Today we have another interview with another favorite photographer, Yvonne Eijkenduijn. I've long loved Yvonne's fresh, bright, colorful photos of her lovely home, so I wanted to know more about how she takes her pictures. Here's what she had to say:
1.How have you learned about photography? Formal training? Books?
Websites?
I started at a young age because my father was really into photography
and he bought me my first camera when I was eight. Ever since I've
been making photos. I'm trying to train myself by listening to other
people and browsing the web for tips & tricks.
2.What kind of camera do you use?
Currently I'm using a Nikon D80 but honestly I miss my Canon 300D. It
was such a lovely camera.
3.What is your favorite subject to photograph?
Stock photos and interior shots.
4.Tell us a little about how you compose a shot, any rules you follow
(or break)?
That's such a hard question because I'm always busy making
little corners and when I have a perfect corner I take a picture. Sometime
the corners already exist and sometimes I create them moving things
around. I try to find the right color combination, items and a setting
that they fit in. Really I don't know how to explain this LOL!
5.Do you do any post-processing? What do you use (Photoshop version or
other program)? What is your favorite action or effect?
I use Photoshop CS3 and I sometimes play a bit with curves but that's
it really. I try to get a perfect (to me) shot and try to keep it
natural without any editing.
6.Share a favorite photo you have taken.
This one is actually a bit blurry but I just love it. I love Christmas! (Me too! This is one of my favorite photos of yours! ~Marné)
7.Share a favorite photo by someone else
I can't remember where I found this photo but I love it. This is just
everything I love and want for myself wrapped up in perfect happiness!
I want to hang out with you there, Yvonne! Thanks for taking the time to play along with us and sharing your secrets :o) I highly recommend a visit to yvestown and to her flickr stream for lots of lovely eye candy.
Posted at 06:16 PM in Interviews | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Just because Keri asked, here's a little bonus post for you. I really like the way my Spring blossoms photo came out when I adjusted it so it looked like it had been cross-proccessed, which is a darkroom technique used in film photography (click that link for a much better explanation than I could ever give you). I think the effect looks like a scene from a 1950's technicolor movie, and who doesn't love 1950's technicolor movies? If you don't, I suggest you go rent The Quiet Man right now. We have it on dvd, if you want to borrow it.
Here's the original image, straight from the camera to my computer. the first thing to do is create a Curves layer, by clicking the black and white cookie icon at the bottom of the layers palette and choosing Curves. Remember that Seinfeld episode? "Look to the cookie!" Sigh. I miss that show.
I still don't know what curves are, but adjusting them is a lot of fun. For this particular effect we're going to adjust each channel. So select the red channel, and click and pull the right end point over to the left slightly, and then adjust the rest of the line into a gentle s-curve. This is the kind of thing that you'll just want to experiment with, I think, until you get it looking how you want it to look.
I barely adjusted the green channel this time, but again, pull it into a very slight s-curve.
And the blue channel, you just want to move the right endpoint down a little, and the left endpoint up a little.
That's all I did, and ended up with this:
You can easily stop right there, but if you want a little more turquoise-y glow, add a color layer (again, click the black and white cookie icon, and this time choose Color), and make it a greenish-yellow color. This layer should be the top layer. Now adjust the opacity way, way down. I think I went down to about 10%. It should be very subtle.
Here's what the yellow layer did to it:
And that's it! Just play around with those curves, and adjust until you like the end result.
I think we should start a flickr group for everyone to share the results of trying all the stuff we're posting about, what do you think? I really want to see what you all come up with. Who's in?
Posted at 11:56 AM in Lucy, photoshop cs2 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
I don't take a lot of pictures of people. I'd like to learn how eventually, but in the meantime it's good to learn what to do with portraits. This one was a pretty big challenge for me, obviously, as it's taken me two weeks to post it. Even with the constant nagging of my sister, who berated me for making an Easter Bunny egg cozy rather than posting the picture she sent me. I have been trying, but just couldn't figure out what to do to make this picture look better. Well, I finally decided to just do a little touching up, and then add a tiny bit of a glow. So here is what I did:
It's a nice photo to start with, so you can understand my dilemma, right? I decided to concentrate my efforts on the eyes, and referred to my handy dandy Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby. I have to say, his Photoshop books are very helpful. There's not a lot of technical babble, he just takes a single technique, and walks you through it, step-by-step. So, if you don't know what Curves are, no big deal, you don't have to, he'll just show you how to adjust the Curves to get the effect you want. So I would recommend checking out his book for whatever version of Photoshop you're using.
