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Everything You Need to Know About Point Color in Adobe Camera Raw

“The new Point Color feature in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw enables more powerful and precision color editing than even before. In this video you’ll learn how to use Point Color to make adjustments based an all three dimensions (Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity). While Point Color is designed to be easy to use (you can simply sample a color and start making adjustments), this in-depth video also points out key differences between Point Color and Color Mixer and demonstrates how to use the range sliders to achieve the exact color adjustments that you’re after. Point Color is available both when making edits to the entire image and when adjusting only a portion of an image using masking.”

For more check out Julieanne’s blog.
Read more in my Color Adjustment resources.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

 

20 Great Quotes About The Color Orange

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color orange.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“Orange is the happiest color.”
– Frank Sinatra

“Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.”
– Wassily Kandinsky

“Orange is the color of positive thinking and optimism.”
– Remez Sasson

“Orange strengthens your emotional body, encouraging a general feeling of joy, well-being, and cheerfulness.”
– Tae Yun Kim

“Orange is an underrated color, it’s the second most underrate color after yellow.”
– Michel Gondry

“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.”
– Vincent Van Gogh

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other?”
– Herman Melville

“Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it’s actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don’t you see that? By itself it’s a no-thing, it’s really mental, it’s seen only of your mind. In other words it’s empty and awake.” — Jack Kerouac

“Much like purple, orange tends to be a controversial color. People tend to either love it or hate it.”
– Kendra Cherry

“It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent e. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I’d ever known.”
– Rob Sheffield

“I forgive nothing. If you stole my orange crayon in the fifth grade, you’re still on my hit list, buddy.”
-Jonathan Carroll

“The sky takes on shades of orange during sunrise and sunset, the colour that gives you hope that the sun will set only to rise again.”
– Ram Charan

“Meanwhile, the sunsets are mad orange fools raging in the gloom.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Orange is an attention-grabbing color that tends to stand out visually.”
– Kendra Cherry

“The color orange relates to adventure and risk-taking, inspiring physical confidence, competition, as well as independence.”
– Anonymous

“Orange is a color of liberation from the pains of hurtful love and inner insecurities. To channel orange is to truly be free, to be you.”
― Frank Ocean

“When I think of flavors, I think color, so lemon should be yellow and orange is orang.”
– Dylan Lauren

“If the real world is orange juice, then art is like orange juice concentrate.”
– Martin Mull

“God doesn’t make orange juice, God makes oranges.”
– Jesse Jackson

“Why is a carrot more orange than an orange?”
–Steven Wright

Explore the Psychology Of The Color Orange

Discover Words For Orange

Find more Quotes on Color

How To Fix Color Casts In Photographs With Photoshop’s New Point Color

Colin Smith shows you how to eliminate ugly color casts and weird shadows with effortless ease in Photoshop, using the new point color tool in Camera RAW.

View more from Colin Smith here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Halos & Lines In Your Photographs – How To Avoid Or Quickly Fix Them

halo and line on horizon

Nothing screams digital artifacts more than halos and lines. Bright and dark lines around the edges of objects make straight photographs look altered, and altered photographs look poorly crafted. Rarely, if ever, a good thing, their insensitivity to both contours and textures within images is supremely distracting. It's easy to eliminate these dealbreakers if you know what to look for, how to avoid them, and, when necessary, eradicate them.

Know What To Look For

First, know what to look for. If halos and lines exist, you'll find them along the edges of shapes and, sometimes, the spaces objects surround. They're most pronounced when the inside and the outside exhibit more contrast. Halos, the bright lines, are obvious; the brighter, thicker, harder halos are the more obvious, while darker, thinner, softer halos are less obvious. Lines, the dark lines, are less obvious. As they get darker, thicker, and harder, they become more obvious. 

Know How To Look For It

Halos are harder to spot in higher-resolution images that must be zoomed in (100% screen magnification) to be seen accurately. The worst is seeing them after an image is printed on a large scale. This time-consuming and expensive mistake can easily be avoided by looking closely at images before processing is finished.

Don't Produce Them

Second, know how they're produced. The quickest way to produce halos and lines is with digital sharpening, whether that's the Detail panel in Lightroom or Camera Raw, filters in Photoshop like Unsharp Mask and High Pass, or third-party plug-ins like Nik. The point here is not to avoid these tools but rather to apply them in ways that don't or minimally produce these artifacts. The next quickest way is to use any contrast tool that accentuates them; sliders in the Light panel, Curves, Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze should be monitored too. These tools won't produce halos, and if you don't have halos and lines, these tools won't accentuate them. (Careful, at high settings, Clarity and Dehaze may produce very thick, feathered halos and lines, and when they've gone too far, these artifacts look more like sloppy masking than over-sharpening. These are much harder to fix than hard lines around contours, so try not to produce them.)

