VFX Haiku » Panorama

Lomography Spinner 360 Review

Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:57:41 +0000

Old Thirty Five stock | A Plastic Revolution | Magical Photos

This is a thorough video review of the new Lomography Spinner 360.
http://microsites.lomography.com/spinner-360/

I spent about a week or so with this camera, and have blown through over 8 rolls so far, and I absolutely love it.

For some more detailed information about this camera, with links to high res film scans, check out my blog posting about it here:
http://blog.isotropy.ca/2010/06/lomography-spinner-360-review/

To see some shots taken with this camera, check out my flickr feed, or check out this flickr search.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgartner/
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=Lomo+360&m=text

If you have any comments or questions, just let me know!

Thanks!

Advanced Photoshop Techniques

Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:27:11 +0000

Learn why you should work in 16-bit and 32-bit modes, Advanced Photo Manipulation, and many other tips and tricks! This tutorial is meant for intermediate to advanced Photoshop users who want to take their knowledge to the next level! There’s lots of discussion in here about topics that aren’t readily covered in Photoshop tutorials, and I think you’ll be surprised by what you learn!

Advanced techniques | Taken to the next level | Your skills will increase!

Here’s a quick overview of a few of the topics that are covered:

Working in 16-bit and 32-bit mode:

• Why 8-bit is for suckers!

• Understanding why you would want to work in 16-bit mode

• How to take advantage of 16 bit mode with your DSLR RAW files

• Disadvantages of working in 16-bit and 32 bit mode

• Understanding the weird world of  32-bit floating point

• Special effects for working in 32-bit mode

• Re-creating realistic lighting effects in 32-bit mode

Advanced Transfer (blending) Mode  Tricks and tips

• One HUGE tip that will change the way you use transfer (blending) modes!

Working Non-destructively in Photoshop

A preview of this tutorial can be seen here

• Understanding why working non-destructively is important

• Examples of non-destructive workflows in other applications (Fusion 5)

• Using the Clone Tool in a non-destructive manner

• Using Adjustments Layers

• Using Smart objects and Smart filters

Advanced Photo Manipulation

• Taking maximum advantage of working with RAW files

• Breaking a photo down into different problems to be solved

• Using Actions to experiment with different looks

• Using Adjustments Layers to modify specific areas

• Looking at your photos and finding the best way to enhance them

• Replacing a drab sky with something more exciting

• Creating areas of interest in your photos to guide the viewer’s eye

• Using Colour Curves

File Formats Explained!

A preview of this tutorial can be seen here

• An in-depth look at the Photoshop Document Format (.PSD)

• Tagged Image File Format (.TIF)

• Joint Photographic Experts Group (.JPG)

• Portable Network Graphics (.PNG)

• OpenEXR (.EXR)

• When to use one format over the other, and why some formats are better suited to certain tasks

Photoshop Tips and Tricks!

• Why using a tablet rocks and how to put it to use in Photoshop

• Making better B&W images

• Tricks with masks

• Interesting uses for Photoshop’s History

• Improvements in the Clone tool

• Editing Photoshop Actions

• Using Quicktime Movies in Photoshop

What’s included in the Download?

• High quality quicktime movies of every section of the tutorial (1GB download)

• Copies of my favourite Photoshop Actions

I really hope that you enjoy this tutorial. I had a lot of fun putting it together. If you have any comments or questions about anything, send me an email, and I’ll try and answer it as soon as possible. Thanks!

Thanks!

Double Rainbow: Photoshop Time-lapse

Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:00:55 +0000

A 1.5 hour photoshop session compressed into a 3:50 time-lapse. At one of Sarah’s recent soccer games, there was a beautiful double rainbow just beside the field where she was playing. I wanted to get a really nice shot of it, but I only had my LX3 and not my AE-1 with my fisheye lens…

So, I thought this would be a good a time as any to get into the world of HDR Panoramas! Without a tripod, I set my LX3 to take bracketed exposures of as much of the surrounding area as I could. I took 27 shots in total, 9 shots with 3 exposures each. These were then all dumped into a great free panorama tool called Hugin. There’s a few other tools out there to do the same thing like AutoPano Pro, but Hugin seems to allow for more manual control when things go awry when stitching together your images.

In the image above, you can mouse over it to see how the original images get distorted inside of Hugin to stitch together.

Once the image was stitched together, it was exported as an HDR .exr file and brought into Photoshop where the magic happens.

The clouds that day were pretty dull, as the sunset was actually happening to the west, and this was being shot towards the east. The drab sky called for a sky replacement! That along with a bunch of other colour tweaks and you’ve got the final result!

If anyone has any comments or questions, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!