Photoshop Tutorial: How To Do It

Today we're going to talk about advanced Photoshop techniques with Photoshop, but also I have discovered the most incredible thing. It's a Youtube playlist called "Important Videos", by a man called eljolto. Rarely has a playlist been so aptly named.

There are currently 312 videos, mostly quite short. They span the gamut of human experience. A man performs a snooker trick shot with a dog; men, women, and children fall over; a man shoots a child's toy in the head with a revolver and it falls over; a baby sees chickens for the first time and falls over. A man tries to climb his kitchen, but he falls. A helicopter takes off from a dog's head and although we don't see it fall, it does fall. Gravity, time, sex, and pain. There is no more, because there is no more.

A woman pours too much vodka. The human animal is indescribable and limitless. Ducks can walk, fly, and swim; human beings can only do two of those things, yet we are the masters. You have seen some of the videos before, but you were different then.

It's important to give your layers descriptive names

My favourite video has a Turkish man yelling the word "meow" at an egg:

Why does he shout at an egg? Is he trying to wake it up? Why "meow"? That video has amassed over one and a half million YouTube views; many thousands more than you or I.

Eggs have enormous metaphorical resonance, and something about the video's unintentional symbolism appeals to me. Human beings are of course not born of eggs. We are mammals. The writers of television's Mork and Mindy chose to demonstrate Mork's non-human nature by having him arrive on Earth in an egg-like spaceship; in later seasons we learn that his race are born from eggs, and that they grow young.

All of comedy stems from violent subversion. Why is the Turkish man shouting "meow" at an egg? The collision of disconnected ideas defies rationality. It shocks and amuses us. Laughter is the physical manifestation of an unexpected mental sneeze. The video reminded me of Can's "Father Cannot Yell", which is the opening song from their first album, Monster Movie. The lyrics present a horrific portrait of sexual dysfunction in a primordial landscape of anarchic dissipation.

After setting up seventy adjustment layers, you need to use the curves dialogue. It's important to use adjustment layers so that you can tweak the end result without altering the original.

"All has been forgotten and the plastic turns to rotten rays and smells", sings Malcolm Mooney. The words are not supposed to make literal sense. Instead they are an impressionistic depiction of chaos. "Mother screaming I AM MOTHER woman screaming I AM FERTILE and the father, he hasn't been born yet", but if the man cannot make love with the woman, how is he a father? Does the fertile woman know what she is letting herself in for? "Woman who just lies there waiting, and the father hasn't been born yet".

For a man, there is something disturbing about fatherhood and fathers. There's nothing funny about fathers. It's impossible not to think of a father without thinking of his cock, but not in a funny way; a father's defining characteristic is that he has had sex - unfunny, serious sex. Grown-up sex. A bearded, sweater-wearing father has had sex several times with the same woman, not for fun but to have children. When he goes outside to join the hunt he does so for sustenance, not for fun. Fathers have conversations about farming equipment and/or tides, not Adventure Time.

In this example I have used the measurement log. I have not yet found the pattern.

Fathers have to give up drinking and having fun with their friends; they don't have time. They have to learn about mortgages and tax relief. They put on weight and change nappies. In centuries gone by it was customary for the man to spread his seed and then ignore the children; in certain cultures today it is normal for men to leave a trail of single mothers and fatherless children behind. Male bears famously have a dim view of their children, and the rest of the animal kingdom is just as brutal. It is surprisingly difficult to burn a book, or rather burn a book so that there's nothing left. Books go crispy around the edges but the interior is insulated, and even when they have been in a fire for a long time the middle of the pages remains intact.

Therefore, when I write my novel, it will have all the little itty-bitty words around the edges of the page, with the meaty important words in the middle, like so:

Armoured words

Edit: A month after writing the above the BBC discovered "important videos" as well. Never let it be said that I am behind the curve. In the words of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, it's a mixed-up world, and I, Uncle Ashley - your real uncle, not that impostor - will guide you.

