Sean Duggan Blog

Mobile Compositing with Photoshop MIx

On the current episode of TheFIX on This Week in Photography, I delve into mobile compositing and show how to create a multi-layered composite on smart phones and tablet devices using Adobe Photoshop Mix.

Starting with a scan of a vintage portrait from the 1880s, we take a look at how to apply basic image improvements, how to use the content-aware Cut-Out tools for non-destructive masking, combining layers with Blending Modes, and working with the style presets in the Looks module to modify the look and feel of an image. In a short side trip, I use Diptic to create a mirrored image to use as a background for the vintage portrait. Different images are added as layers to transform the portrait into an image that suggests a vintage glimpse into a hidden world. Photoshop Mix and Diptic are available for both iOS and Android.

Forest Portal

Forest Portal   [iPhone Composite]
June 19, 2015 |  Snowmass Village, Colorado
(click in the image for a larger version)

This composite was created on an iPhone 6 when I was teaching at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado a couple of weeks ago. The image was made from the three source images shown below (all taken with the iPhone).

The initial composite was made while I was riding home along a steep and winding mountain road from one of our location field trips. My fellow instructor Amadou Diallo and I had planned a "cross-pollination" session for the last day of the week between his iPhone Photographer class and my Creative Digital Darkroom class. I wanted to show his group a live compositing demo on the iPhone and during the ride home from our location higher up in the Rockies, I tried out a few ideas, this being one of them.

The apps used were Diptic to create the reflected version of the stream, LensLight to create the bright point of light, Image Blender to add the door and the bright point of light to the reflected stream image, and Ansel for the final black and white styling. I am working on a short video tutorial to show how this composite was created. Stay tuned!

If you're interested in creating composites on your mobile devices, check out my online course on that topic at lynda.com: Creating Photo Composites on Smartphones & Tablets.

For regular photography techniques using iOS8, check out my other mobile course: iPhone & iPad Photography with iOS8.

Not yet a lynda.com subscriber? Here's a link for a FREE 10-day trial.

Source images for the Forest Portal composite
(click in the image to see a larger version)

Lunar Eclipse Over Donner Peak

Lunar Eclipse Over Donner Peak  |   Order a Print
April 14/15, 2014
(click in the image to see a larger version)

For the lunar eclipse a couple of nights ago, I headed up to Donner Peak (8019 ft / 2444 m) in the Sierras. I wanted a location where I could have a view of a big landscape, and also a place where the view wasn't blocked by tall trees (an issue in the area immediately near my house, about an hour away from the summit). This is what I had in mind when I set out to shoot the eclipse (though the Donner Summit location was a last minute decision) and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. This is a composite of 20 images, all taken on-site at this location. I'm working on a more detailed description of the planning and process that will be available soon.

The summit area here is named for the ill-fated Donner Party who became snowbound in the Sierras in the winter of 1846-47. Looking directly left from this vantage point is a view of Donner Lake. The makeshift cabins where they were stranded and spent the winter are about 6 miles from here on the far side of the lake.

Rendezvous at the Cafe Luna

Cafe Luna
Polaroid Transfer from a digital composite (with gold pen)
Date:  1996 (??)
(click in the image to see a larger version)

It's the first Tuesday of 2014, so that means it time for another edition of Time Machine Tuesday, where I use the photographic Wayback Machine to revisit an image from the past. The rules are simple: it has to be at least one year in the past and is often an image from the same time of year (and sometimes the same date; of course, that only works with good metadata). More often than not, I try to cast my gaze much farther back than just a year. Today's image has no metadata even though part of the process was digital, so I am a bit unclear on the exact date. As near as I can remember this is from sometime in 1996 (though it could also be 1997).

This is from a series of Polaroid transfers I worked on in the mid to late 1990s called Short Stories. Sometimes the transfers were modified further with colored pencils or paint and, in some cases, the addition of collaged elements. Hand written text was added to suggest the hint of a story or situation, just enough for the reader to take that thread and follow wherever it might lead them.

For this particular image I created a composite in Adobe Photoshop (this would have been version 4.0, which is when adjustment layers first made their appearence). From the digital file I made a 35mm slide with a film recorder, the slide was then exposed onto the Polaroid pack film with a Vivitar slide printer, and then the image was transferred onto moistened watercolor paper. Adding the hand written text and edge work with a gold pen were the final touches. The actual size of the original piece is approximately 5x5 inches.

