I’d like to think of myself as somebody who knows their way around the Internet, especially after doing five years of computer courses. I’d almost go as far as to call myself computer savvy! Yet, last night when trying to create another vanity URL for my Pet Photography website, I found it quite hard to figure out an easy way to create my Facebook Vanity URL for my Fan page on Facebook. Here is the snazzy looking Vanity URL for Pet Photography Ireland.

Less talk, here’s how we go about it!

How to create your Facebook Vanity URL!!

ONE – Simply log into your facebook account.

TWO – Go to www.facebook.com/username – You should have something similar to below:

THREE – Just check the availability of your desired username and hit create.

Simple!!
PS: From what I’ve been reading so far, you need at least 25 fans before you can create a vanity url for a fanpage.

Abstractly processed plane

What processing in photoshop did I do?

In camera raw I only changed the temperature/white balance by 400 as I shot in camera WB of ‘cloudy’. Now in photoshop:
– dublicated the background layer
- Dodged the two planes/lines in the sky
- Added a ‘Color Negative’ curves adjustment layer
— Changed this layer to screen @ 20%
- Made a levels adjustment layer just for this layer
- Added a ‘Cross Process’ curve ajustment layer
—Change this layer to ‘Linear burn’ and you’re all done!!

Photoshop Video tutorial

Here’s everything I’ve done in a short video tutorial It’s pretty fast but afraid I don’t have the time at the moment to redo the video)

Any questions, Just ask!

It’s the first time I’ve tried doing anything like this and I’m happy with the results. A few people have said the eyes/lips are too prominent but this is how I wanted it. I was looking for a powerful stare from this ‘creature’. Below are the stages of processing:

Download the full photoshop file

If you’re wondering how I actually did all of this, you can download the file with all the layers intact and see how to do one of your very own. (the bottom group + ‘original’ layer are only there to show what I did in the early stages – this is why they’re turned off)
Download the amazing creature photoshop file here – 14.2mb

OK, so below is the before and after of this quick tutorial. This can be used on many different types of photographs with brilliant results. Without further ado, we’ll get cracking on the tutorial. If you’re already pretty handy with photoshop you can skip through to the conclusion for a fast tutorial! You can also download the source/.psd file here or have a quick look at the results.

Choose one of your own photo’s or you can download my photo. Once you have a photo, bring it into photoshop and we can get started

Step 1

Open the Channels palette by choosing Window>Channels from the main menu
(by default it’s the tab right beside the Layers palette).

If you click on each channel, you can see the detail on each. For this particular photo, the green channel is best for what we want. Click on the top channel(RGB) to return to the original view and see all layers.

Step 2

Choose Image/Calculations from the main menu. Here we shall choose the green channel, blending mode of overlay and make sure that result is set to New Channel.


You will notice the photo has changed to black & white and there’s a new channel selected.

Step 3

While your new channel ‘Alpha 1′ is still selected we shall copy this layer. Press ‘Ctrl + a‘ to select all, now press ‘Ctrl + c‘ to copy. Click on the top channel RGB to restore the original shot. Now click the Layers tab and paste your layer ‘Ctrl + v‘. You should have something that looks like this:

Step 4

All that is left is to change the blending mode of this layer to overlay.

That’s it, job done.

Conclusion

Open your image in photoshop
Go to your channels palette
Choose which channel is best for this image (R/G/B)
Choose Image/Calculations from the main menu
Pick your channel, change blending to overlay and change result to new channel
Copy that channel over to your layers palette
Change the blending mode to overlay

Finishito – Job well done!!

Once you’re happy with that you can start adding little adjustment layers with curves/levels and they will make a big difference to the end result as you can see with some of the following shots.
Let me know what you thought of the tutorial. Also feel free to pop a link to one of your photos you tried this out on below!!

Some Results

Thanks for stopping by!

The Plan

I wanted to have nice permalinks on my blog. The plan was to have them like this – blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/day/month/year/name-of-the-post/. So the last post I had up would have looked like this – http://blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/03/02/2009/first-dublin-strobist-meet/. To do this I used the code /%day%/%monthnum%/%year%/%postname%/ within my wordpress admin control panel (Settings >> Permalinks >> Custom).

The Problem

All links worked perfectly EXCEPT the archive links. So what worked?
blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/
blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/day/month/year/name-of-the-post/
blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/category/name-of-category/
What didn’t work where the archive links, like March 2008 or January 2009. They would purely bring up an error #404.

