Tutorial Blog » Charles McNally

Photoshop Tutorial: Faking Darkroom Film Edges

Charles McNally — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:00:14 +0000

So far in my photoshop tutorials, we’ve covered quite a bit on how to fake the look of an old toy camera, with the Holga, LOMO/X-Pro, and Light Leaks tutorials. These are fun to do, but if you really want to go all the way and to make people think you’re shooting film, this is the last (and really most important) step.

Digital cameras trim the edges of your shot (as do a good amount of enlargers) so that you don’t actually see any edges – the image goes all the way to the edge of itself, if that makes any sense.

However, if you’re printing any size film yourself in the darkroom, you have the choice of printing without cropping it in the holder. It gives you those cool-looking rough black edges and uneven borders. Well in my usual fashion, today I’ll show you how to fake those edges.

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Photoshop Tutorial: Light Leaks, pt. 2

Charles McNally — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:00:39 +0000

One of the coolest things about older cameras and toy cameras (such as holgas, dianas, lubitels and other gems) is that they have an element of unpredictability to them.

If you haven’t shot on a camera before, you have no idea if there are going to be holes (usually around the edge of the film) where your film is accidentally exposed to light when it shouldn’t be, causing little colored blurs or white streaks.

I showed you how to get white-blur light leaks in the last photoshop tutorial, so let’s focus on the colored bar leak today. (This poor flower! Getting all leaked on…)(...)
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Photoshop Tutorial: Light Leaks, pt. 1

Charles McNally — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:00:22 +0000

One of the coolest things about older cameras and toy cameras (such as holgas, dianas, lubitels and other gems) is that they have an element of unpredictability to them.

If you haven’t shot on a certain camera before, you have no idea if there are going to be holes (usually around the edge of the film) where your film is accidentally exposed to light when it shouldn’t be, causing little colored blurs or white streaks.

Now that I’ve shown you how to fake a holga photograph and how to get that fun toy camera look, I’ll show you how to fake convincing light leaks in your photos. Also, the color will be changeable, since we’re mostly going to be using curves layers. This will also give us a small element of unpredictability and a lot of creative freedom, making it fun! Load up your image and let’s start leaking! (err…)

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Photoshop Tutorial: Getting that great X-PRO LOMO look

Charles McNally — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:00:08 +0000

Let me explain the title real quick, in case any readers aren’t in the know yet. LOMO is a russian optics company that makes cameras. They use the word Lomography to mean a wide-angle, shoot-from-the-hip, distorted colors, plastic lenses, expired film kind of photo asthetic.

Another thing a lot of Lomographers like to do is x-pro, or cross processing. This is the act of developing one kind of film in the chemicals meant to develop another kind of fim. For a lot of photographers, this means shooting onto slide film and bribing a friend who works at a developing lab to develop it as normal film. (...)
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Software Review: Vertus Fluid Mask 3

Charles McNally — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:00:27 +0000

I was a little hesitant when I signed up for this review. A masking program? I’ve seen quite a few masking programs that were hard to work with, with steep learning curves, bad tools, poor quality and more. I went in to it with pretty low expectations, to be honest, so I was blown away when I encountered the level of quality in Fluid Mask.

Most of the time I create cutouts using photoshop layer masks and spend a lot of time zoomed in up close. It’s seemed to work pretty well — I thought I was doing a good job, and fairly quickly. That was before I tried Fluid Mask…

Wow. Just wow. All that time I wasted! All those images that could’ve looked so much better! I wish I’d discovered Vertus Fluid Mask 3 sooner. (...)
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Post tags: fluid mask 3, masking software, photo editing, software review, vertus

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Photoshop Tutorial: Tilt-shift Miniature Faking

Charles McNally — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:00:31 +0000

Hello fellow photo editors! Today we’re going to learn how to make everything in your picture look like it’s teeny-tiny by simulating the extremely short focal plane that macro photography creates. It’s fake tilt-shift photography.

Tilt-shift is actually kind of a misnomer for this, however, as tilt-shift lenses don’t quite get this same kind of effect. Thanks wikipedia!

This is just a fun, quirky edit and works great for outdoor sporting events, parking lots, city-scapes and countrysides alike. Miniature cows? Hilarious… So let’s get down to it, shall we?

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Photoshop Tutorial: How to Fake a Holga Photograph

Charles McNally — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:00:26 +0000

If you don’t already know, the Holga camera is a $15 plastic toy camera, made in China and celebrated by many photographers for it’s blur, vignette, light leaks and low-quality aesthetic.

I’ll assume that you don’t want to go through all the hassle of using film, developing it, dealing with negatives and printing and storing and all the rest, so I’ll show you the best way I know how to fake a Holga image using Photoshop.(...)
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Photoshop Tutorial: Plain Pic to Glamour Girl, Retouching Techniques. (part 3 of 3)

Charles McNally — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:00:43 +0000

Welcome to the last of the portrait retouching tutorial series. The previous two cover blemish removal and blurring/sharpening. This tutorial will focus on using curves to ensure your image looks nice and bright and color correct. If you’ve been following the previous tutorials, your portrait subject already looks great.

It still may look a little dull however, and more than likely has a very subtle color tint, so we have to make sure the color flatters the subject’s skin and is accurate. I’m going to show you the best way I’ve been able to find to do this. It’s not guaranteed to work, but it works a lot for me and works very well when it does. Load up those .PSDs from last time and let’s get ready to finish the job! (...)
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Photoshop Tutorial: Plain Pic to Glamour Girl, Retouching Techniques. (part 2 of 3)

Charles McNally — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:00:37 +0000

Hello, and welcome back to our three-part photo retouching tutorial. If you haven’t seen it, you might want to check out part one, in which we cover blemish removal and eye/teeth whitening. For this part of the tutorial, we’re going to learn how to both blur and sharpen your subject to create pleasing results.

I know that blurring and sharpening the image seems somewhat contradictory, but we’re going to use layer masks to paint these effects onto the image only where we think they will look good.By the end of this part of the tutorial, your model will have smooth skin and nice sharp eyes and hair.

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Photoshop Tutorial: Plain Pic to Glamour Girl, Retouching Techniques. (part 1 of 3)

Charles McNally — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:00:33 +0000

Greetings, pixel pushers! Today I’m going to teach you how to subtly transform a good picture into an excellent picture in just a few easy steps. By the end, you will be able to turn your pictures into beautiful portraits for business, friends, family members, even touch up your own myspace pics…

This will come in handy when using your own photography on a website, or using your friends for product demonstration photos. This process is very similar to what magazines do to make sure skin is smooth, color is correct, and there are no visible blemishes. We all get zits from time to time, but you never see them in advertisements right?

That said, I picked my friend Nikki’s MySpace picture to use for this tutorial (with her permission of course) because the on-camera flash is something you see a lot and this lighting style really shows off even the slightest imperfections in her skin. We don’t really notice these imperfections in peoples’ skin most of the time because we don’t walk around with large, high-powered lights strapped to our foreheads. At least most of us don’t… but our cameras pick them up, so we have to get rid of them.

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Read the rest of Photoshop Tutorial: Plain Pic to Glamour Girl, Retouching Techniques. (part 1 of 3) (646 words)

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