In terms of looking back at my own path was a photographer, it's interesting to see that my interest in images with a strong sense of narrative and metaphor, as well as a dash of mystery, stretches back this far (and even farther when I recall other images from the years before this one). I'm still exploring similar creative pathways in my present work.

I have a few others from this series that I may share on future Time Machine Tuesdays. Stay tuned!

Compositing Tutorial in Photoshop User Magazine

( click in the image to see a larger version )

If you're a NAPP member and are into compositing in Photoshop, check out my feature tutorial in the latest issue of Photoshop User magazine (Sept, 2013...you can also find the magazine on sale at some book store chains). This is an image I first made for the 2nd edition of Photoshop Masking & Compositing that I co-authored with Katrin Eismann and James Porto. For this version, I show you how to create the basic composite and then take it in a slightly different direction from the one in the book. NAPP members can download the source files for this composite.

If you plan to be at Photoshop World in Las Vegas next month, I'll be giving a presentation on "Photoshop Masking & Compositing" at the NAPP/Peachpit bookstore on the Expo Show floor on Wednesday Sept 4th at 4pm. Stop by and say hello!

If you can't make it to the full conference, but will be in the Las Vegas area that week, you can get a FREE pass to the Expo/Trade Show over at the Photoshop World web site.

Inspiration from the Weather Report

Death Valley Heat  [Diana Camera Collage]
August, 2010
(click in the image to see it larger)

The forecast for today and tomorrow predict that the high temperatures in Death Valley will get up close to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Here's a collage that was inspired by that weather forecast made from five negatives taken with my Diana camera on a summer trip there three years ago, when the high was only 115.

It's always interesting to me to see where the inspiration to make an image comes from. In this case, a simple weather report. This coincided with running across these Diana images from Death Valley the week before as I was organizing several years worth of pinhole and toy camera negatives. You can see the five images used in this composite below. All are from the same roll of film (click in the image to see it larger).

In addition to my DSLR and the Diana, I also had my ZeroImage 6x9 pinhole camera with me for some images I wanted to make for my Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin project. You can see two of the tableaus I created on this trip below. Click in the images to see them larger.

The Propeller

The Radio

The Return of Time Machine Tuesday

Hotel McCray, No. 2  • [collage from 11 6x9-inch prints]
1988 • Santa Cruz, California
(click in the image for a larger version)

This post marks the return of Time Machine Tuesday, wherein I fire up the photographic Way Back Machine to delve into my photo archives and post and image from at least two years in the past. Typically I try to post an image taken on or around the same date as the current day, but for today's post, I'm deviating from that practice simply because this one is from nearly 25 years ago and I can't quite recall exactly when in 1988 I made it (that's one of the nice things about digital metadata: it's always easy to identify when you took a photo).

This is an image style I used quite a lot in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I would take several 35mm frames of a scene, enlarge the negatives to 5x7, 6x9, or 8x10 prints (always trying to match each print as close as possible to the ones adjacent to it), and then collage the results together to create large finished pieces such the one above (this one was 36x36 inches). When taking the photos I would try to be conscious of the shape I was creating and how it might look when the prints were fitted together. The gap between the hotel and the sidewalk in this image was an intentional experiment with creating a more fractured image form. In some cases, such as with this image, I would print them full frame with a filed-out negative carrier so you could see the edges and sprocket holes of the 35mm film.

One of the fun aspects of this style was that I could break free from the typical rectangular or square frame. But the style was also very labor-intensive and of the many individual scenes that I shot for this project (each one consisting of 6 to 12 separate exposures), only a small amount made it to the larger finished state. The image above is a copy photo that was made with my iPhone before I removed the prints from the foamcore of this piece. The backing had suffered water and mildew damage over the years and had to be discarded. I still have all the negatives, of course, from this scene and many others. One day, I tell myself that I will fire up my 35mm film scanner and revisit some of these using Photoshop to collage the individual puzzle pieces together and make large format inkjet prints from them. But current work and projects always seems to take up the lion's share of free time. So, while I still hold onto that goal, I'm not holding my breath that I'll get to it any time soon. But, as they say, hope springs eternal...

A Note on the Location: For those familiar with Santa Cruz in the late 1980s, this is when the Hotel McCray was an abandoned wreck of a building (you can see the barb-wired topped chain link fence in front of it in the collage above). I had the opportunity to get inside it once (legally, I might add), and it was in pretty sad state and very creepy. The interior was quite run-down and the exterior had the look of a classic haunted house. In the late 1990s, the property was purchased and the building rennovated with extensive addtions and reopened as an assisted living community for seniors called Sunshine Villa.

