Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Printing and Shooting


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Day 2 with George Lepp is now finished. We started this morning at 8 AM with a download and review of yesterday's afternoon session. After about two hours of discussion with George, Hal took over and gave a print tutorial on the Canon ipf 5100. Fortunately, the new print plug-in makes the whole process much more intuitive and efficient.

Since we had a little time before the afternoon shoot, Hal covered some tried and true Photoshop techniques to make images pop and prepare for printing. We started with a discussion of "painting with light," non-destructive dodge and burn options. Whether using a single layer set to Overlay blend mode or using a "blank" curves adjustment set to Screen or Multiply blend mode, the end process is still the same.

We then talked about a few border options including the world famous "George Lepp Border" and the often used Drop Shadow Border. To make things easier Hal demonstrated a couple of times and then distributed a detailed set of notes.

We finished the Photoshop work with a sharpening discussion. The highlight for most of the class was learning how to make a Luminance mask to apply targeted sharpening. Once again it was a demonstration and then follow along with Hal.

After a quick lunch, the critters showed up and George led a discussion of macro and flash photography. Everyone was anxious to start shooting so we didn't talk long. Hopefully, tomorrow we'll have some images up from today's shoot. The shooting continued for a few hours and then we downloaded and started to optimize and print.

The print workflow worked for everyone and just under a hundred prints were finished by late in the day. As we were printing we had about 10 pizzas delivered so we could eat and work through the standard dinner hours. Always good to have a little social time with the class in addition to the normal course work.

Early tomorrow we are off to Shell Creek for the abundant wildflowers. Will let you know how it goes.

Cheers!

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