When I first joined Flickr, I kept hearing the word “bokeh” being thrown around, and I didn’t have a clue. Even after I read the definition, I still didn’t get it. So I’m not even going to try to explain it.

There are really two kinds of bokeh out there …

1. defined “balls” of light, often in the background of pictures

2. a less defined blur in the background

All of this can be discussed for DAYS, and one of these days, I will try to explain how it works, why it works and how to get it. When I figure it out.

But today, I will explain how to get one kind of bokeh — holiday light bokeh.

Have you ever seen pictures like this …

And wondered how to get them?

I did for a really long time. But it’s really quite simple.

First step, put your camera on manual focus. Don’t freak out – you won’t actually have to be focused. That’s the beauty of it! Bokeh balls like this are made by being out of focus.

Second step, shoot! If you’re a beginner, you can shoot in night-mode. If you’re more advanced, shoot in aperture-priority mode & then set your aperture wide-open (that’s the smaller numbers like f/2.0). If you shoot in full manual, you already know how to do this, so quit reading! ;)

The magic is in getting the right light & exposure, but if you play around, you’ll get it. And make sure you are out of focus. The more out of focus you are, the larger the “balls of light” will be.

It’s really fun driving or walking around at night & taking pictures of a house that has a lot of Christmas lights up.

And of course, don’t forget your Christmas tree!

You might be lucky enough to have all of your lights working at one time – unlike us. {The downside of having a pre-lit tree …}

Have fun!

Confession time!! It seems like I confess a lot of my photographic shortcomings on this blog, so I will probably NEVER make it as a professional photographer … but here comes another confession.

I started using textures because my camera has horrible horrible horrible noise control. Anytime I put my camera over ISO 200, I have noise.

Bad noise.

Lots of noise.

Noisy noise.

So when I discovered textures, I did a jig simply because it covers the noise!! But then textures can also completely change an image. It can change an image’s meaning and tone. It can make something happy become very dreary. It can turn a blurry image into something artistic.

And here’s my very non-professional tutorial on adding textures to images using Adobe Photoshop Elements. I’m currently using 5.0 because I just don’t have the extra money to upgrade to the latest version, so if I can do it in 5.0, anyone can do it!

I’m going to skip the processing, because it doesn’t really matter how you process an image in order to use textures. In that case, I’ll start with an image that I’ve already processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

I am going to use some of my recent favorite textures by Patti Brown / Kaleidoscope to demonstrate, but I’ll add a list of some of my favorite places for free textures at the end of this post. The pro to buying textures is that you are getting the original image, so you will always have it. I find myself using a texture I found online and then not remembering where I got it — the textures that I buy are always there. And easier to look through.

1. Open the image in Photoshop.

2. Open the textures that you want to use … in this case, I am using the following Patti Brown textures:
1. Vintage Dream Burst – Dream Collection
2. Vintage Dream Sequence III – Dream Collection
3. Dustclouds – The Gallery Collection
4. Seafoam Vignette – The Gallery Collection

The following steps are completely open to interpretation. What I do is solely based on how it looks, and it will look completely different on another image. The fun part of textures is the playing around to find something that looks good.

3. Simply drag the first layer you want to use onto the image.

I actually don’t like drag-sizing the texture to fit the image, so I re-size the textures based on the size of the image, and I always go over by about 10px. Simply put, if my original image is 800px x 600px, then I’ll resize the texture to 810px x 610px before I drag it onto the original image.

4. Change the “blending mode” for the layer – I usually use either “overlay” or “soft light” as my two main blending modes.

5. Then, change the “opacity” to suit your desires. Sometimes, you can leave it at 100%; sometimes, you may only need it around 20% – it’s all about personal preference here.

6. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your layers.

I used the following combinations:

1. Vintage Dream Burst – overlay @ 80%
2. Vintage Dream Sequence III – overlay @ 50%
3. Dustclouds – overlay @ 40%
4. Seafoam Vignette – soft light @ 70%

Once you get all of your layers on there, you can go back and change the blending mode and opacity for each layer to create different looks.

Just go to your layer control box, select the texture you want to change, and then make your adjustments. It’s fun to play around.

You can also “hide” each texture to see how the image looks with or without that texture. Just click on the “eye” next to the texture in the layer control box.

When you’re all done with your layers and happy with how they look, then you can “flatten image” and save it out.

There is a whole different method for using layers on portraits, so I’ll cover that in a different post. It involves a lot of erasing the texture over the skin since you usually don’t want someone’s face looking bumpy or scratchy.

I’ve already sang the praises of Patti Brown’s textures, and I really love Florabella textures as well, but here are just a few of my favorite places for free textures.

Flickr
Les Brumes
Pareeerica

Web
Grunge Textures
Deviantart

Enter to win a set of Patti’s amazing textures at I Heart Faces!!

I’m over here today.

I’ve always wanted to say that. I see so many bloggers with “other gigs” and it’s always been a secret dream of mine to be elsewhere. But if I don’t hurry up and write another article, they’re going to ban me from over there.

Just kidding.

They’re not that mean.

I don’t think ……………………………..

Um, I better get to work.

I’ve had many people ask me to share my processing techniques for my images. Funny thing is, I don’t really do the same thing every time, and most of the time, I just play until it looks good. So it’s hard to just say, “Well, I did this and this and this.” But for you … I will try. ;)

Note: I process all of my images in Lightroom and Photoshop Elements 5.0

So we’re going to start with this image …

I know what you’re thinking. Um, dude? That’s blurry. Well, yes. I decided to use a particularly bad image to show you how drastic just a few changes can be. But I actually like the movement in this picture since she’s running around so carefree. I think it adds to the image.

