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Almost any portrait subject over the age of 25 can use some under-eye cleanup, but many photographers struggle to make this common retouch look natural. I know I struggled with it, until I found this handy shortcut.
Most of us start out using the Clone Stamp tool as our all-purpose retouching sledgehammer. It’s great for removing blemishes, so we just keep going and going and try to fix everything with it. But using the Clone Stamp tool to retouch bags or dark circles under eyes can require patience and artistic skill that many of us lack.
Not to worry. There’s an easy “instant fix” solution.
1. Open the photo that you need to retouch in Photoshop.
2. Select the Patch Tool, which lives on the same Toolbar square as the Healing Brush. You can right-click on that square to select the Patch Tool from the fly-out menu.
3. Using the patch tool, draw a closed loop around the area under the eye that you want to retouch. Be careful not to chop off the eyelashes.
4. Now that the loop is selected and surrounded by a dashed line, click inside it, and with the mouse button held down, drag that loop down onto the cheek of your subject. Drag it to an area of smooth, clean skin with good texture. This will be your sample area.
5. After dragging to a clean sample area, release the mouse button. Bang! Instantly the texture of the sampled area will be remapped onto the target area under the eye, smoothing out any bags and correcting the color of dark circles!
Somehow the wizards at Photoshop have programmed this thing to blend the texture of the sample area and the color of the target area in a way that looks totally natural (most of the time). Occasionally, you’ll find a face where it doesn’t work so well, but 90% of the time, this fix is all I need.
6. Deselect it by pressing Command-D (PC: Control-D) and check the results.
7. If there is a visible edge along the border of the patch, you can zoom in and do a little cleanup. Now is the time for the Clone Stamp tool. Adjust the opacity to about 30%, take a sample (Alt:Click) from clean skin near the edge of the patch, and than lightly clone along the borderline to smooth away any visible edge.
With practice, you’ll get skilled at drawing and sampling with the Patch tool so that edge touch-up is rarely necessary.
Then you’ll enjoy this as a fast, easy, one-step solution to most of your under-eye portrait problems!
About the Author : Phil Steele is the founder ofSteeleTraining.comwhere you’ll findfree photo tutorialsand training on a variety of topics ranging from basic photography tips to advanced off-camera flash techniques.
The photo used in this tutorial came from his popular course, “How to Shoot Professional-Looking Headshots and Portraits on a Budget with Small Flashes.”
This lens is insane. It’s the world’s first circular fisheye lens for APS-C sized sensors, and the first fisheye lens that I own. Looking through the viewfinder for the first time was a strange sensation. The view was both very restricted due to the circularness of the lens, and very wide at the same time due to its 180 degree view all around. For those not intimate with fisheye lingo, “circular” means that it projects a circle. Outside of the circle everything’s black, inside the circle you have a 180 degree view from left to right, and top to bottom. So far the best us APS-C shooters could get was a “diagonal” fisheye, which means that you only get a 180 degree view from top left to bottom right. Horizontal and vertical would be less than 180 degrees.
From the first moment I saw the lens I knew that I just had to have it…. the only downside is the price tag. At ?650, it’s not the cheapest of lenses, but it’s not that insane compared to other fisheyes. Sigma isn’t known for their good quality control. The shop I bought the lens at had three of them in their magazine, and the first two had uneven coating on the front element. The store personnel told me that it wouldn’t show on photos, but nevertheless they let me inspect all three lenses, and one of them had perfectly even coating. For that price, I wanted to make sure I got the best one.
I used the lens on my Canon EOS 7D, so besides having a high resolution of 18 megapixels I could also give it a go with video. And boy is it fun! I don’t have a professional setup where I can measure things like distortion or colour metrics. Instead I’ll tell you about practical results I got with this lens, and how they look with my two eyes. The photos you see here are also processed a little bit. Unprocessed photos from a digital camera always look a bit flat and soft, so I don’t think that presenting you with such photos would be a true demonstration of the capabilities of this lens.
