Venice

Deke's Techniques 044: Miniaturizing the World in Photoshop

Submitted by deke on 1 November 2011 - 12:15am.
Deke's Techniques 044: Miniaturizing the World in Photoshop

This week, I take you on a journey into the world of the small. That is, I show you how to make the world small, as if you---quite by contrast---have become inexplicably and fantastically HUGE. So that you can tromp around your photographs and proclaim maniacally, "I am vast and powerful!" as you crush cars, trains, and buildings with your bare feet. And squish the fleeing citizenry with your fingertips.

Or just pick 'em up and play with 'em. Your choice.

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Deke's Techniques 021: Assembling a Flawless Panorama

Submitted by deke on 24 May 2011 - 7:15am.
Deke's Techniques 021: Assembling a Flawless Panorama

It's tempting to dismiss stitched panoramas as a kind of trendy fad, one that passed about the same time that Adobe finally got its act in gear with the current version of Photomerge. But I see panoramas very much in the realm of ongoing relevance, and for two reasons. First, the obvious: You can build an image with roughly the same proportions as human eyesight, thus permitting the viewer to fully immerse in your photograph. Second, and more importantly (because there's nothing that says these things have to be wide), you can assemble a higher number of pixels than your camera can otherwise capture. For example, a collection of 12-megapixel shots can grow upwards of 30 megapixels---even after cropping---enough to measure at least 3 feet wide (or 3 feet tall, if you prefer) at 267 pixels per inch.

Photoshop's Photomerge command is easy enough to use. But getting flawless results out of it is another thing. It's less a matter of Photoshop wizardry---there's not a whole lot you can do to control Photomerge's automated behavior---and more one of capturing the best scene while behind the camera. And because panoramas are best suited to grand vistas and other location shots, you may have just one chance to get it right. Which is what this video is ultimately about.

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dekeSpeak January 25, 2011

Submitted by LouBrz on 25 January 2011 - 12:15am.
This Is dekeOnline
dekeSpeak
The Newsletter of Things Deke: January 25, 2011


Hello, friends:
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Seven Days in Venice

Submitted by deke on 23 January 2011 - 12:15am.

With any luck, dekeOnline feels like it's been humming away like the seamless beast that it is. In which case, I cheerfully admit, it's been doing so largely without me. Last week, I was away on one of my rare vacations. This time in Venice. You may know Venice from tales of its canals and Mediterranean sun. But latitude-wise, the city is roughly even with Mongolia and Nova Scotia. Toss in lots of water, copious fog, and a few Adriatic winds, and you have one of the coldest Winter cities I've ever visited.

Which was a good thing. Witness the HDR composite of Ponte Rialto below (captured with an Olympus E-30 and merged in Photoshop's HDR Pro). I count 14 people on the south side of the bridge. Based on my experience traversing that bridge, there's a very good chance every one of them was Italian. In the Summer, the Rialto is jam-packed with tourists of all stripes. But in the Winter, it's just you, a few Nativi Italiani, and the indigenous denizens of Venice. Which means, for a few heavenly days, you can rid yourself of Americans.

Ponte Rialto at sunset

Nothing against the Dear Old U.S. of A. I'd sooner live on the moon than anywhere else. But charming as Americans are in the wall-to-wall box-store opulence of The 50 States, they tend to be boorish imperialists abroad. As if to supply proof, the one American at my hotel: A) asked the dining crew if the complimentary breakfast included waffles, B) woke the housekeeping staff late at night to request fluffier pillows, and C) inquired of me one day if I had been to the "Doag's House." (He meant the Doge's Palace.) Once I got to know him, he was a great guy. But I really wanted to take him aside and entreat him, on behalf of Our Great Country, to stop being such a dumb shit. Read more » 

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Old Photo, Meet New Lightroom

Submitted by colleen on 11 August 2008 - 8:30am.

We like to make screenshots pretty here at dekeOnline, so when I went to capture the interface of Lightroom 2 for my post a while back, I picked an old photo of Venice at sunrise I had handy. Just so happens, this particular image really benefited from one of the new features in this version of Lightroom, the Graduated Filter tool, which allows you to apply your chosen adjustments with a mask that emulates a classic graduated filter. In one stroke, I could lighten the foreground while keeping the sky romantically dark and mysterious.


I shot the original image with my trusty old 4MP Canon Digital Elph, as I emerged, bleary eyed from taking the midnight train from Rome, to this amazing scene of sunrise over the Grand Canal. I had seen both the Pyramids at Giza and the Sistine Chapel in the previous week, but this view brought tears to my eyes. Tears which are my excuse for some serious exposure issues. But Lightroom's graduated filter did an amazingly simple job of reviving the Venitian sunrise experience. And on a JPEG no less. Read more » 

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