It really does work. You’ll see. (Don’t go scrolling down to see, yet — be patient!)

We also have that horrible blownout light across the top of the image, and it’s just not composed very well AT ALL.

I’ve been a little obsessed with square crops lately, so I did that, purposefully keeping Jessie in the shot, because our dogs rarely get camera time these days, poor things.

Then, I just applied my “in shades of brown” preset.

Without just giving away my “formula” this preset basically warms up the image, adds a little green tint, bumps up the exposure, bumps down the saturation, and then split tones it with some tan highlights and light purple shadows. Among other things.

But. It still isn’t “right.” It looks like it’s just blurry, ya know?

So this is where textures come into play. I love textures. I love how they can totally add a completely different element to an image. It’s a whole other layer, both literally and figuratively.

On this image, I stuck with Florabella Textures, which were recently featured on I ♥ Faces. She has done some amazing things with these textures, and I can almost guarantee I’ll find the texture(s) I want when I open up my Florabella folder.

I used …
antique square in overlay mode @ 100%
champagne square in soft light mode @ 100%

I also copied the background image and put it into multiply mode @ 50% because the 2 textures had lightened it up significantly.

And then I added the creamy white border to add an even more vintage flair, kind of like those old polaroids.

After all the textures are added, and the image meets my approval, I just go to layer -> flatten image, then select -> all.

Image -> Resize -> Canvas Size

With these settings …

By the way, this is also a great way to add a black border without cutting into your image.

And here is the final product …

It’s amazing how much difference a little crop & texture can do to an image!

And here you all thought I was a decent photographer. ;)

My first entry into the Fix-It Friday over at I ♥ Faces … I really wanted to do this one because it was a challenge. I am finally putting my camera into full manual mode when I shoot, so I get pictures like this often.

before:

processed in Lightroom & Photoshop Elements 5.0

after:

cropped
tint: -30
temperature: -64
exposure: +3.55
contrast: -25
clarity: +65
bumped up green highlights
bumped up blue shadows
cloned out the feet in the background
added a gaussian blur layer in “soft light” mode in PS

after:

cropped
tint: -30
temperature: -64
exposure: +3.55
contrast: -25
clarity: +100
saturation: -70
gray highlights and shadows
cloned out the feet in the background
added a gaussian blur layer in “soft light” mode in PS

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
approx $260

Granted, there was a time right after I got it when I used it TOO much (oy), but now that I’ve found my way, I use it for everything from minor adjustments to some fun vintage looks.

It does everything I need it to do in just a couple of clicks, and since I’m usually editing pictures in about 3.7 seconds of free time every day, it works great for me.

I received many “YES!” responses to the idea of a before/after post with a sort of “how to” in regards to processing, so I decided to make it a weekly thing. Or a whenever I think about it and/or don’t have anything else to blog about thing.

Like I said, I use mostly Lightroom, but I think I can explain things in a way to where it won’t be too hard to replicate in Photoshop.

Here is the first installment … a fairly easy one.

before:

camera: Olympus E-520
lens: Zuiko 50mm
exposure: 1/30 second
aperture: f/3.2
ISO: 200
flash: no way, Jose

First, I cooled the temperature down a tiny bit and added a teensy bit of green tint.

Then, I adjusted the highlight recovery a little bit to make the background a little darker – make the apples pop out a little more (this is a bit like the highlight slider in Photoshop’s shadow/highlight tool).

Added some blacks to also help fill in some of the background color that was still popping out. And finally, a little brightening.

This is stuff that I do on almost all of my photos. Minor adjustments that will make a difference in the end.

Now comes my favorite step – clarity. On landscape’y photos like this one, I bump it up a lot. I’m also going to kick up the vibrance a bit.

And then the BIG step. The S-curve. Or the tone curve as experts like to call it. This is what adjusts your photo’s highlights, lights, darks and shadows. It is super fun to play around with, too. It’s just called “curves” in Photoshop, I believe.

For the sake of this image, I just pulled it into a pretty clear S-shape. I don’t use the same numbers for each image or anything – I just pull it around until it starts looking the way I want it to look.

I’ve labeled what each part of the “S” is, so you can kind of see how each part affects the image. Now, I wish I could wax on about what each little slider does, but I have only the tiniest bit of understanding in my pea brain and not quite enough to put it into words.

So just play with it and see what you get.

Oh yeah … NOW we’re talkin’!

By the way, I hope you aren’t reading the titles of these images because I am just naming them whatever I want, and it is not making sense.

Okay, so that’s all I’m doing in Lightroom.

Looks pretty good, eh?

That bright spot on the apple in the foreground is driving me nuts.

So I bring it into Photoshop Elements (yes, I only use PSE – I know, I know … but I chose to purchase Lightroom instead of Photoshop CS, and this combo has been enough for me).

First thing I do is add a layer (Layer – New – Layer) and then I fill it with 50% Gray. Say what?

While I have the new layer selected, I go to Edit – Fill Layer and then fill it with 50% Gray, in Overlay mode, keeping the transparency …

Or this.

Now, I still have to go to my little layer box on the right side and select “overlay” – not sure why that is, but it is what it is.

Then, I go to my brushes, choose black as my color and then choose the following options at the top:

55px soft mechanical brush
mode: color burn
opacity: 50%

And then I lightly paint over the light spot – more like dabbing. I also decreased the opacity of my brush to 20% and hit the light spot on the back apple, as well.

Voila!