I’ve been looking for a camera bag that is nice and stylish and looks like a normal handbag. I came across Kelly Moore’s website through her Facebook page and fell in love with the B-Hobo bag in ‘teal’. After chewing though the box to get to it {I was a tad excited and couldn’t find any scissors}, I used it for my evening session on the beach and it was FABULOUS! It held my camera body and 24-70mm lens plus two other lenses. I carried it on me during the shoot, and switched lenses easily.

I love the fact that I can literally take my camera with me anywhere

You can find more information HERE  Also Kelly has some fabulous videos on all her products. The inside is fully adjustable, so you can fit your camera and lenses in however you want.

Kelly Moore Video

On the free tutorial disk, you’ll find some of my funky actions ~ so I hope you have fun:)

There’s more to come over the next few issues, so it’s all very exciting Watch this space for more photoshop tutorials too! I’m just putting the final touches to the post which will be on beautiful black and white conversions

Click HERE to see Vanessa’s work

Aren’t they beauty-full, and FREE for a limited time only. All you have to do is click on the image above, ‘Like’ the Florabella Collections Facebook page and download Easy and just in time to share a bit of love……..

Click HERE to visit the Facebook page

Below is an instruction video for the SpyderLensCal and also the link. Click HERE for more information.

VIDEO

Have fun calibrating!!

So, this is little Miss M…..isn’t she gorgeous, and this shot is SOOC (straight out of camera)

The first thing I want to do is lighten the whole image up! So I duplicate the layer

• Layer > Duplicate Layer

One of the quickest ways to lighten up an image is to change the blending mode to ‘screen’. So in the layers palette, on the right hand side, change the blending mode from ‘normal’ to ‘screen’. You will see the image instantly light up. Now adjust the opacity to around 60%, or to taste

She’s nicely lit, but I’ve noticed little Miss M is a little darker on the left side of her face. So from the tool bar on the left hand side of the screen, I grab the lasso, feathered at 120 px and roughly draw around the area I want adjusted. Now in the layers palette, on the right hand side, I select a ‘levels’ adjustment layer (or go to Image > Adjustment > Levels). The levels adjustment box will appear. Now move the right small arrow to the left to adjust the brightness.

Now it’s nicely lit, I can zoom in and tackle the little things like removing blemishs (and snot)! Little Miss M, has the most perfect skin, so its unlikely I’ll have to do anything too drasic! However, if you want to smooth the skin a little and adjust skin tones, you can run a plugin for photoshop called Portraiture.

To remove blemishes, snot and bags under eyes, I use a combination of the spot healing tool and patch tool (found in the same combination in the left hand tool bar). To use the patch tool, zoom in to the area you want adjusted (Ctrl +), then draw around the area you want selected. Once it’s selected simply click in the centre of the area, hold the cursor down and pull the ‘patched’ area to your sample area. This can be any area on the face where there are minimal blemishes and the exposure is nice. I generally use the area closest to the area I’ve changing, like the cheeks or forehead.

Whilst you’ve ‘zoomed in’, you can grab the dodge tool (in dodge/burn/sponge combination) from left hand toolbar, and with the exposure set to midtones at around 50%, you can quickly dodge the eyes, this will lighten them, and make any catchlights sparkle!

Now press Ctrl -  (control and minus) to zoom out!

So, for this image I’m going for a bit of a vintage look, which means I need to take down the saturation slightly of the grass, as I’ll be adding a warm texture and it’ll come up too bright! So I need to add a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer. Go to the little yin/yang (black white circle) at the bottom of the layers palette, and select the Hue and Saturation layer.

To select just the ‘green’ in the image, I need to add a mask. So in the Hue and Saturation adjustment box, click on the Mask tab as shown

When the small dialog box appears, select ‘color range’

Using the eye dropper, I sampled the ‘green’ area that I wanted adjusted. You can see it highlighted on the screen.  When I was happy, clicked OK. Then I clicked back onto the adjustment tab (next to the mask tab) so I would be back in the hue and saturation adjustment palette.

Using the saturation slidebar, I pulled the arrow to the left and reduced the amount of ‘green’ to taste

I am happy with the image, but I want to give it a vintage feel. To do this I generally add a texture. I use textures from Jessica Drossin. I find these most suit my style of photography. Other textures are available from JinkyArt

There are a few ways to add textures, however I go to File >Place (then I select the texture from where I’ve saved it – usually a file on my desktop). I pull the corners of the texture over the image so it fits, then I right click and select ‘place’. Then in the blending modes box, I change the blending mode from normal to ‘soft light’, and reduce the opacity to around 60% or to taste. Now one of the biggest mistakes, most photographers make when applying textures, is that they don’t remove the texture from the subject’s skin. A lot of badly applied textures make the subject look like they’ve come out of a burns unit, so it is important to erase back over the the face, arms and sometimes clothing. To do this, I first add a layer mask (or layer vector mask) from the bottom of the layers palette (it looks like a little camera icon). You’ll see a white box appears next to the texture layer in your layers palette. Then I grab a soft black brush, on a low opacity (see pic below). Then I simply paint over where I’d like the effect removed from. In little Miss M’s case, it was from her face, arms and dress. Now we’re almost done!

Finally, I crop the image to taste. The flatten the layers (Layer > Flatten) then save as a jpeg!

 These a zillion methods for softening edges, but this is mine:

• Ok, first thing’s first Duplicate Layer
• Now press Ctrl + A {to select all}
• Go to Select and from the dropdown menu choose Transform Selection

• In the top navbar in the Width and Height fields type 80% in each of them – you’ll now have a nice box selection over your image
• Click the little green arrow on the navbar to commit to the transform
• Go to Select and from from the menu choose Inverse {the outer part of the image is now selected}

• You want the blur to be nice and feathered, so go to Select > Refine Edge

• Adjust the slidebars for Smooth Edge and Feather to taste,  I usually go all the way to near 100%, click ok when finished
• Now go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and using the slidebar choose the amount of blur you’d like {around 15% is nice}
• To finish go to Select > Deselect
• Go across to the layers palette and pull the opacity slider to the  left. You can then fade the blur effect to taste.

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