Posts Tagged ‘Enhancing detail’

Make no mistake; I am not a Photoshop guru. Not even close! I can manage some basic retouching, and a few techniques that will spiff up your face, but for the most part I’m a kindergartner when it comes to massaging an image. This is one of the reasons I originally joined NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals); to figure out how to use Adobe’s massive software program.  Associated with NAPP is Kelby Training, an online source of video tutorials that cover a wide range of subjects. It was from one of the latest Kelby Training videos that I found this technique for enhancing detail. The video was from Tim Wallace, a commercial photographer that specializes in automobiles. He was lighting a car in a garage with a single strobe. (I was interested in the single strobe concept, not cars.) The back half of the video was Tim’s work flow on layering individual shots into a finished image. And at the end of that process he discusses enhancing details in the final image. He mentioned a couple of outside plug-ins, specifically Topaz (which I have) and Nik Color Efex (which I would like to have), but goes on to say that there’s a PS technique that works fairly well. Although I could not really tell how good it worked in the video, I thought I’d give a test as I often wish I could bring out the texture and detail in an image. I had just shot some close-up flower images last week from our garden and grabbed a wild columbine flower as a test subject. It had lots of fuzz hanging on it and had only basic sharpening done on the jpeg.

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