Okee-dokee. If you have been following previous posts here your homework is due now. You should know whether or not your camera can handle the heavy lifting required for HDR photography, you should have a tripod and most definitely, you oughta be about ready to quit reading my rants about this and get started. Perfect.  Only one little problem. In order to do any kind of fancy-schmancy HDR processing you have to have some images to work with.  So that is just what we are going to do:  go make some images.

Its probably going to take a few days for me to get things going on my end, round up my entourage and all that, but in the very near future we are going to go out on the town. This is your formal invitation to join me on your maiden voyage into HDR photography, your vision quest, walkabout, coming of age party, or whatever you want to call it.

All you have to do now is figure out where you want to go and when.

Here are your choices for where, we will figure out the when part soon.

• Mesa Art Center / Downtown Mesa
• Downtown Phoenix
• ASU Tempe Campus
• ASU Polytechnic Campus
• Old Town Scottsdale
• The airplane museum at Falcon Field Airport
• Somewhere else, you pick

I could have added a poll here to make it easier for you, but I’m going to make you work harder than that. Yes, you have to post a comment below. You will need to click on the ‘Read more’ link at the bottom to see the comments section.

Another thing, this is an equal opportunity event. If you have never taken a picture in your life you will be just fine. If you’ve been shooting for 20 years and just want to come hang out, that is awesome too. Everyone is welcome, just BYOC – bring your own camera.

Click on the image to see what this turns into.

In continuation of my last post, this evening’s edition also has to do with HDR photography. This time around we will begin taking a look at the hardest part of this whole game…getting the gear.

It is no surprise to anyone that has been involved in photography for any amount of time that this is no poor man’s hobby, relatively speaking. Having invested several hard-earned pennies myself I can say I feel your pain if you are one of those considering the investment.  But never fear, you don’t have to have the absolute newest, biggest, baddest camera setup to do this stuff. Let’s take a look.

The first item on the ticket tonight is pretty much a giveaway. You gotta have a camera. But what kind of camera? Nikon? Canon? Hasselblad? Think broader.

Simply put, you need a DIGITAL camera. Is that specific enough for you? Hope so.

Let’s just say you can give it a try with the camera you already have. If you have one of those big fancy SLR type cameras you have nothing to worry about. If you have something else, something smaller, just hold on for a minute before you rush out to buy something new. You might find that all you need to do is take a look at your instruction manual. Many recent models of consumer ‘point-and-shoot’ type cameras actually have the manual settings needed to shoot HDR.

I’ll keep this brief tonight because you might potentially have a big assignment here. So without any further ado, here is your new task:

1. Look at your camera. Go into the menu and find out what that little digital beastie can really do. What you need to find out is whether or not your camera can shoot in any shape or form of Manual mode. We will discuss the reason why just a little bit later, but before we can go on this is a very important step, it will determine whether you need to go out and drop some dough on a new rig. While you’re at it, figure out how to use the manual settings too!

Copyright 2009 Chad Westover

Ok, you will have to click on the image and view it larger to actually see the difference. You might not even notice most of the changes between these two images because most of them are rather small. A friend asked once about retouching faces to clean up skin tones, fix blemishes and basically give anyone the skin of a model. So thought I would finally answer his question, sorry it took so long Justin. Well, in my limited experience, when you look really close even model’s are human too. They don’t always have perfect skin. Sorry to disappoint!

When you look at the cover of a magazine or makeup ad you are usually seeing an altered perception of what that person’s skin actually looks like. The good news (if you feel like you need to fit into the stereotypical mold of what some people think is beautiful) is that you can have skin like that too. Maybe not in real life, but at least in your digital images, you too can be a supermodel! It can also be nice to know some of these tricks if all you want to do is make a little more flattering image of your mother-in-law, significant other, person giving you money to make them look good in pictures, etc…

The purpose of this post is not to give you step-by-step instructions, I don’t have the time to write all the steps, post screenshots and all that good stuff. What I am going to do is give you a nice tidy little list of links to tutorials and websites with tons of helpful tips. Aside from my previously mentioned laziness excuse, I think this will be better for a different reason. I find that when I am working on a photo, I don’t just use one method, I bounce back and forth from one tool or technique to another. Read on for all the tutorial goodness…

Many of these examples cover some of the same material, there is a lot of overlap. It’s just about like anything you do in Photoshop, there’s always seven different ways of doing the same thing. So hopefully this will help you find the way that you are most comfortable with and works best for you.

In no particular order…

• Grafpedia – Simple Facial Photo Retouching
• ToxicLab – Artificial Smooth Skin
• Yanik’s Photo School – Soften Skin with Surface Blur
• Lunacore – Smooth Skin *excellent tutorial
• You Suck at Photoshop – Patch Tools & Levels *Parental Guidance Recommended
• Photoshop Mama – Setting Skin Tones
• nampersands – Airbrushing Skin
• NewDarkroom.com – Advanced Skin Smoothing
• Photoshop Tutorials – Airbrushing: Natural Smooth
• Eyes on Tutorials – Glamour Model

If you don’t have the patience to go through the effort of learning and applying everything from the tutorials above you can also find programs out there that do all the grunt work for you. For example, Portraiture by Imagenomic takes a lot of the sweat out of the process. (If you ask me though, I think some of their examples are almost scary!)

One last little tidbit, just because I think it is entertaining.

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