A filter called Topaz

Today I found a 30 day trial to a Photoshop Plug-in filter called Topaz Adjustment from a company called Topaz Imaging.  It does some pretty sweet stuff, especially with clouds and water.  However, because it uses some sort of high end noise reduction along with all the exposure and contrast effects it takes about 10-15 minutes from beginning to end on one image.  And my computer is pretty kick butt.  So, if you try it, be prepared to wait.  Here’s a few samples that I did from some old images I shot a while back.  Enjoy…

Some pompous grass at my uncles on the Albermarle Sound…

a bumble bee in a whooooole bunch of flowers…

fishing out in Man’s Harbor with my uncles…

and finally driving back to Iron Station on South 85.

The filter is really easy to use, just make sure you turn the noise reduction off before you start sliding stuff around, otherwise it will be more like 20 or 25 minutes.  There’s also a tutorial video on their website.

 

HDR

Well, I’ll admit, a lot of the HDR pictures that I see these days are ten times better than the ones that I do.  Many of them always immediately invoke the response: “how in the world did they do that?!”  Tonight, I figured I’d give a few a try.  It was a cloudy night and there was a storm coming so most of them have some pretty crazy looking clouds in them.  I used a program called Photomatix, of which I used to have a full license to but my computer blew up and I had to rebuild it so I lost that version.  The trial version puts a nice little watermark of their own on every image you save, which is just wonderful (that was sarcasm in case you couldn’t tell).  Enjoy!

This one is of the field out beside the church.

This one is of the field in front of the church, showing the looming storm that hit about an hour ago.  I did this one a little more surreal than the rest cause it looked better that way.

The church steeple…obviously.

My Jeep, parked in the handicapped (VIP/J-Lo) parking at the church.

 

practice with black and white

Lately I’ve been playing around in photoshop trying to see what sort of things I could do when converting my color images to black and white.  Normally I just change the color format to grayscale but when I was doing a batch conversion the other day I figured out you could do the same thing with Channel Mixer, only now I had the option of Infrared Black and White, Red Filters, Green Filters…and all that good stuff.  So I took some shots from a wedding I did back in November of 2007 and changed them to black and white using the Channel Mixer, which gave me a completely different effect than just changing to grayscale.  Here’s three from Dan and Hannah Walker’s wedding:

Any suggestions?  Feedback?

-Jason

 

Adam and Megan’s Wedding

I haven’t fully got all of the pictures done yet but here are a few that I took.  Hope you like them.

I liked this one sort of desaturated better…

 

Adam and Megan Wedding

photos are coming soon…

 

Shaun and Joy’s Wedding

So I didn’t get paid to do Shaun and Joy’s wedding but I told them that I would come and take some pictures just around. I enjoyed their wedding regardless of whether I got paid or not, it was honestly one of the most beautiful weddings I’ve ever been to.