The lens
The lens feels very sturdy. The build is solid, and with a metal mount it attaches firmly to the camera. At the rear there is a gelatine filter holder, and you even get a small metal plate you can use to cut the filters to size. I feel that this filter holder is of limited use, unless you want to insert ND filters. As the holder doesn’t rotate you can’t really use polarizers or graduate ND filters.
Going further towards the front of the lens, we meet the distance scale. It has three marks: 13.5cm, 20cm and infinity. Remember these distances are measured from the sensor; it can focus really, really close. The hypersonic motor (HSM/USM/whatever you want to call it) does its work quickly and silently. The focus ring is all the way at the front, and rotates smoothly. I would have liked it to be a bit further backward, though. My hands are quite big, and it’s just too easy to get some digits into the frame. Every bit of finger that sticks out from the focus ring will get photographed, so be careful with it.
The front element bulges out of the lens, to be able to capture the 180 degree view. The lens cap comes with a metal ring so that it can fit around it. So, remember to remove the ring as well as the lens cap, or you won’t get the full view.
The maximum aperture is f/2.8, which is a tad slow for a prime but quite good for a lens this wide. Combined with the short minimum focus distance you can even use it to blur the background. A little. The wide aperture is more useful for low-light shots; it also means that the viewfinder is bright, and that your autofocus has more light to work with.
The photos
The center sharpness of this lens is amazing. Even at very close range – which is where you want to be with a lens like this – it is very sharp. Towards the edges it has some serious chromatic aberration and purple fringing in high-contrast areas. As it’s my first and only fisheye lens I can’t tell you whether this is more or less than others. I just know that it’s very difficult to bend light and keep all the colours where they should be, and at the edges that light is bent a lot. The photo below has been corrected, the photo of the Volkswagen van up top hasn’t been.
The lens flare looks really nice, as it doesn’t stick to the circular projection – it breaks the frame, so to speak. Of course if you don’t like it you can always mask it during post processing. The flare shows that the aperture has six blades. I would have liked one more – I like odd flare streaks more than even ones. The aperture makes more noise that I would have expected; more than any other lens that I own. Now this isn’t a lens you can use stealthily anyway, as you’ll have to get right on top of the action or it’ll get really, really small, so a bit more aperture noise isn’t a practical issue.
The Panoramas
The wide view makes this lens very suitable for panorama shots. With only two photos you’ll be able to capture the entire view around you. However, you won’t be able to stitch them together very well; at the edges the quality goes down, and there wouldn’t be much of an overlap anyway. So rather than using the minimum, I used six shots: north, east, south and west, and straight up and straight down. And since I was shooting a library with mostly black architecture and large windows with a bright sun outside, I tripled every shot at -2 EV, 0 EV and +2 EV to merge them later as HDR photos. The 7D with its 7 photos per second just whirred through those three shots per direction.
Before I started stitching the photos I loaded the RAW files into�Bibble Pro 5.1 and removed most of the chromatic aberration (C/A). With a few clicks the C/A was as good as gone, and since I had a nice overlap between different shots the remaining C/A woudn’t pose any problems. The 18 RAW files were exported to 16-bit TIFFs (100 MB a pop) and then loaded into�Hugin.
In�Hugin I manually placed control points, about 5-7 per overlap, optimized the photo and let it do the stitching and HDR processing. Hugin is very good at producing realistic HDRs. Many HDR programs first create a photo with a huge dynamic range and then try to compress this range using tone mapping. This can easily produce those super-saturated, artificial looking photos. Hugin blends between “real” pixels, ignoring ones that are under or over-exposed, blurry, etc. and keeping the good looking ones. This process gives a much more natural result.
After exporting the photo in “equirectangular” projection, I loaded into the Flash application by�pan0.net so that you can look around in it. The zenith (look straight up) isn’t perfect yet, but I’m sure I can fix that if I spend enough time on it. Also know that I took those photos without any tripod or panorama head.