Self Portrait as a Tree

Tree Man [iPhone 4]
January 8, 2013
(click in the image to see a larger version)

My nearly 12-year old daughter now has an iPod Touch, which means that, in addition to her listening to her music, playing silly games and texting with her friends, she also has access to all of the photo apps that work on my iPhone. With these newfound creative possibilities available to her, I am enjoying introducing her to the joys of the mobile digital darkroom. To show her how easy it was to combine two images using the Image Blender app, I turned myself into a tree!

The secret behind this type of texture blending collage is blend modes (in this case, the tree is set to Hard Light) and a little bit of very simple masking. The masking capabilities in Image Blender are basic, but for a project like this, which does not require precise edges, they worked very well. In addition to Image Blender, I also used Toon Paint to create a simplified grayscale version of my portrait prior to making the composite (an optional step that could also be accomplished with other apps simply by making a high contrast version of the face), as well as Filterstorm for some basic tonal adjustments, and Vintage Scene for the aged paper look.

I'm looking forward to continuing this journey of visual discovery with her and seeing what she creates along the way!

A Journey Into the New Year

New Year's Road
(click in the image to see a larger version)

Musings on Day One

Another year has ended and a new one has begun. And, as usual, I am always a bit surprised at how fast a year can go by (and the older I get they seem to go by faster and faster!). And, as with past experience on the first day of the new year, I am a bit behind the curve with a list of resolutions, or even my favorite images from the previous year. The end-of-year holiday season is always so busy that I usually don't get around to things like that until a couple of weeks into January. Which is fine. There are enough deadlines in life without artificially creating new ones. A tally of favorite images from 2012, or things I resolve to do this year can wait another week or two.

The New Years image above is the result of an impromptu "Photoshop Road Trip" (see below for more on this concept) and is my first composite of 2013. I enjoy compositing because it allows me to exercise a different part of my creativity to make entirely new images. All of the landscape images are from Iceland and the book is a ship's log from a voyage to the Arctic Ocean in 1888 (and since the image is about travel, journeys and the discoveries and experiences they lead to, it works very well as the unifying theme for this collage).

I hope that you and your family have a wonderful new year and that 2013 surpasses all of your expectations. If some of your goals for the new year include improving your photography and digital processing technique, I hope to see you on one of my workshops. If something less than a full-fledged workshop would work for you, consider my personalized online training and consulting that is customized for what you want to learn and designed to help you take your image-making to the next level.

It's a brand new year, and as I mentioned above, even though I haven't really given much thought to resolutions, there is one resolution that I will make (and I encourage you to make as well), and that is to make more time for art…viewing it, thinking about it, enjoying it, creating it, and ensuring that it is always a part of every day.
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* Photoshop Road Trip: A creative session in Photoshop with no specific destination in mind, much like some road trips one takes in a car. You just get in, start the engine (Photoshop) and hit the open road, playing with different images until an idea starts to form and that idea leads to a side road, which leads in a new direction, or to a destination you never envisioned.

 

Video Editing in Photoshop CS6

The Bell
Link to larger HD version

Halloween has passed but in a slightly spooky spirit, here's a short film (3 minutes) that was shot on an iPhone 4 and edited entirely in Photoshop CS6. I originally shot the video clips last spring for a demo on video editing in Photoshop CS6 at the Society of Photographic Educators conference in San Francisco. Over the intervening months I've tinkered with it some more, redone the opening section, added some new elements, and finally found time to make a sound track. 

The nice thing about the video editing capabilities in Photoshop CS6 is that if you already know how Photoshop layers work, it's pretty easy to start working with video layers. It's essentially just layers arranged over a span of time, which you can control with the Timeline panel. Plus, you can use all the usual layering tricks that work on a still image...layer masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, filters, blending modes, etc...With the release of Photoshop CS6, video editing is now supported in the standard version; you don't need to get the Extended version in order to play around with this cool functionality!

In this short film the opening section is actually a composite made from two still photos (the TV and the room behind it). The video clips have been added into the closet and the TV screen using layer masks to control where they appear, as well as layer blending modes to affect how the video blends with the still images. I'll be creating a Photoshop Viewfinder video tutorial exploring some of these techniques in coming weeks, so keep an eye open for that.