Damien Symonds

Please, I beg you, don't wait any longer to take The Raw Class. Your photos make me cry a little.

It's disastrous. Adobe RGB files can only be used in colour-managed programs, and non-photographers don't habitually own colour-managed programs like Photoshop. So your photos will appear dull in colour on your clients' screens, and depending where they get them printed, dull in print too. Yes, that's the point. You need to have a good understanding of colour-management to be able to safely use Adobe RGB. Please switch to sRGB immediately and never change. If any of your past clients ever contact you about dullness of colour in their files, you'll know what the problem is. Your only saving grace is that customers are, in the main, quite ignorant about what photos should look like. They probably assume that dull colours are your "style" or something. This is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO stupid. Never do this again.

The files open just fine, but OH CRAP!!!!! They're Adobe RGB! This is catastrophic. Thank your lucky stars that she couldn't open them. Also, they're insanely noisy. So, fix the noise (step 1, step 2 if needed) and while you're there, make sure you fix the colour space. Then yes, crop them to 11:15. Then, I'd maybe email her a couple of the files, to see if she can open those ok. If she can, try the USB stick again.

Hi Megan, can you send me a couple of the files you've given her? Send them via this link: https://www.hightail.com/u/BellePhotography

Thanks for letting us know.

Post in the class Posting Area as usual.

Oh gee, can we talk about this in the Raw Class please?

Oh, bugger. May I see the whole photo, so I can see what you mean?

It's pretty mild, I think we can use the easy option. Add a Solid Color layer of shirt blue, and set its blend mode to "Color".

Yep, that's perfect.

No, that's not the crop tool, that's the marquee tool.

Terrific! So just use your Crop Tool, on the "HxWxResolution" setting exactly as you have it in the screenshot you showed me, and enter "8in", "10in" and "300" in the three fields as usual. Then crop. That's all there is to it.

I don't think you're missing anything, but let's be safe. Can you show me a screenshot of your crop tool settings just before you crop, and also a screenshot of the Image Size dialog that you mentioned, after cropping?

And are they always, and only, 8x10 prints? Never any other size?

For whom? Do you print the photos yourself, or send them to somebody else to print? Or do they get used by a graphic designer?

Good job.

Is it for business cards or something like that?

No, that one looks rather blue.

This will be the result:

Furthermore, we can see that the wall is quite nicely neutral at the bottom. This is a great example of how quickly light falls off in a studio. So we'll aim to match the top of the wall to the bottom. This is the method you'll use: https://www.damiensymonds.net/levels-eyedropper

The first thing we need to clarify is this - you definitely don't want to make it pure white. Bright white, I mean. That would look implausible, and make the child look dark and dull by comparison. What we want is to make it neutral.

Well, the alternative is to get yourself a bottle, and try photographing it at exactly the correct angle, and putting it in there.

No. Prints are never too bright. Prints are what they are. If your print is visually brighter than your screen, it means that your screen is too dark.

Gosh, how troublesome. Without embarking on major pixel cloning, I think it's best to just dull the colours as much as possible?

In case who wants to crop closer? Who uses your photo?