Mobile Phone Photography: A Couple of Tricks

Genoa, shot with a Moto G

You may find yourself in a museum, and you may find yourself in a public space, and you may find yourself in a restricted area where you cannot take a proper camera, and you may ask yourself "what is a proper camera anyway?", and you may ask yourself "how can I make do with what I have?", like everybody else in this sweet cesspool, because making your way in this world today takes everything you've got.

I've said it before, but the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith and Robert Capa would have killed to have a smartphone. Back in the Time of Giants they travelled the world with cute rangefinder cameras not because the cameras were cool, but because they made sense at the time. Contax and Leica rangefinders were a lot smaller than Speed Graphic press cameras, and they could take several shots in rapid succession. The giants of the past would have killed for a portable camera that could upload images to a press agency instantly; that could shoot video and record sound. They would not have grumbled about smartphones, they would have snapped them up, packed their bags, and gone out to take pictures of people dying in dramatic ways.

But mobile phone cameras have a couple of limitations. I'm not fussed about resolution; fixed focal length is something you have to deal with on the spot; having to use an LCD screen is a mixed bag. My biggest bugbear is dynamic range. Mobile phone cameras have narrow dynamic range. You can either shoot for the shadows and blow out the sky, or shoot for the sky and have an extremely noisy landscape. Narrow dynamic range is the difference between the following two images (straight from the camera at the top, with numerous tweaks at the bottom):

That was shot with a Fuji S5, a digital SLR with an unusually dynamic sensor. Mobile phones generally expose for the subject, so the sky tends to blow out, and there's little you can do to bring it back. But I have a few really simple tricks.

Trick One
Over the last few years I've shot a lot of film. Slide film has the same smooth colours and limited dynamic range as digital, but even when it blows out detail it still tends to retain a hint of colour. Consider the following, which is overexposed Provia 100, cross-processed:

Here's a crop of the top-left:

Even though the sky is basically blown-out, there are still some faint traces of colour. In this crop I've darkened the image so that you can see the grain. Or consider this, with the original scan at the top and the Photoshop remaster at the bottom, which looks ludicrously yellow in comparison, but natural in isolation (the sun was setting):

The detail in the church's frontage has been obliterated, but there was still some colour left, and with a bit of work the second example is the end result. It's terrifically simple to recreate this with Photoshop or any graphics package that has layers, masks, and graduated fills. The technique is simple. I feel ashamed. Those are two separate thoughts.

Consider the following, in which the sky has blown out:

Simply turning down the brightness doesn't make the sky better, in fact it makes it worse. The sky is clipped in the same way that Iggy Pop's remaster of Raw Power is clipped, e.g. the top end isn't just fuzzy, it has been shaved off. It has gone, so we must replace it.

Pop open the image in Photoshop. Layer - New Layer, and then just fill the layer with orange, and add a Reveal All mask:

This has the effect of adding an orange wash over everything. Now use the graduated fill tool on the Reveal All mask thusly, and finally turn down the Opacity to about 23% or so:

The end result doesn't restore the sky, instead it replaces it with an orange wash which is a lot more attractive. This kind of effect is incredibly simple, but it works. I suppose it's reminiscent of the old Hollywood trick of preflashing, but instead of lifting the shadows it tames the highlights. Here's a shot from the film Skyfall, in which Moneypenny shoots James Bond and then Adele starts singing:

At the top is how it appears in the film, and at the bottom is how I imagine it probably looked in real life. The film was shot digitally, and perhaps because of that the sky has blown out, so in post-production instead of matting in some clouds they instead chose to tint the frame brown. Once you notice this you start to see it on television shows a lot. Old-fashioned analogue video had the same problem.

In days of yore the cinematographer might have used a graduated neutral density filter, as in this shot from Barry Lyndon, which looks a bit naff as a still but works perfectly well in the film (both times it appears, it is very quick):

But graduated filters only work when the camera is static, and what if the sky had been overcast? A graduated filter would have just made it darker, without bringing out any more detail. In any case, which is most important: a neat-looking sky, or Moneypenny shooting James Bond?

