The following in a guest post by Villian, from Villian Conception. You can also follow Villian on Twitter and Facebook – thanks for your guest article, Villian!

Visualizing in Photoshop is a skill that very few learn, it is something that pros do daily.  You must see before you can reveal to your audience.  Visualization in Photoshop is the process of planning your shot with overlay drawings and grids to get the most out of your project.  It is a pivotal step in making your project pop and in giving it a real jolt from your imagination into reality.

I wanted to introduce visualization to those who are not familiar with it’s process so, I will take you step by step so that you can understand what the purpose is and how to use it.  There are many ways to visualize in Photoshop but I will show you my method it is neither wrong or right it is just one way.  I will hope to find your own way as your journey into the visualization process.

Plan Your Shot

Before anything goes onto paper you must plan your idea even in it’s vague form a general idea is extremely important because this will reveal how you will actually shoot the piece.  For this shot I knew far in advance that I wanted him to be a warrior – somewhat like the Aztec warriors aggressive but really valiant in their traits.

The Outline

When starting to visualize it always starts in your head, the first step is getting it down on paper.  I generally jot down things that hit my mind like so.  Using action words and presence words that really give me a good image are the best way to go.

1. warrior
2. rough
3. tribal
4. conquering
5. defiant
6. honour

Writing down the outline is usually the most important part of visualization.   Ironically it’s words that will help you see your image more clearly.  I commonly go back and look at them to see if my picture symbolizes the words that I originally wrote down.  I have never been disappointed in my work that matches it’s original intent, without the outline my thoughts sometimes slip away from it’s true purpose.

The Skeleton

After writing down my outline for the picture, I do what I call a skeleton.  The skeleton is the basic building blocks of the actual visual things I plan on being in the picture.   In the Skeleton I plan out things such as light source, atmosphere, colours, particles, and digital makeup.  The skeleton literally is my road map to my final destination.  The purpose of the skeleton is not to confine but to refine your detail in a thought out way.   I find myself going outside of it from time to time, but usually not much.  Look below at the skeleton.

How to make a Skeleton in Photoshop-
-Make a new layer on top of your photo
-Always save a second copy of your psd.
-On the new layer use your favourite paint brush or pencil
-You can write with a tablet or use type words like me
-Using colours to represent your skeleton features is a good idea
-Repeat and Rinse add layers as necessary.

After you have your road map developed you can begin to actually build layers onto your photo and actually put in the puzzle pieces that will make your image complete.  Just remember to always visualize, it will make you more observant of the possibilities.  Keep in mind you may find your own method of visualization – there are plenty and don’t let anyone tell you, you can’t, you can and you will.  Good Day.

Villian

Thanks again to Villian, from Villian Conception, for this article. You can also follow Villian on Twitter and Facebook.

By the way, I did this post because someone actually contacted me and asked for it (thanks, Joseph!), so feel free to do the same if you have a topic you’d like me to cover on here (or ask on our Facebook page, if you’d prefer).

So, here’s a before and after image so you can see how making the eyes pop enhances the image. This is actually a photo of a friend of mine, from his 30th birthday party this year:

Before and After

So, to do this, simply open up your photo in Photoshop, and select the ‘Dodge’ tool. This is on the left handside, and looks just like a black version of the ‘zoom’ tool.

What ‘dodging’ does is to lighten the areas of the photo that you choose to apply it to. As we want to make our subject’s eyes pop, we can use this tool to brighten them up… simple!

So, you have the Dodge tool selected, but before you start applying it, look at the top left of your Photoshop screen to where it says ‘Exposure’, and move this exposure slider down so that it’s at around 10%. What this does is lessen the effect of each application of the dodge tool – if you had the exposure at 100% it would have a MASSIVE effect, which could look really overdone, so by having it at around 10% you can subtley keep adding to the effect until you get your desired ‘pop’ factor.

So, dodge is selected, expousre at around 10%; you’re good to go. Zoom in on your subject’s eyes, and start ‘painting’ (although you’re not actually painting, you’re simply brightening the eyes). Here’s a screenshot of my workflow window so you can see what I’m talking about.

This is the shot before I’ve started to dodge the eyes, just so you can see what settings I’ve selected.

You can keep ‘painting’ the eyes until you’ve ‘popped’ them enough (careful of overdoing it!), and then you’re done – ‘popped’ eyes in under 10 seconds. As I mentioned earlier, there are lots of different techniques on how to do this, but this is what I find to be the quickest and simplest.

Here’s a larger before and after comparison:

Before

After

Enjoy making the eyes of your subjects stand out!

The Photographer’s Ephemeris is a totally free desktop application (PC & MAC) that can help you plan an outdoor photoshoot to perfection. Well, I say perfection, but that may be a little bit of an exaggeration, as lots of things can happen on a shoot that are outside of this little programme’s control! But, that little point aside, The Photographer’s Ephemeris really can help you out because it will show you the angle of light for anywhere in the world, at any given time.