First I decided to make the whites of her eyes a little brighter. I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to select one section of white, and then held down the shift key while selecting the other sections. Next I went to the selection menu and clicked Feather, and adjusted the feather amount to 3. Then I opened the Hue/Saturation menu (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation). If the subject has a lot of red in their eyes, you can first select Reds from the edit menu, and then slide down the Saturation level. Switch back to the Master edit menu, and to make the whites brighter, slide up the Lightness level. Watch the preview while you do this, because you want to keep it subtle, and it can turn into freaky alien eyes really quickly. Click Okay and deselect, and there you have it, whiter whites. If only it were as easy with my laundry.
Next I wanted to add a little sparkle to her eyes. I'm going to list this part step-by-step, because there are quite a few steps, but they're not hard, just follow along:
1. First I added an Unsharp Mask by going to Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp mask. You can play around with the settings a little. I used the following: Amount 150%, Radius 1, Threshold 10.
2. Reapply the Unsharp mask several times by pressing Control-F (PC), or Command-F (Mac), until the eyes start to look really crisp. At this point there will be some funny stuff going on with the rest of the picture, but don't worry about that, we'll get rid of it. I did it quite a few times, maybe 8 or so, but you may need as little as 4. You don't want to do so many that your history list only shows Unsharp mask, make sure you can still go back to the step before you started applying it.
3. Now, in the History list, click the last step you completed before you applied the first Unsharp mask.
4. Still in the History list, click the box to the left of the very last Unsharp mask you applied. This will give you the History brush, which you can use to repaint all those Unsharp masks only in the areas you want. Make sure it's a soft brush, and adjust it to about the same size as the iris, and just click once over each iris. Voila! A little extra sparkle!
The very last thing I did, which is super easy, and give photographs a nice dreamy glow, was to apply a blur layer. Just drag the background layer to the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Make sure your new layer is at the top of your layers, if you have more than just a background layer. With that layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Adjust the blur as much as you like. I think I set this particular picture to 25 pixels on the blur menu. Now adjust the Opacity of the layer and the Layer type from the drop-down menu next to the Opacity slider. In this case, I took the opacity down to about 25%, and used the Overlay layer. And finally, after all that, here's what I ended up with:
It's a pretty subtle difference, but I think it looks nice. If I were to start doing a lot of portrait photography, I would probably invest in some actions, like these. Touching up portraits can really take a lot of time, and they make it quick and easy to make the subjects of your portraits look fantastic. Seriously, click on that link and see what an action or two can do for a photo.
So, let's compare the before and after side-by-side, shall we?
Coming up this week: another photographer interview, this time with my friend Yvonne, who takes magical pictures of her beautiful home, and I'll explain how I edited the photo in this post.
Posted at 06:31 PM in Lucy, photography books, photoshop cs2 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
I'm more than slightly jealous that Lucy is already enjoying the spring blossoms where she lives. I live a bit more northerly than her and they are talking about some snow falling tomorrow. *sigh* But we're here to talk about photo editing, not weather, so let's get to work.
Here are the beautiful blossoms in front of Lucy's local post office:
Last week, The Pioneer Woman showed one of her favorite, yet incredibly simple tools. Hard light. AND, you can do it on both Photoshop Elements, as well as Photoshop CS. You can read her tutorial here. She's a bit wordy at first, but if you stick with it, she finally cuts to the chase and shows you with lots of step-by-step pictures on how to do it. What it all comes down to is creating a new layer and then selecting "Hard Light" in the blending menu in the Layers corner on your screen. Here's what it looks like on the blossoms:
It just gives a little punch and deepness to the colors. When you add the feathering around the edging like we talked about a few weeks ago, here's what you get:
Before and After:
Lucy had to do her own editing session on this photo and she shows it on her blog. It just goes to show you the endless possibilities of photo editing!
Posted at 05:03 PM in photoshop elements 6, Sijbrich, tutorials | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Heylucy had the brilliant idea of interviewing photographers that we have both come to admire. We thought a perfect person to start with would be our very own brother, Dean. Within less than 24 hours of soliciting his participation, he had already e-mailed us back, with all of our questions thoroughly answered. He's obviously very passionate about the art. Let's see what he has to say (and show us):
PS: How have you learned about photography? Formal training? Books? Websites?