See my articles on High Pass, Clarity, and Dehaze for more.

If any tool produces halos while you're processing, reduce the settings until they don't (Remember to zoom in to check this before moving on.) It's easier not to produce them than to cure them. If you discover halos and lines long after they were produced, find the slider or layer that produced them and change those settings. (In Photoshop, it's critical to adopt a flexible workflow using smart filters, adjustment layers, and layers so that you can do this quickly and easily. If you start building too many effects into flattened layers, you'll have to redo the whole thing.)

adjustment in Camera Raw masked

Mask Them

Sometimes, the artifacts produced by sharpening and contrast enhance images positively inside contours, but along contours, they look terrible. Consider applying the effect and masking it away from the contours in this case. Horizon lines are one of the most important image elements to monitor. This contour typically has more contrast than any other, not only in luminosity but also in texture, which means halos are more easily seen in the lighter, smoother sky. 


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John Macintosh’s New Book – Tell Us, What Have You Seen?

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And What Is Art?        

And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
 
 Rudyard Kipling
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The most gratifying thing about being a teacher is seeing your students grow. One of the pinnacles of my years of teaching has been witnessing John Macintosh’s effervescent explorations of photography. His creations have become as colorful and rich as he is. John is about to release his first photography book, Tell Us, What Have You Seen? Below, John shares some of the highlights of his artistic journey, things he has learned that are important to him, and how making a book has deepened his experience.
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Inquire about the book by emailing macgybe@gmail.com.
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“Eight years ago, as a birthday present to me, Petra signed us up for one of their photo workshops on a boat in Greenland. Since then, we have been privileged to witness much of Nature’s majesty in their delightful company. Many of the images in this book were taken during their workshops. They taught me everything I know about digital photography. But a voyage with the two of them is not just about understanding the tools of photography, nor is it just a voyage into the wonders of Nature. For me, those were journeys into the uncharted waters of my own creativity. Why am I so passionate about the unworldly intensity of blue ice, the sensuous flow of sinuous curves, or the warm patination of rust? I found it difficult to converse with my own tight-lipped creativity, but eventually, those conversations acted as a guide to my whimsical wanderings.
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When I had my show about five years ago, I was amazed at the attendance, including several people who had flown to Chicago from the East Coast. A lady who I knew from the floor of the CBOT had bullied her partner, who owns a local restaurant, to come along to the show. When I had met him previously, he had displayed little interest in my photography. But when he entered my show, he walked up to one of my metal prints and said, ” I can’t live without this.” Shortly afterward, he redecorated the entire restaurant to accommodate seventeen of my prints, which still hang there today. It gives me great pleasure to know that over a thousand diners get to see my work every month.
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What did I learn while making the book? Since I knew bugger all, I learned a lot. I decided that I would need a high class printer for the book, just as Blazing Editions are the printers for my prints. As someone without a name, I realized that the odds of finding a publisher were very remote. A couple of years ago, a well-known publisher in England told me, ” Beautiful images do not sell a book. A story sells a book.”  I thought that I didn’t have enough good images of one theme to tell a story, and so was born the idea of grouping different subject matters together through poetry.
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For me, Seth and JP were instrumental in creating a link between photography and poetry, as they constantly urged the use of haiku to stimulate the visual mind. I was very dubious when they suggested writing haikus about images and even more so when they encouraged us to do so before setting out with the camera. I was one of the most reluctant pupils to accept the connection between photography and poetry, between the world of word and image. But, bit by bit, over several trips, they wore down my resistance.
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.Cloths Of Heaven

.Had I the Heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams,
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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 William Butler Yeats

I read a huge amount of poetry over the last year and a half, which was extremely rewarding. Finding a poem that conjured up one of my images was always thrilling, but at one stage, I realized that I would not find enough poems (over 100 years old for copyright purposes) for a book with nearly 100 photographs, so I took the plunge of attempting to write my own poetry. That was definitely one of the hardest things I have ever done.
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I have tried especially hard to avoid the sensory overload that comes when words, lying side by side with the image, simply repeat what has already been communicated by the eye. It was a formidable challenge to balance the verbal and visual stimuli, without simply superimposing one on top of the other, but it was immensely rewarding when the two seemed to complement each other.
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Mixing my own poems with those of famous poets felt somewhat presumptuous, but I tried to let the image speak to me in its own voice. And just as my images cover a wide range, from portraits to landscapes to the abstract, the poems vary from short to long, from the lyrical, as in Sea Fever, to the whimsical. Above all, I wanted to avoid repetition and monotony. So as not to pigeonhole an image or a poem, I have left them without titles. I am hoping that the reader will return to the book, drawn either by the image or the poem or by a combination of both, like a hummingbird to a flowering bush.”
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John Macintosh
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I too have bubbled up,
Floated the measureless float,
And have been washed upon your shore.
I too am but a trail of drift and debris.
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 Walt Whitman   

Inquire about the book by emailing macgybe@gmail.com.

