Two for Tuesday – Video Tutorials

So, it’s been months since I had the time to sit down and write a blog entry. And quite frankly, I still don’t have the time to sit down and do a lengthy, formal tutorial. Instead, I have sat down and finished two video tutorials, one for Lightroom 3 and the other for Photoshop. As always, both in HD quality for viewing pleasure.

The first video for today is a tutorial covering how to correctly balance color using a ColorChecker Passport or any other white balance target, including reasons behind why you should not balance using the dress, suits or other objects with unknown color tones. As well as how to quickly apply these settings to a group of images. I also cover basics of the histogram and highlight/shadow clipping warnings in Lightroom, what they mean and how to correct for it.

Click through for the second video plus a link to more freebies!

Color Correction for Dummies. (And everyone else.)

Getting good color can sometimes be a difficult task, but if you follow some of these steps and use the tricks I explain in this post you can make color correction a much easier task.

Everyone has their own personal preference on what is “good color”. Some people prefer warmer skin tones and overall deeper, richer colors. (This is my own personal preference.) While others may prefer cooler skin tones with little or no yellow or red cast or low contrast bright images or very over saturated color or who knows! This is why learning to correct your color to your preference is ideal as nobody but yourself can get the color exactly how you want it and save a few dollars on lab fees for color correction.

Then again, some people wouldn’t know what good color is if it hit them in the head. Let’s be honest…. If that person is you, you can read on but you are probably better off sending your files to the lab as-is. Bad corrections can sometimes be more damaging than sending files with poor color straight out of the camera.

Color Checker Passport does EXTREME color correction.

I’m sure you’ve encountered this problem before. Lighting conditions that are so bad that even a custom white balance in camera simply cannot fix. And you don’t have time or perhaps don’t have the skill to correct for these color errors on your own in post production. Even if you do, it’s not time well spent. Instead, here is how you get the best color from these extreme lighting conditions.

Just a video today – Lightroom Processing

I put together a quick video of a typical image processing in Lightroom from start to finish showing the steps on how I take a raw image straight out of camera and make it ready to sell.

In the video I cover quick color corrections, crop and angle, general corrections to density and exposure as well as spot fixes using the adjustment brush. I also hope to post a little more advanced video soon.

For best quality, click to view in full screen and in High Definition (HD button).

10 second Teeth Whitening + Video Tutorial

Here is a common problem. Perfect capture, perfect smile, perfect skin tone, yellowed teeth…… Yikes! It’s all too common these days no thanks to coffees, sodas or cigarette smoking causing discoloration to the front teeth. As a professional photographer, we really should fix these sort of things on a clients images before presenting them to them for purchase. But hand editing dozens, even hundreds of images can be rather time consuming.

Here comes the 10 second Teeth Whitening to the rescue. (Ok, it might take more than 10 seconds, but it is very quick.)

First three tutorial videos online!

As promised (though slightly late), here is the first three video tutorials. Two videos are for several of my more popular tricks and a third bonus video for an entry I have not made yet.

Stay up to date with the latest videos at my YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/ModifiedPhoto