This is Twelve Mile Beach. It is the campsite we stayed at when we first arrived in Hopetoun. Like many places in Western Australia there are no free campsites within a certain distance of the town. Twelve Mile is far enough out of town that you can stay there for free. I had to wait a couple of weeks to get a shot of a full moon to composite in. As it is a local shot I may get it framed for The Deck Gallery but I do not know how well photoshop trickery sells in print. What do you think?

This was taken at the groyne in Hopetoun yesterday. Fishing is a popular sport in Australia and there are usually around a dozen people fishing at sunset in Hopetoun each night. The time here has flown by and its hard to believe we are half way through our six weeks work here. We have both really enjoyed working at The Deck and will miss it when we go. I’ve been updating The Decks Website this year and have just put the new site online. I have a few more bits to add but most of it is there. Let me know what you think.

This shot of the Perth Skyline was taken at the end of our first day in Western Australia. The 30 hour journey to Australia via Singapore went fairly smoothly with the exception of Heathrow security who almost caused us to miss our first flight by holding us up when they discovered the metal in Karen’s leg and then swabbing my phone for explosives. It was raining when we arrived at 1am but it had all cleared by the following morning. At this point I would normally go into the all details of how this image was shot and processed however while we are travelling this Photoblog will be more of a Travel Journal like the Egypt Blog rather than A Photoshop tricks and tips study. If any regular readers wish to know how images were created please leave a comment and I will be more than happy to go into the details and the Photoshop layers used.

After removing all the logos and trademarks from the building this image was accepted for Stock Photography at Shutterstock and is available for high resolution download here.

This sunset was shot in Montego Bay, Jamaica. It was taken in 2004 with an early digital camera. In those days memory cards cost 240 times what they do today. In fact the two 256MB cards I used almost cost as much as the camera I used then. In order to save space I was forced to use significant jpeg compression. The more a jpeg is compressed the more speckling occurs. This can be seen best in the dark areas of the left image below. Unfortunately this type of distortion makes it almost impossible to submit images for stock photography. If you want to sell your images always save them at the highest quality. Fortunately as this blog only needs images 800 pixels wide by the time the resolution is reduced the speckling is effectively eliminated. This can be seen in the right image below. The moral of this story is only compress your jpegs if you plan to put them on the web and nowhere else.

This was taken near Luxor in Egypt. The image was processed using Photoshops Camera RAW developer. The effect was created using the inbuilt split toning feature in Camera RAW. You access the panel by clicking on the icon which looks like an = sign after you open your RAW file. It’s useful to know when adjusting the saturation slider it acts just like an opacity slider. You can blend it between original image colour and the hues you have set for the highlights and shadows. The balance slider is really a midpoint. It defines the crossover between highlight and shadow. In this case a warm hue was added to the highlights to give the effect of sunset. A subtle blue was added to the shadows. Finally a vignetting was added.

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.

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 the White Desert in Egypt. To process this image I have been experimenting with Photoshops inbuilt Camera RAW processor. Developing images from RAW files gives the best results. For this image I developed the RAW file three times, then once in Photoshop I blended them together to create a more dynamic image. Finally I applied a little vignette to darken the edges.

I heard the sunsets would change now we have a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland drifting over us. It was a clear night with no red in the evening sky. These are the silhouettes of two nesting osprey in Rutland.

This shot of the White Desert in Egypt has become my fifth Enhanced License sale.  The original image had a very narrow tonal range giving it a dull greyish look. It is situations like this where it helps to shot in RAW.

If your camera saves jpegs or any 8-bit format the tonal range will start to exhibit banding when you apply a Tone-Curve to fix the image. This banding results in the image breaking up and in extreme cases giving an old poster look.

By shooting in RAW you record more data. In my case 12-bit. This means you can stretch the tonal range over the full 8-bit range without losing the nice smooth gradients between tones.

Both images are available at Shutterstock. Original Image / RAW Curved Image