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Enjoy Breathe An Exhibit Of Small Works At Alex Ferrone Gallery

Breathe
Small Works Exhibition
November 18, 2023 – January 15, 2024

Alex Ferrone Gallery
Cutchogue, New York

Saturday, December 2, 5-7 pm
Artists’ Reception
Holiday Tree Lighting and Caroling

Closing a chaotic year with a soft exhale, “Breathe” features serene, meditative photography, painting, mixed media, and sculpture to relax the senses from 2023 and help you recharge for 2024. Presented are small works under 18 inches from local and national artists including:

Bob Barnett
Patricia Beary
Arduina Caponigro
John Paul Caponigro
John Cino
Carolyn Conrad

Laura Dodson
Cora Jane Glasser
Eleanor Goldstein
Linda Hacker
Thomas Halaczinsky
Katherine Liepe-Levinson

Kathleen Massi
Scott McIntire
Wendy Prellwitz
Barbara Stein
Pamela Waldroup
Constance Sloggatt Wolf

Learn more here.

Arduina Caponigro

John Paul Caponigro

How To Use The Future Of Photoshop Filters Now

New in Photoshop 2024 Beta, Parametric filters, the ultimate guide. Colin Smith shows you all the different new filters in Photoshop and provides tips on how to make them the most useful.

00:00 Introduction
00:06 How to Get Photoshop beta
00:14 How to Use the Parametric Filters
00:36 Tip for better setup and resolution
02:17 Substance Designer
02:45 Changing and combining filters
03:24 Using Parametric Filters with Layer Masks
05:32 Lightning Round of all Filters
05:36 Black and White Vintage
05:52 Chromatic Aberration
06:12 Color
06:33 Distortion Filter
06:45 Duotone
07:06 Emboss
07:12 Glass Filter
07:44 Filter Glitch
07:56 Halftone
08:12 Hologram
08:29 Hologram 2
08:40 Oil Paint
09:11 Pattern Generator
09:45 Pixelate
09:50 Rain Filter
10:12 Scratch Photo
10:55 Snow Filter
11:13 Spherify
11:46 Sticker
12:00 Symmetry
12:33 Vintage Photo

View more from Colin Smith here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

33 Great Quotes On The Color Yellow

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color blue.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“Orange is an underrated color, it’s the second most underrated color after yellow.”
– Michel Gondry

“Yellow usually means it’s not that serious.”
– Bobby Unser

“Whenever I drive under a yellow light, I always kiss my finger and tap it on the roof of the car.”
– Jared Padalecki

“I have these new policies toward my life, like ‘I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.'”
– Elizabeth Gilbert

“The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.”
– Jim Hightower

“Fear has nothing to do with cowardice. A fellow is only yellow when he lets his fear make him quit.”
– Jerome Cady

“Yellow wakes me up in the morning. Yellow gets me on the bike every day. Yellow has taught me the true meaning of sacrifice. Yellow makes me suffer. Yellow is the reason I’m here.”
– Lance Armstrong

“Yellow is not an in-between color, you’re either all in or you’re not.”
– Mobolaji Dawodu

“Watch out where the Huskies go
And don’t you eat that yellow snow.”
– Frank Zappa

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
-Pablo Picasso

Read More

How To Get Perfect Results With Adobe Lightroom & ACR’s Lens Blur

Colin Smith shows how to use the new Lens Blur in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW, including refining the blur and adding bokeh.

00:00 Intro
00:15 How to apply Lens Blur in Lightroom and Camera RAW
00:50 Lens Blur Settings
01:16 Focal Range, change the focus distance
02:06 Visualize Depth
02:46 Changing Blur area
03:43 Refining the selection, manually fixing the blur area
07:03 Multiple blur planes. matching the background
07:46 Final Settings for the most realism
08:17 Setting the Bokeh
08:58 The Different types of Bokeh

View more from Colin Smith here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

33 Great Quotes On The Color Blue

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color blue.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
– Neil Armstrong

“Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding – yet beautiful – Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.”
– Buzz Aldrin

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience….. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
– Carl Sagan

“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
– Archibald MacLeish

“No water, no life. No blue, no green.”
– Sylvia Earle

Read More