You could change your permalinks to /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and everything would work find. Personally, I felt that the links were starting to get too long. After lots of searching and testing a bunch of easy and difficult solutions I decided to give in and change my Permalinks. I am now only using /%postname%/

Search Engines?

What about the big G and everybody linking back to your old links that you previously had in place? Simple, just add the following line

RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$4

to your .htaccess file in your wordpress directory and it will redirect all your traffic for you. So if somebody clicks a link or types in http://blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/30/01/2009/inspirational-photography-tips/ they will be automatically redirected to http://blog.kyletunneyphotography.com/inspirational-photography-tips/.

Nobody gets lost, no broken links and the big G doesn’t spank you!!

I hope that helps somebody from spending two days searching online for a fix.
Let me know if it helps,
Kyle

Save photos you like

Save save save! Start cutting pictures out of magazines & newspapers. Head to some of your favourite websites, Google images and type in random words or places, photographer’s websites, stock image sites, flickr, jpgmag and many many more. This is something I started to do in March of last year. I usually file everything by month but would have a few other folders purely for the likes of ‘modelling’, ‘strobist’, ‘photography ideas’ and so on. Organising the files is purely up to you; this is just a suggestion and an insight to how I’ve been doing it. I have close to 500 files, all of which I have yet to look back upon for inspiration. Luckily I’ve had many of my own mini-projects to keep my photography lively.

Remember a good spot.

I’m sure it’s happened to everybody. Your out for the day without the camera and come across an amazing field/landscape on your walk or a hidden street, deep in Dublin city that you’ve never seen before. Instead of just going ‘ I wish I had my camera with me’, whip your phone out and take a picture or get out the trusty pen and paper to write down the location/shot. These will all come in handy a few days/weeks/months down the line when you draw a blank and can’t think of something/somewhere to go shooting.

Buy a disposable camera

You don’t always need a big camera! Buy a disposable camera and shoot to your hearts content. You may be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Use everyday things

Go about your house picking up normal objects like TV remotes, speakers, candles, your fridge (if your strong enough), cups, chairs etc. Then try to take photos you usually wouldn’t see of these bits and pieces. Or go one step further and bring the items to places you’d never see them. Ever seen a goldfish bowl at the side of a swimming pool? A bowl of weetabix and a spoon on a swing in a playground? A person pointing a TV remote at a lamb in the middle of a field? The possibilities are endless!

Play with your camera

Most people get acustomed to certain dials on their camera and don’t bother to use the rest. I do it myself, I don’t think I’ve taken my camera off manual in four or five months. Wack up the ISO, use your timer and get in your own photos, slow that shutter right down; the posibilities are endless!

Let there be light

Lock yourself in a room closing the curtains to get the room as dark as possible; or even better, do it at night. Pop your camera on your tripod and set a long exposure. Grab your torch and try to spell your name or make a smiley face. If you’re feeling sporty, head outside and run around like a lunatic, throwing your hand everywhere with the torch. I’ve only tried this once myself but it was great craic and I’m really happy with the results. I’m looking forward to trying it again.

Mixing it up

Change how you hold your camera. Shoot with your camera upside down, shoot from the hip, use your bad hand to hold the camera.

Set yourself challenges

Shoot all day with the tripod attached. With the tripod only having one leg on the ground and the other two leaning on different objects (trees, walls, your leg etc)

Find inspiration in the little

Macro is what I’m talking about of course! Beg, borrow or steal (don’t steal!) a macro lens if you have to. There are so many new things to see and find around us when a macro lens is introduced. Give macro a go!

Post Processing

Find a spot, something you’d usually shoot and then when you get home start process the shot into something else.

Old photos

Cold rainy day out? Not pushed about heading out to take new photos? How about going over some of your old photos and reprocessing them. I often see some old files that I didn’t think were much but now I see them in a different light and proceed to process them.

Two good to be true

Nope, it’s not a typo. Find a suitable image and double it. Not sure what I’m talking about. Look at the photo below. *Poof* Magic!

One last tip

Don’t forget your own photography. Often times when I’ve dropped the camera for a few weeks I start to look back at some of my shots and think “that’s a really nice shot, I wish I could take something like that now”. The only thing stopping you from taking great shots is yourself. Push yourself, your boundaries and your comforts. All your efforts will come back ten fold and it will show in your images.

A few links

JPGmag
Flickr River
My Own Portfolio
Behance
Erica Leighton
Muratsuyur
Chase Jarvis
Flickr
Cool Hunting(the odd photography thing crops up here)
Boards Photography Forum
Don’t forget to keep an eye on this blog too!

Remember, save, save, save!

