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3 Great Books On Color Psychology

Looking for great reading on color psychology?

Start with these three very different books.

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The Color Box

Lori Reid

A simple approachable survey that’s lushly illustrated.

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The Art of Color

Johannes Itten

The expanded version of a true classic The Elements Of Color includes personal exercises and analyses of historic paintings.

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Color and Human Response

Faber Birren

A comprehensive overview of all areas of the field by the most prolific author on color.

Read more on Color Psychology here.

Learn more in my digital printing and digital photography workshops.

 

How To Master Color Adjustment With Curves

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After

Before

Sounding XVII

 

Curves does what other color adjustment tools can’t, precisely adjusting two out of three elements of color (luminosity and hue but not saturation) based on lightness. No other color adjustment tool is as powerful or precise as Curves. Surprisingly, many people don’t use Curves because they find its interface confusing. Yet it’s that interface which offers so much control. You can master Curves quickly and easily with this guide. You’ll be thrilled when you do.

 

Why Use Curves ?

Curves gives you the most precise control of luminosity. This applies to the whole image and to select areas of an image. This can also be extended to adjusting hue by luminance values.
Curves will help you control and refine masks.

Curves will simplify your Photoshop toolset; you’ll need only a few other color adjustment tools.
You can do more with this one tool than you can with any other.

If you asked me to throw away all of the tools in Photoshop or Camera Raw and use only one tool it would be Curves. It’s that good. It’s that important. I strongly recommend that you not only learn to use Curves but that you master it.

 

Straight
How To Control Curves

There are a number of things you need to know to use Curves precisely.


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Join Me For My Melt Down Talk – 5/5/19

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May 5th

3-5 pm

CMCA

Rockland, Maine

I’ll be presenting a free public talk during The Center For Maine Contemporary Art’s exhibit Melt Down.
I’ll share my personal story as an environmentally concerned artist, stories from my 16 trips to Antarctica and Greenland, current climate news – bad and good, ways you can contribute, helpful resources, inspiring images and texts, and more.
I’ll be joined by World Ocean Observatory founder Peter Neill.
Join us for a lively conversation as we celebrate the world’s waters!
 

Melt Down – New Exhibit Opens March 23 @ Maine's CMCA

Suffusion VIII

Exhibit

Melt Down

March 23 – June 9, 2019

Center For Maine Contemporary Art

Rockland, Maine

Melt Down, features stunning photographs and videos by ten distinguished Maine artists whose work addresses climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. “Melt Down” has been organized by CMCA curator emeritus Bruce Brown, and includes the work of artists John Paul CaponigroJohn EideElla HudsonJonathan LaurenceJustin LevesqueJim NickelsonJan PiribeckPeter RalstonShoshannah White, and Deanna Witman.
Through their experiences recording and responding to the visible and visceral markers of irrefutable change in the Polar Regions, the artists in “Melt Down” bring these physically remote places and the compelling need for action to a wider audience. Their work provides a route for inspiring awareness and response when overwhelming data and science have failed to motivate.
 

Opening Reception

March 23, Saturday, 5-7 pm

Sunday Salons present artists talks.

I talk May 5.

with World Ocean Observatory Director Peter Neill

Enjoy My New Video – My Antarctica

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Antarctica has enchanted me. Find out why in this video.

See more of my images from Antarctica.
View fascinating facts about Antarctica.
Find out about our next DPD Antarctica workshop.

I Joined The Climate Reality Leadership Corps

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This weekend I joined the Climate Reality Leadership Corps.
This is something I’ve wanted to do for years and the Atlanta conference was the largest event and particularly intense. It powerfully aligned climate change with the civil rights movement to discuss climate justice.
You can get a glimpse of two of the more unique presentations.
An interfaith meeting was held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Comedian Pete Davidson gave Al Gore some tips on how to speak.
 

Extending Format – You Can Use It For More Than Panoramas

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Left

2_Right

Right

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Panoramic stitches combine both

Think Outside The Frame

No one needs to learn to “think outside the box” more than photographers. The frame, literally a box, is often our greatest ally. Learning to see photographically is in part learning to see within the limits of this box and use them creatively. But there are times when this limits our vision unnecessarily. Once we’ve learned to see within the box, we then need to learn to also see outside the box – and start extending the frame with multiple exposures to perfect select compositions. Extending format techniques aren’t just for panoramic image formats. They can be used to give you the extra inch that can make all the difference in the world for your compositions.

Hand-held Exposure Techniques

While the best way to make exposures for panoramic merges is to use a dedicated panoramic head on a tripod, this may not be practical – or necessary. (There are three significant benefits to using panoramic tripod heads; one, they keep the camera level and without rotation throughout an exposure sequence, two they calculate the number of and overlap between exposures, and three they pivot the camera around a lens’ nodal point minimizing parallax.) Today’s software packages work miracles making what was once impossible possible. Several practices can help you make better hand-held exposures for panoramic merges.

Keep the horizon level in all the exposures; varying rotation can cause improper alignment and/or excessive cropping and/or retouching.

Shoot a little loose. Perspective correction in these types of photo merges often resulting in irregular borders that beg cropping – or retouching, if this is appropriate. The extra wiggle room you gain from shooting loose will allow you to crop the final results more precisely.

Don’t shoot the separate exposures edge to edge. Instead, overlap your exposures by a third for medium lenses, a half for wide-angle lenses, and two-thirds for fisheye lenses.

Make exposures with the opposite orientation as the final image orientation; if you’re making a horizontal composition shoot with a vertical camera orientation and if you’re making a vertical composition shoot with a horizontal camera orientation. This does two things. One, it increases the number of frames, and thus vanishing points, reducing the tendency for the required perspective correction to produce distortion artifacts. Two, it increases resolution – a tendency that becomes compounded with each added pass in multi-column or multi-row exposure sequences.

Once focus is set, turn off auto-focus during the bracketing sequence. Unwanted shifts in focus may ruin an exposure sequence. For this same reason, consider shooting all exposures in a single sequence at the same aperture setting, as significant variances in depth of field between frames may be challenging to merge convincingly.

Consider using manual exposure. While software can convincingly blend exposures with significantly varying exposures, if brightness across a scene remains fairly constant keeping the same exposure settings between different shots can aid the blending process. (The same is true for white balance, which can be set either during exposure or during Raw processing.) On the other hand, if brightness varies dramatically, bear in mind that simultaneous HDR exposure bracketing is not out of the question; it just increases the number of exposures needed.

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Lightroom’s Panorama Merge Preview

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Auto Crop checked

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Boundary Warp slid to 100

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Adobe Camera Raw’s Panorama Merge Preview

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Auto Crop checked

ACR_BoundaryWarp

Boundary Warp slid to 100

Stitching / Merging
Merge to Panorama in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw

You can perform panoramic merges in either Adobe Lightroom or Camera Raw. Their interfaces may look different but they’re the same.

There are three advantages to making panoramic merges with these Raw converters. First, it creates a new combined file in DNG format and allows future access to the Raw data in the files. Second, they offer simple but powerful post-merge distortion (Boundary Warp) and Auto Crop options that Photoshop’s Photomerge doesn’t. (This means you’d only choose Photoshop when you wanted to use its additional merge projection options Collage and Reposition.) Third, the DNG file takes up less space than the PSD or TIFF file Photoshop generates.
How do you do this?
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