Benz World Blog » Wales

Snowdon Route

Jason Benz — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 08:32:51 +0000

This was taken on a family holiday to Wales in 2010. I used Camera RAW to process this image. I like to show what setting I use for each post unfortunately “Print Screen” does not record anything when the Camera RAW dialogue is open in Photoshop. I’ve managed to get round this by using “Problem Step Recorder” This is a bit of software which is included in Windows 7 and takes a screen grab each time the mouse is clicked. It saves them as heavily compressed jpegs but it is the only way I can show the settings I have used. I replaced the sky with part of this image because I wanted some more blue in it.

Welsh Pub

Jason Benz — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 07:19:54 +0000

This is another shot from a family holiday to Wales last summer. I can’t remember the name of the pub but if you recognise it please leave a comment. Photoshop gives you many ways to make black and white images. I used Convert to Grayscale in Camera RAW. This allows you to adjust the brightness of each colour as it is converted. In this case the yellow tones were made brighter to lighten the beach and give a greater variety of tones in the vegetation.

Five Pups

Jason Benz — Sat, 28 May 2011 05:26:37 +0000

These puppies were photographed on a family holiday to Wales in 2010. They are either Border Collie Sheep Dogs or Jack Russell Terriers. If you know please leave a comment. The main task for this image was to manually remove all the dirt. Like juveniles worldwide their ability to attract debris seems to defy the laws of physics. Fortunately Photoshop has a variety of tools for removing dirt. Some of them are legacy tools for people who have grown up on earlier versions of Photoshop. If you have the latest version of Photoshop CS5 you cannot beat the speed and accuracy of the Spot Healing Brush Tool set to Content-Aware. Although it is much improved the auto sampling does sometimes get it wrong. In these situations use the Clone Stamp Tool and define your own sampling area by holding down the alt key.

The full resolution version of this image was accepted at Shutterstock 8hrs after submitting.

Copper Mine

Jason Benz — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:51:42 +0000

This is a Copper Mine in Wales. To add light to the darker areas of the image I increased the gamma value. Gamma shifts all the mid-tones towards the highlights or the shadows. By changing the Gamma value from 1 to 1.5 it increases the image brightness. I’ve added a faint mask over the brightest areas to preserve the detail.

Portmeirion Square

Jason Benz — Sun, 23 May 2010 23:12:32 +0000

This is Portmeirion in Wales. Site of the 60′s TV series The Prisoner. To process this image I added Vibrance to boost the colour. Vibrance was introduced in Photoshop CS4. It was designed to add saturation without making skin tones look unnatural. In this image there is no skin but vibrance does give the affect of adding saturation without distorting the Mediterranean wall colours. I fixed the blown out sky using techniques from this video.

Llugwy River

Jason Benz — Mon, 10 May 2010 01:38:31 +0000

This waterfall was under the miners bridge near Betws y Coed in Wales. I balanced the Camera on a rock and used a long exposure to get the water to look like that. I developed the image using Camera RAW 6.0 in Photoshop CS5. Once in Photoshop I did a few little tweaks to the colours but most of the work had been done by Camera RAW.

Llyn Llydaw

Jason Benz — Sun, 02 May 2010 04:24:12 +0000

This is Llyn Lldaw on the way down from the Snowdon Peak in Wales. To process the image I used Vibrance instead of Saturation to bring the colour out of the bleak landscape. I then used various masks and adjustment layers add a bit more drama to each area of the image. High Resolution image is available here.