Say, for instance, that you intend on taking a few shots of sunrise at your local beach. What would be the best time to take the shot? From which angle will the sun be rising from? This free piece of software will show you in a few second – simply enter the address of your photoshoot location, and you’ll instantly see sunrise/sunset times, as well as angles of light for that specific location. Just see the example screenshot at the top of this post as an example.

This handy video shows you how to use the software in more depth:

You can download The Photographer’s Ephemeris for free here (download link is at the top-right), or you can get a mobile version on your iPhone/iPad on iTunes (though you have to pay for the mobile version).

Well, with Adobe Lightroom, you can fix this little problem in a few seconds. Yep, it’s that quick, that simple, and that effective. And I’ll show you how to do it in this little Lightroom tutorial. Check out this before and after:

The window light behind my friend meant that her face came out all dark; not good. But by using Lightroom’s fantastic ‘Fill Light’ slider, which took all of a second, her face is now all light again – great! I also call this a ‘virtual flash’ technique, because it really is like you took the photo with flash. So, without further ado, here’s how to do it:

First off, I’ll show you a larger version of the ‘before’ photo:

Before using the 'Fill Light' slider

Too dark; not good. So, just open the photo in Lightroom, and choose the ‘Develop’ module (top-right).

Now, see those bunch of sliders across the right of the screen? We want to just use the one that says ‘Fill Light’. Drag that slider to the right, and, voila, your photo will start to look brighter. What’s so great about ‘Fill Light’ rather than, say, the ‘Exposure’ or ‘Brightness’ sliders, is that ‘Fill Light’ works mostly on the slightly darker midtones of your image – it doesn’t affect the brighter parts of your image much at all. If you just upped the ‘Exposure’ or ‘Brightness’ sliders, then ALL of your photo would get brighter, which means you’d run the risk of starting to ‘white-out’ the brighter parts of your image (or ‘blow the highlights’).

As we just want to brighten the part of the image that is – in this case – my friend’s face, we simple move the ‘Fill Light’ slider to the right, until we get our desired result. In this case I moved it across to 51. See the screenshot below:

A Fill Light setting of 51 was good in this example

This literally took a few seconds. Here’s the result:

After using 'Fill Light'. No more shadows, yay!

And a composite ‘Before’ and ‘After’ screenshot below (I love how Lightroom does these before and afters):

Using ‘Fill Light’ too much can introduce a bit of digital noise into your image, but this can be very effectively counteracted by using Lightroom’s fantastic ‘Noise Reduction’ sliders, which I’ll go into at a later date. If your image is just for small 6″ x 4″ prints, or web-use, then you really won’t notice noise too much anyway.

Adobe Lightroom is my photo editing software of choice by a long way – I hardly use Photoshop anymore, it’s that good. It’s available from Amazon US or UK if you fancy getting a copy.

They really are great little videos, especially for the beginner DSLR user – or even for people who’ve had their camera for a while now, but are yet to delve further than the automatic modes. You can check out Ethan’s Youtube channel at this link, or view 8 of his videos below:

This is where the idea of ‘fill flash’ comes in: just popping a small amount of flash on the subject so they are not lost in shadows. Here’s a really good video to show you just how to use fill-flash easily and effectively:

Enjoy! (Oh, and yes, the first one is kinda cheesy, but it still has some good little tidbits of advice…)

Before a crop

The above shot is a photo I took recently at a friend’s 30th party. It looks decidedly average, no strong subject at all, and one that you may just delete. However, by just doing a simple crop, I came away with a really nice portrait of my friend – see below:

After crop

You can see that this is quite a hefty crop, but see all the detail still there? A photo I might have got rid of is now a definite keeper.

Another example of when cropping saves the day:

Before a crop

Pretty boring, huh? The subject is centre-frame, which is not ideal, and it’s pretty small within the whole photo (I took it this way because it’s a lot easier to track focus of a moving subject when it is in the middle of the frame, but that’s beside the point). But, with a simple crop…

After crop

…we get a much better shot! Again, this is a really large crop of the original photo, but there is still plenty of detail here – one of the advantages of having DSLRs is that they have a lot of megapixels; they record so much detail that we can afford to crop our images and still retain great image quality.

By the way, the shots above were taken with my Canon 7D, which has an 18 Megapixel sensor. But you’d be able to get just as good results in your crops with any camera that had, say, around 10 or more megapixels, which all modern DSLRs do.

So, next time you’re reviewing your shots and you’re thinking of sending a few to the Recyle Bin Graveyard, why not try a simple crop instead?

In this video, Joe shows us just exactly how he holds and supports his camera so that he can take sharp photos, even in situations where he needs a really slow shutter speed. Try it out at home, this really works!