I recently had an opportunity to do a photoshoot for a friend of my wife, a celeb makeup artist (https://www.instagram.com/makeupbyaditichopra), since the photographer she had called could not make it for the shoot.
This gave me a lot of insight into various points related to makeup and what one should keep in mind in such scenarios. Do keep in mind that this is my first attempt at this…I only do wildlife otherwise!
These shots also gave me the opportunity to test out all the new masks in Lightroom 12 in a practical scenario and that is what we are going to look at in this video.
Someone recently asked me online about how to create a painterly and also an artistic effect for bird photographs.
This video is all about these two points…
1. How to simply create a painterly effect
2. How to make it artistic
So, let’s take a look at a quick example of how to achieve both these goals in Photoshop.
I have selected a recent shot from my balcony for this purpose which should be good enough to illustrate the basics of how to achieve this goal.
Okay, so a “Command” or “Control” + “E” would take this image from Lightroom to Photoshop.
Now, as illustrated in earlier videos, we just do a basic cleanup on this image.
First, we duplicate the image which puts it on a layer and we retain a backup in case we need to re-do the process. Command + J is a shortcut for this. Now, we can make the background layer invisible since we do not require it anymore.
A command + 0 fits the image to the window for a better view…
A simple select subject, and mask out the subject. Just use the selection and brush tool to clean up rough edges. Maybe try the colour range selection as well, if needed.
Now, let us see how to simply create the painterly effect.
Select “Stylize” from the “Filters” menu and choose “Oil paint”. Feel free to play around with the settings in this dialog box.
You can always use the help built into Photoshop to find out more about the settings in this dialog and what each option does.
Once you are done with that, just press “Enter” or click “OK” and we have our “painterly” effect.
Now, what about the “artistic” effect?
As it turns out, the person who asked me about this was looking for multiple copies of the same image put together in different sizes.
This is how I went about it…
Just duplicate the layer we already have. Use the “Free Transform” from the “Edit” menu to modify the copied layer. You can make as many copies as you want and pretty much apply any kind of transforms to each.
The art and concept belong totally to you and what you choose to create!
This is just an example that I came up with just to illustrate the concept.
Of course, you can also try to “Oil Paint” one layer at a time to give them all a different artistic look.
If like me, you got the Luminar AI package on release and installed it, you would have noticed that the Lightroom plugins for Luminar AI do not work as expected.
Luminar has released an online update which fixes the issues, but, leaves the older, non-functional plugins in place. This can be very irritating at best.
Let us take a look at how to update the plugins and remove the non-functional ones…
This is a little known technique that I wanted to share, but, kept forgetting 🙂
Basically, it’s not just Lightroom, this technique works for all disk/file intensive applications on the Mac and since Windows also indexes file, this would work on Windows as well.
Let’s take a brief look at how to speed up such applications on the Mac…
I generally use Lightroom for all my raw processing and avoid Photoshop unless I am replacing a sky or a similar composite.
One of the tools I use a lot in Lightroom is the Adjustment Brush and the AutoMask feature in that for edges.
Although I have updated to version 10 and therefore cannot show a side-by-side comparison, but, the change from the earlier version is quite visible even in normal masking.
This feature was introduced in version 9.3 and I have found it very useful for wildlife macros. Of course, we do have similar conditions with birds at times, but, this is more useful for macros.
We often see a major green tint when we photograph insects in the wild on leaves and branches. Adjusting the overall image tint in the white balance does not work in these conditions.
Earlier, one would have to go to Photoshop to fix these issues, but, now it can be done in Lightroom itself.
Let us look at an example to see how this is done…
I ran into this major bug while re-organising my mobile shots and I consider it serious enough to share. In short, if you are using date/time functions in the Lightroom import, you have to be careful and double-check to make sure this bug does not impact your catalog.
Let us see what this bug is and how it can create chaos in our catalog.
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