The videos
The lens is nearly perfect for video. The video below shows a view from my Renault Twingo. The music is by my band (I’m the drummer) The Soundabout, and the drive is from our practice studios to my home. Click on the cross-like thingy at the bottom of the video to view full screen.
So yes, it’s good but just not quite perfect for video. It’s more an issue with my 7D than the lens, to be honest. At those lovely modern and crispy 16:9 HD resolutions the camera crops a few pixels off the bottom of the circle – I would be much happier if we would have gotten a true 3:2 high-resolution video format, so that the entire frame could be captured. So Canon, if you’re reading this, pretty please with sugar on top, add a 1920×1280 or 1620×1080 video format!
As I said, I drum in a band. My girlfriend sometimes records our performances on video, and will of course start using the Sigma fisheye lens for this. Keep an eye on our website!
The verdict
This Sigma 4.5mm Fisheye is a unique lens. The results are very pleasing, and most importantly: it’s great fun. It’s really different from anything else in my photo bag. The price is a bit steep, but given the quality and the fact that they won’t sell that many of them, I think it’s justified. If you want to easily shoot 360 panoramas, record edgy videos or otherwise use an incredibly wide field of view, this lens is for you.
A new photo backpack called the Kata Pro Light Beetle-282 was recently launched in the United Kingdom. It’s designed to hold at least three DSLR bodies with 4-6 lenses, other camera attachments and even a 17 inch laptop or HD video camera. The Kata Pro-Light Beetle 282 is also made in accordance with current regulations concerning carry-on baggage. However, the company recommends that you check with your airline to make the backpack is still accepted since flight regulations are subject to ongoing change.
Furthermore, the Kata Pro-Light Beetle 282 features an adjustable hip belt and strap to provide personal comfort for the user while managing the weight of the gear it’s carrying. There is a camera attachment to manage your camera’s weight on a harness instead of around your neck as well. You can even attach a tripod on the side or front of the Kata Pro-Light Beetle 282. This photo backpack works with Kata?s Insertrolly, making it easy to convert into a rolling bag. The Kata Pro-Light Beetle 282 is recommended for retail at �269.95 and that includes tax as well.
Stealth Gear, the acclaimed provider of outdoor photography clothing and accessories is eagerly anticipating the launch of their Extreme Photographers Smock, which has already gathered rave reviews from experts. The smock is perfect for wildlife photographers and those interested in bird watching.
The new Extreme Photographers Smock features a variety of pockets. It sports a large pocket at the front, one expandable padded lens pocket, a removable wired peak hood, padding on shoulder and elbows with anti-slip camera strap grips on both side and insect repellent mesh face net. When it comes to outdoor photography clothing, Extreme Photographers Smock will surely offer you more choice.
Currently available in green, the smock is priced at just �199 including VAT. It will be available in charcoal from August 2010.
Please visit the Stealth Gear website, for more information on Extreme Photographers Smock.
It was the first bright afternoon after a rainy, flash-flood kind of week when I stepped into Carol and Fred's light-filled home. Entering their living room was the equivalent of having the clouds part and finally seeing a patch of blue sky. Ahhh.
Hot on the heels of last week’s update for the TZ10, Panasonic has announced firmware updates for the Lumix FT2, TZ8, TZ9 and ZX3 (also called the TS2, ZS5, ZS6 and ZR3 respectively) digital compact cameras.
About the Author : Phil Steele is the founder of SteeleTraining.com where you’ll find free photo tutorials and training on a variety of topics ranging from basic photography tips to advanced off-camera flash techniques.
Stealth Gear, the acclaimed provider of outdoor photography clothing and accessories is eagerly anticipating the launch of their Extreme Photographers Smock, which has already gathered rave reviews from experts. The smock is perfect for wildlife photographers and those interested in bird watching.
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