I learned initially from books during my first year in college. Kodak had a series of shortish books, probably 50 pages each, that covered various technical and compositional aspects of photography that I read in the university library when I should have been studying for classes. I was so enthused about them that I made my way to the library at every opportunity.
Posted at 07:58 AM in Interviews, Sijbrich | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Lesa Snider King might be my new best friend.
I discovered her while looking for interesting tutorials on Photoshop Elements to see what I might do with this photo that Lucy sent me this week:
I ended up at the Photoshop Elements Support website and learned how to use several cool features in just one tutorial by Lesa.
This is what I ended up with:
Kind of funky, eh? What blows me away, though, is that when the photo is pulled up in Photoshop Elements (I'm assuming that all of this could be done in Photoshop CS, as well) you can drag the white framed section to other parts of the photo and make whatever part you want turn from black and white to color. It's seems pretty fancy, but luckily Lesa gave some really clear instructions and even I was able to follow them. Seriously, if I can do it, anyone can.
Go check it out for yourself by clicking here.
Posted at 07:08 AM in photoshop elements 6, Sijbrich, tutorials | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I very, very quickly made some buttons which I would love for you to steal and put on your blog, if you would like to link to us. Here you go:
I think this will work, if you just want the code: <a href="http://heylucy.typepad.com/photoshop_sisters"> <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2076/2299297728_c633dda2f4_o.jpg" border="0" alt="photoshop sisters"></a>

And for this one: <a href="http://heylucy.typepad.com/photoshop_sisters"> <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3220/2299297714_7b85585f02_o.gif" border="0" alt="photoshop sisters"></a>
Posted at 03:45 PM in Lucy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Hello folks, how's it going? I'm really impressed with what Lucy did this week with the photo that I sent her. Yeah, she says I'm being a show-off sending her all these exotic pictures, but it's really her that's the one that always has to one-up me. Case in point - I got my Nikon D40 last spring. Last Christmas, she got a Nikon D40x. I decided that Photoshop Elements was perfect for my photo editing needs, and at a price of $70 at Costco, I thought it was great deal. But Lucy, always wanting to be a little better than me, updated Photoshop on her computer so now she has the most recent version. I can't keep up with her. She's apparently into researching on the web about other neat ways to do her editing, while I'm still here, tinkering around in Photoshop Elements with some of the basic tools. Do you sense some sibling rivalry on my part?
Here's the "boring and domestic" (Lucy's words, not mine) photo that she sent me this week:
Lot's o' Lichen. I actually think lichen is very pretty and whenever I see it while out hiking or snowshoeing I feel like it needs to have it's picture taken. Lucy told me that in reality, there was a lot more color to it, but it just didn't show up in the photo. I played around a bit with saturating the colors, but then I thought maybe we should just take out the color.
So I went to the Image menu at the top of the screen, then selected Mode, and Grayscale. A pop-up window appears asking if you want to discard color information. Select OK.
I got a basic black and white version of the photo, but decided to play around with the sharpness. I went to the Enhance menu at the top of the screen, and selected Adjust sharpness. This is a fun tool, as you can make some abstact images, or just do some minor adjusting to define or soften details. On the pop-up window, I adjusted the Radius to about 1.0. I added a little feathered edge in a shade of gray color instead of straight black, and this is what I came up with:
Before and after side-by-side:
So there you have it my friends. Now you know a simple way to make old looking black-and-white photos.
Posted at 08:56 AM in photoshop elements 6, Sijbrich | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I know we're all about Photoshop here, but there are other options out there. One of the funnest I've found is Picnik, a free web-based app you can use to do all sorts of fun things. You can upload photos from your computer to edit them, but what's even cooler is that you can connect to your flickr (or facebook, photobucket, picasa or webshots) account and edit your pictures stored there. Besides the basics, like cropping, rotating and re-sizing, you can also do red-eye correction and lots of fun effects. Here's this weeks' picture from my sister with the boost and vignette effects:
That took me about five seconds to create.
Flickr user beebee mod used the cross-process tool to create this image (check out more in her photostream to see lots of good examples of this effect).
It's free to register and use, but there is also a premium version for just $24.95 per year, which includes more editing tools, effects and fonts.
It's super easy to use, and quick. I could spend a lot of time playing around at picnik :o)
Posted at 06:47 PM in free stuff, Lucy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