Make sure to check out all the past Random Photo threads on boards. Some brilliant work and they’re already up to their eight album. Some amazing photographers and I’ve saved many of their photos in my own Inspiration folder!

If you have any other ideas I’d love to hear them, I’m always looking for inspiration. I hope this has helped you get out of your photography rut!

Kyle

Ok, so clearly you can work that one out for yourself…. theirs three layers in that file. How about this file?

So this image is a bit more of a strain to count, it would probably take five, maybe ten minutes to count the layers. Theirs only 45 layers but this can all take time if you have to count them yourself. What if your images start to get really big (not filesize) but regards layers. Do you really have the time to count hundreds of layers? Would you have the patience?

The following will help you get around this!
Photoshop Layer counting script – This script will count all the layers for you automatically!

So I’m sure you want to know how to use this?
It’s simple!!

• Right-click the above link and download the script to your desktop
  (or somewhere you will remember)
• Open up Photoshop with the file you wish to count
• Click on ‘File’
• Then ‘Scripts’
• Now click ‘Browse’
• Find the script you just downloaded to your desktop and click Load
• You will now be prompted with ‘Go through your file and count all the layers??‘
• Click ‘Yes’
• You will now be informed of the amount of layers in your file!

Job done, that was a lot quicker than counting 20-5,000+ layers now wasn’t it?

I hope this script speeds up your photoshopping someday

This script is used at your own risk, I have personally used it many times but shall not be held responsible for any misbehaviour caused by it!

One thing that I was unsure about in my photo is that, personally, it feels quite cluttered. Obliviously the shot is taken in quite a small space compared to other shots that encompass the same effect. I have two versions and personally I think the quieter image works better. (The final images are at the bottom of the page)

The following are the settings used to take the shots:

• Canon 30D
• Canon EFS 17-85mm
• ISO 1600
• F/Number F4
• Exposure 1/6400
• Program Aperture Priority

These are the eight images used in the sequence

OK, lets get to work. I adjusted the levels and added a curves adjustment level to the first shot in the sequence, as this shall be the base/background file. The layering might change from photo to photo but for this one I had to do as follows.

• Sixth last shot
• Fifth last shot
• Fourth last shot
• Third last shot
• Second last shot
• Last shot
• 1st shot/ background shot

You then need to bring all of the photos into this one file in Photoshop. Once that is done, label all your images accordingly and logically, as this will make it far easier later on.

From the above you will notice a few things about how I work in photoshop (and how you should too). I have an originals folder, I will always duplicated(ctrl+j) a layer before I start to work on it. You should get into the habit of doing this as a precaution. It’s easy for a photo to get messed up, at least with this backup you can only go so far wrong. I also have a very ugly lime layer at the bottom – This shows very clearly the pixel I might have missed when working on the other layers.

So, you should have your file looking something similar to the layers image above, the first frame being on the bottom, last frame next as displayed here and so on. We will now make only the second layer visible by clicking the eye to the left of the layer + ALT

We select the lasso tool (L) and do a quick selection of what we want to keep.

Once that is done we want to select the inverse. To do this press Ctrl + Shift + I OR go up to ‘Select’ in the toolbar and then choose ‘Inverse’. Now just hit the ‘delete’ key. You should have an image like the following:

Press Ctrl + D to deselect you selection. Zoom into the photo so you can see everything in detail – I usually stay in and around 170-230%. Now that you’re in nice and close to the shot you can start to take out the bits you don’t want. Using your lasso tool with a 10/15px feather start to select – delete – deselect and repeat. Don’t go too close to the subject you want to keep just yet.

This is what we should have so far

It looks quite messy still but now we start to zoom in a bit closer and cut out all those edges. Zoomed in at 200% you can see how the lime background starts to help, making it quite clear where there is still a few lingering pixels.

Don’t be afraid to change the feather – Depending on where you’re deleting from the image it can look better with different feathers. (Experiment)

As you can see in the image I don’t have to delete everything perfectly as this bit of water in the bottom left will blend in nicely with the background image.

Simply repeat what we have done to the second layer for all the remaining layers and you should have some thing similar to these.

Back to the top

This is a very time consuming process, if you want it to look well you have to be willing to put in hours. Personally I feel it is well worth the time if you have a good picture! The image above took me about three hours and this is quite a hurried job in my opinion. When I have a better image that isn’t as dark I shall take 5-10hours and post it up to compare.

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to post below!!

P.s. A great example of this shot can be found here (22 frames of Eamon) – Shot by Treasa Lynch over at Dancing Shades.