where the blue sky turns to interstellar black. Now I’m here to tell you that what I posted was only part of the story – in other words, it really wasn’t a good photo at all. However, the magic of Photoshop allows you to make something out of nothing.

The source image was a whole lot more than a sky and moon. In fact, it was a parking lot (with a sky and moon):

Though I took the photo because I thought the sky was nice, the rest of it could stand to be eliminated. So that’s what I did. I selected a crop area that cut out everything that wasn’t sky, while still giving a decent placement to the moon:

The problem we have now is the noise generated by a low-quality, 2 mega-pixel camera phone. The file is saved as a JPG with high compression (to save space, I presume), which affects the overall quality of the photo. High compression produces poor color gradients and a pixellated look, so we need to eliminate this with a photo editing tool. Enter Photoshop magic.

As I posted recently, there’s a simple filter to smooth out gradients and reduce noise. This filter is appropriately named “Reduce Noise…” and can be found in the “Filter” menu under “Noise.” For this particular noise reduction, the settings I used were as follows:

• Strength: 10
• Preserve details: 0%
• Reduce color noise: 100%
• Sharpen details: 0%
• Remove JPEG artifact: checked

By using extreme settings, the color should smooth out nicely. You wouldn’t normally do this, but there’s no detail to preserve and we want the best smoothing possible before adjusting the levels. NOTE: Before applying the reduce noise filter, duplicate the background layer and switch off the new duplicate layer. You’ll need it later. Here’s the image with noise reduction applied:

Once the noise is worked out, we’ll add an adjustment layer to control the levels by going to “Layer->New adjustment layer->Levels…” Be sure that this layer is at the top. Adjust the settings to your liking. In my case, the blue becomes much more blue and the dark areas become almost black. Almost there:

Now wait, there was a moon in this image. What good is a noise reduction filter if it is going to blur everything out? Good question.

Remember that duplicate layer? Turn it on then outline the moon using the polygonal lasso or whatever you’re comfortable using. You will notice that the noise reduction didn’t apply to this layer because it wasn’t selected at the time, which means the moon is still visible. Once outlined, right-click (CMD-click in OS X) on the selection and the choose “Layer via copy.” Now the moon is resting on its own layer, hopefully above the noise reduced layer. You will know this immediately because the moon will suddenly be visible. Add a watermark and you’ve got a finished product:

Visit the Wordless Wednesday HQ for more!

Adjusting levels, saturation and other settings in Photoshop can have a dramatic effect on the mood of an image. Take the image below, for example. What you see is a standard landscape photo of Paynes Prairie in late fall. The lush greenery is becoming dying brownery, accented with patches of yellow flowers. The sky is overcast with no defined cloud patterns. Overall, a pretty plain photo, aside from being shot through a fence. Nice, but plain.

I like Paynes Prairie, though, and I want to save this photo somehow. Photoshop holds the key. It holds many keys, but I’m going to use only a few this time around. Via the magic and awesomeness of adjustment layers, I’ll take the ordinary photo above and turn it into something moody and dark. The same could be done to make it happy and light, but I’m going in the other direction (which some might even call drab and plain!). The beauty of using adjustment layers is that you alter the photo’s appearance without altering the original photographic layer.

Open the photo in Photoshop and crop it to your liking. Using this cropped selection, add an adjustment layer to take out most of the color – in this case, everything except yellow – by going to “Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Hue/Saturation.” Take all colors down via the Saturation slider to their lowest value, then increase the yellow slider a bit to make the flowers pop more. You should have a semi-desaturated image at this point.

Next, add another adjustment layer for level adjustment by going to “Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Curves…” (or adding a Levels… layer). Adjust the levels to your liking. There are endless possibilities with this setting, just like the saturation layer, so don’t be afriad to play around with multiple variations. It comes down to personal preference.

To finish this off, we want to bring those clouds up a bit more, since there’s really no definition in the gray, overcast sky. This can be easily done with the burn tool. Make sure to burn the highlights, midtones and shadows in order to achieve maximum effect.

Now sit back and enjoy your creation!

It’s been awhile since my last stop at the Paynes Prairie overlook, so I made the trip out there last week during a particularly overcast day. The floodplain is just about dried up and most of the vines and grasses are beginning to wither away. There’s some late-blooming things, but most everything is about ready to succumb to the pending winter freeze.

This particular shot was taken with the Nokia 5310. A quick trip through Photoshop made this image pop more than the original, due to the poor quality of the 5310. Desaturation, curves and a gradient map later, and we’re in business.

Though the palm tree was alive, the vines that had climbed all the way to the top had since died back, waiting for next spring’s rain to repeat their ascension. And they will be back, without a doubt.

A minor miracle occurred yesterday after a casual tweet to Guy Kawasaki regarding the humor of people complaining about his Alltop promotional tweets on Twitter. He agrees and then says my feed is now in the Alltop directory, at which point I fall out of my chair and administer CPR to myself. Needless to say, his tweet about my site’s addition to Alltop sent traffic through the roof yesterday, which is always a nice thing to witness.

If you haven’t seen Alltop yet, go check it out. It’s Guy’s latest project which entails sorting sites in a way that resembles a magazine rack. There’s a load of topics now and the list keeps growing. My site feed was placed in the Gadgets section alongside sites like Engadget, Boing Boing, Gizmodo and many other high-profile sites. For my site to even be considered is an honor. Getting listed is beyond words.

I’ve placed a feed on the right column for the gadgets section that provides the latest posts from the member sites. Go check them out if you can. Thanks again, Guy!

High file compression is a given in the field camera phone photography, but I had not discovered a way to counter this efficiently, instead trying to manually reduce it through lighting and shot angles. Well thanks to the tutorial, “Reduce Noise in Photoshop CS3,” by Mike Rodriguez, I discovered a goldmine in the world of Photoshop.

The image above was taken some time ago (during Negative Week in August 2008), but it didn’t make the cut because of massive amounts of noise in the darker colored areas. Well, here it is now, cleaned up and much better for it. All this photo needed was a good dose of the “Reduce Noise” filter, a standard filter in the “Filter->Noise…” menu. I think I never noticed it because “Noise” implies making it, not taking it away. Now I know.

Give it a try and you’ll see how incredible this filter is. After viewing Mike’s tutorial, be sure to check out the rest of the detailed tutorials on the Layers Magazine site. They’re thorough, easy-to-follow and worth a look.