This Yellow Rose was taken at the end of the Garden in Grantham, UK. I used sRGB colour space instead of my normal Adobe RGB. Colour space determines the actual colour a specific RGB value corresponds to. Adobe RGB has a wider range of colour but this does mean each colour is further apart. For 8bit files you can visibly see a change when you shift a value by just 1. This is not great if you want smooth gradients but it does give richer Cyans and Greens. The narrower sRGB colour range is the standard for web output as it approximates the colour range of most common computer displays but for how long. The last display I bought boasted 100% Adobe RGB which means it will not be long before most can show these extra colours. For now I’m going to do some test posts in sRGB as no matter how good your monitor is you are limited by how your browser decides to display the colours.

N.B. After testing Firefox reproduces colours far more faithfully than I.E.

This is Belton Park in Lincolnshire, UK. It was the first chance to test out my new Canon 5D Mark II. It’s nice to be using a camera without a schizophrenic auto focus for a change.  The Mark II has been out for three years now and many believe a mark III will be announced soon. The good news is Canon have dropped the price of the Mark II recently which means you can get a lot of camera for your money.

To process this image I used the HSL/Grayscale tab in Camera RAW. This lets you change the saturation of individual colours. For this image the purple of the background flowers could be increased without over saturating the yellows in the grass.

This was shot on the Nile in Egypt. Instead of using Split Toning Actions in Photoshop I used the split toning in Camera RAW. The advantage of this method is it gives you a lot of flexibility over the controls. Not only can you fine tune the Hue of the Highlights and Shadows you can also adjust the Saturation and Balance.

This sunrise was taken on a balloon flight over the west bank of the Nile near Luxor in Egypt. In order to compensate for the cameras White Balance Guess a colour balance layer was used to bring back the sunrise colours. An advantage of using this method is the Highlights, Midtones and Shadows can be adjusted individually. This means you can control the colours in the dark foreground and the bright sky separately.

We went for a walk today and Karen spotted this Jew’s Ear Fungus in a small patch of trees. It was taken around midday on a cloudy day in the shade. These are all factors which make it the bluest that daylight gets. The cameras auto white balance does not know its looking at a red object under blue light. In an attempt to balance the image it set the colour temperature to 3850K. Instead of changing the colour temperature a Color Balance layer was used to bring back the hues of the fungus and the wood.

This was taken from a balloon above Luxor in Egypt. Split Toning was used to create a number of layers. They were then blended back together using a varying opacity and blend modes.

This is Jerash in Jordan. The ancient Roman race track once used by chariots played host to BBC’s Top Gear in their 2010 Christmas special through the Middle East. The sky is blended in from this image in Egypt. To blend it in a solid colour layer with a mask to blank out the stonework was used. The blend mode is set to color.

This is Indigo Dye and Powdered spices in Aswan Market, Egypt. If you recognise the powders please leave a comment so I can give more accurate keywords. In most cases stock agencies discourage too much photoshopping as it can easily degrade the image and can make it of less use to graphic designers who will apply there own adjustments. The exception is removing distracting elements as this makes the image of more use to designers. This image has the wall on the left copied to the right to cover the busy background.

This is the Nile skyline in Egypt. To create some extra sparkle you can use a high pass layer set to hard light blend mode. Sharpening also works well to make the lights stand out. It works best if you sharpen at the very end of the process, after you have resized. If you sharpen an images at full resolution the effect will be reduced once you resize to a low resolution needed for web output.

The High Resolution version of this image was accepted at Shutterstock in a surprisingly fast 7hrs.

Happy New Year. This was taken at the Ferry Meadows firework display in the UK. The glowing effect is made by first raterizing the text. This changes it from a vector to pixels. Once in pixel you have a lot more options in photoshop. By using Gaussian blur on a copy of the text layer below you can create the glow.