Trick Two
The answer is of course "Moneypenny shooting James Bond". Check this out:

Again the sun confounds me. Here's a closer look:

On the horizon the chimneys of Mestre, the industrial heart of Venice. Far in the distance, about thirty miles away, the Euganean Hills on the other side of Padua. It's a beautiful world, isn't it? We see it once and then never again.

How to tame the sun? As before, it's easy. Layer - Layer via copy. Apply a massive amount of Gaussian blur, so that the image is completely blurred out. Then add a Layer Mask, but this time use a Hide All layer, and then use a circular graduated fill around the sun. In the following image I've been really sloppy with the mask, which looks unnatural in a bad way, as if the sun was floating on top of the picture:

In the following image I've toned down the Opacity and worked a bit on the mask, and tweaked the brightness and contrast so that it looked more like the image in my mind:

There's a spot of green lens flare that I've left in. All of these images were shot with a Motorola Moto G (Mark II), a solid Android smartphone with a decent camera that has a good-but-erratic HDR mode. The HDR mode won't help with blown-out highlights, though - it seems to lift the shadows instead.

The above trick works in the following case:

The phone captured all the details but the scene is too bright, as if it was shot earlier in the day. On the right, darkening the sky makes it look terrible. If we add a new layer and blur it, the posterised highlights are gone, but of course the image is blurry:

Saint Giorgio Maggiore looks like an angry gargoyle with two sharp teeth. Do you remember They Live, where Rowdy Roddy Piper puts on a pair of sunglasses and sees the world as it really is? If we could see the universe as it really is it would rock our faith, because even atheists have faith that the human animal possesses something special that separates it from other animals; that our brains are not just pattern-matching devices created by a process of trial and error, but instead vehicles for a soul. Thankfully our tiny minds cannot grasp the infinite.

If we use a graduated mask on the sky, we get this, which admittedly wouldn't work if there were clouds:

In this example the result is a little over-the-top, and the islands are a little blurred as well. And of course there's an artificiality to it, because there's a clean break between the sky and the water. If this was a shot of New York city, with skyscrapers jutting into the air, you would need to do a lot more work on the mask. Eventually your face would grow to fill the mask, and then you are the demons.

Mobile phone photography is a conundrum. As mentioned up the page it's fantastic; if you're the kind of person that moans about smartphones and instagram etc, I don't want to know you. A hundred years ago you would have moaned about this new fangled 35mm nonsense, and a few decades before you would have moaned about photography itself - it's not creative, after all, a photographer is no better than a surveyor. History will flow over you like a river, it will gouge you. The water itself is just a tool of gravity. Gravity uses water to slice through rock; it seduces water and holds it fast in giant pools. But gravity is not a thing, it is instead a result of mass warping spacetime. Mass is the villain here, not gravity.

But, yes, there's a technological conundrum. In terms of dynamic range and light sensitivity mobile phones will always lag behind dedicated cameras, because the sensors are of necessity smaller; and any advances that improve mobile phone sensors would also improve camera sensors as well, so the gulf would be just as wide. There's no way to enlarge a mobile phone sensor without enlarging the optics, short of a revolution in optical design, and with huge optics a mobile phone is no longer a mobile phone, it is a talking camera. There seems to be no way to square the circle, but what if we take a lateral step sideways?

I've said it before, but I believe that in future people won't take photographs. They will instead trawl the internet for other photographs, or they will trawl Google Maps, and they will mash them up, repost them, edit them. The big star imagemakers of the future will be akin to the DJs of today, they will curate and collate, remix and repost. CGI has already conquered the Ikea catalogue, and has made inroads in the fields of pornography and landscape art; I predict that by the year 2020 H G Wells' vision of the Eloi - a future elite who sit in front of Pornhub all day - will have come true. I plan to be at the forefront of this new race. Photography will pass, just as all mediums pass.