Panoramic View of Loch Muick

Seems like the power of Photoshop is enormous. I had just explored the Panoramic function of it. In this picture is the view of Loch Muick, a lake in Aberdeen, Scotland. After the conference, the whole team just took off to a nearby Lock (Lake in Scottish). At first we wish to go to Loch Ness. But Loch Ness is too far away from Aberdeen. It would take us at least one day to get there from Aberdeen.

Any how, we ended up in this Loch instead. It's very beautiful and quiet. I just took 3 pictures to cover the whole are of the Lock Muick. I used the File-->Automate-->Photo Merge function of the Photoshop. After the completion of rendering, I used the crop tool to cut off the excess edge. I also used the "Camera Raw" functions to adjust the exposure as well as the brightness, contrast, hue and saturation, etc.

A little Photoshop work

After having bought a few books on photography, one of the things I see nowadays is they all use Photoshop to enhance their photo, no matter what they are-- amateur or expert. So I'd just started up my Photoshop that I haven't used for a long time. Follow a few chapters on the book to start creating my very first Photoshop effect.

It's easier than I thought. Somehow those book didn't explained why they use those tools or techniques. It just one of those follow me don't ask kind of book. Perhaps, I should start taking a course seriously.

So I successfully created the B&W photo with color highlighting. See for yourself. I just used the magic wand tool to select the red "Chaba" flowers and use the select-->Invert to do the masking of the entire page, rather than the flowers. Then I created a B&W layer from the coloring layer tool (at the bottom of the layer pallet). I also created another layer for the Hue/Saturation to enrich the redness.

Another piece is the creation of High Dynamic Range from a single shot photo. Normally HDR is created by the Bracket function that you shoot 3 shots with 3 different setting of the same scene. The Bracketing allows you to shoot the under-expose, the normal, and the over expose. Once all three shots are combined, you

will have a photo that have details from foreground to background. The three shots can be combined easily using the special function called "HDR". However, we can create HDR fro

m a single shot by using three layers duplication. We make one layer of photo as B&W. We use the copy of the photo to another layer with Hue/Saturation and enhance the color. We then overlay all three layers together. You will have the HDR picture out of a single photo shot. Image on the left of this Swiss Lake is taking using normal exposure. The one on the right is the HDR created from that original picture. As you can see, more details appear on the second picture from foreground to back.

It's easy and fun. After my Norway trip next week, I might have a few more of my photo and some photoshop enhanced effect.

Back to Blog

Having been away for a big while. Lots of things happened in life. After a few month with around the globe travel, it is fun to be back. During the past few months, I spent the summer in Switzerland. I got to travel to Houston, TX, USA. Spent lots of fortune on shopping. Then back to Malaysia for an upset training course which was cancelled without prior notice. Back to England to watch Manchester United games with Arsenal at Old Trafford to celebrated their Premier League Champion. Up north to Aberdeen, Scotland to visit Stone Haven and a little Scottish Loch and Fjord.

Next month I'm going to Norway for a short 3 nights trip. It will be fun.