TUTORIAL
The aim of the Photoskop is to provide a framework that enables you to share your creative ideas with the learning community. Ideally, your input should be as personal as possible. It should be your contribution.
We can help, however, to put everything together, do the post-processing, write texts and make an infinite amount of boring adjustments. We are here to speed-up the process and build an effective collaboration.
Here you may find a few recommendations on how to bring your lessons ideas to live at Photoskop.
This is the rough sketch of the workflow to implement your ideas:
- Choose the idea. Use your creativity and passion for photography (this must be something!)
- Let's discuss your idea together: brainstorm, make adjustments and planning for the shooting
- Do the shooting to get the raw photo material
- Share the raw content and your view on the final result with us or we do it through a cloud service together
- We discuss the results and, (if) successful, we proceed with the next step, that is production. We discuss the post-processing, the learning scenario, texts, etc
- We distribute responsibilities for production steps and get to work on the parts
- We put everything together. Polish and tune. Then polish and tune again
- We share your contribution to the world of better photography
- Your contributions make an impact
We have several purely technical things to ask you to take into account. Yes, you know it, we know it, but we have to say it again just to be explicit and remind everyone. Those are:
- Use a tripod. The more stable your camera is - the better. We are confident that on the final image nothing should distract user's attention from the main subject of a lesson. If it is the DOF, then only the DOF should change
- We shoot in RAW format only
- If possible, try to change the camera parameters remotely, using camera control software. Examples: EOS Utility, Mobile devices, Camera Control Pro 2, etc
- To avoid camera shake - lock the mirror. Or go mirrorless! Although, don't just pull out the mirror from you DSLR
- Use manual focusing. Keep it fixed, if it is not required otherwise
- And we so often did this one last mistake: Don't forget to turn off the image stabilization on your lens, since we are using tripod anyway
During making the content:
- While you are making the shooting, please log everything. It can be comments on lightning conditions, particular ideas for the shooting, positions of the objects and so on. This information will be extremely helpful during the production stage
- After you check the acquired frames, filter out all irrelevant images
- If you keep some images as alternatives, e.g. two different poses of a model or anything else, then please mark it, so that we know. You may use labels/keywords in Adobe Bridge (or similar software) or put labels into the file name directly (something like IMG1432-pose1.RAW and IMG1435-pose2.RAW)
- If the images are acquired using different camera parameters and it is evident what they intended to mean from the EXIF information (e.g. you are shooting dynamical scene using different shutter speeds and it is clear that the longer shutter is related to the motion blur and that is exactly what you are trying to show in the lesson), then you may leave the image files as they are. Otherwise, try to \textbf{group images} belonging to different parameters by using labels/keywords, folders or keywords in the file names
- Use manual focusing. Keep it fixed, if it is not required otherwise
- Make examples of post-processing for several important situations (e.g. for different scenes or lightning setups). This will be a good basis for the discussion of post-processing later on
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us!