All Day I Dream About Photography

Andrzej Dragan is very famous for his portrait photography and specially for his portrait retouching.

Although his retouching technique is kept as secret as coca cola formula, many (if not all) of the photoshop gurus are trying their best to come as close as possible to his retouching style.

I’m by no means an Adobe Photoshop guru, on the contrary I’m a complete novice and still struggle with VERY basic manipulations like layer masking and many others.

One of my biggest problems was (and still is) black and white conversion, I’ve read about every Adobe Photoshop tutorial I could find on this subject I could find on the net and still none gave my little brain a satisfactory answer it was expecting. For THIS result do THAT for THIS result do THAT etc…
The only conclusion I was able to reach is that Channel Mixer is considered by many the best and most flexible method.

So if, like me, you are looking for straight answers and aren’t really able to do your own experiments her is a set of conversion settings that a fellow photographer “Karim” gave me just today.

A free growing collection of PSD images to download and use in your Adobe Photoshop or any other image editing software.

PSDSpy is a search engine/directory of indexed already extracted images. I mean by already extracted that the background of the images has already been deleted or erased so that the picture can be directly without furthe manipulation.

There is enough free PSD images2,398 at this moment there to keep busy and amuse most of us for a good while, definitely worth a look.

If you’d like to have pictures that looks like

you have one of two choices
you came come pay me a visit and take pictures of our beloved city Beirut or

you can check this photoshop tutorial that will teach you to turn

into

Most of us got Adobe Photoshop Elements free with our cameras, and then we rush and buy the full Adobe Photoshop CS2 because we feel that Adobe Photoshop elements lacks some features like layer masks.

Today and thanks to Elements Tools you will soon be able to have several features missing in Adobe Photoshop elements.

Via | DSLR Blog