Thursday 26 November 2009

Selective colour inside Adobe Camera RAW

My last 15 minute photo challenge seems to have hit a chord with many people and I'm not totally sure why that is. I think it has something to do with being shot in a typical tourist shopping town, the kind of place so many of us visit on our annual summer holiday and the kind of place most people overlook as being a "photographic" hot spot. It's also created a steady flow of questions, the top three I'll try and answer here:

No 3. Did you get flown out to Sicily just for the photo challenge?
I wish! No, I was on a much deserved family holiday, but for me a holiday isn't a holiday unless I get time to take some photos. Photography is my job, but it's also my hobby.

No 2. Did you REALLY take all those pictures in 15 Minutes?
The whole point of the 15 minute photo challenges is to show that great photos are all around us and equipment, location and available time are not barriers to photography. I really believe it's possible to take great photos anytime, anywhere and I absolutely love putting that theory into practice.

Having said that THIS challenge was so much fun I over ran a little, so technically it show be called "The 20 minute photo challenge". In fact if it wasn't for the lure of a pizzeria, I'd have stayed there all night (or until I ran out of memory cards)

No 1. Yes but you then spent hours working the pictures through Photoshop, right?
Well actually no. I took about 150 photos during the photo challenge, so I got home I picked out the best dozen or so. I then ran them through Adobe Camera RAW giving them all a similar high contrast feel. The whole thing took about an hour.

To demonstrate how this is possible I put together this short video. Enjoy

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6 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks Gavin this is great stuff. Is there a way to achieve similar results (high contrast, high saturation) that you achieved (without the final image looking too over-processed) for those of us who have not yet graduated to CS4 and/or Lightroom?

Unknown said...

Hi Gavin love the site and info, your a real samaritan to amataur photographers. But I agree with Michel, I apprecaite the ease of using camera raw cs4 but if you've got cs3 or elements, how would you go about doing this?

Dave

Anonymous said...

Michael and Dave - open jpeg in CS3 or flatten a psd.
Adjustment layer in Black and white, adjust to taste.
Select the white "mask" box - click on it and it will have a box around it-active
Get foreground colour to BLACK.
Select a brush and paint - BLACK BLOCKS the b&w effect and the colour "pops" back.
If you want a homemade video tutorial contact me on ikam99@ntlworld.com

Steve

Anonymous said...

I thought you were using 50mm f1.8
in the youtube tutorial it said you used 24-105 f4L @85mm

Gavin Hoey Training said...

Correct. That picture was taken at the same location, but at a different time. Hence it didn't feature in the 15 minute photo challenge video.

Brian McCray said...

Hi Gavin, love all the tut's. If i wanted to get similar results with jpeg, any suggestions or links to previous tut's on doing it?

Thanks either way for all your great info!

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