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- There are a thousands of tutorials and tips on retouching and post-production out there, so it’s pretty hard to find new things worth sharing. Here’s one I use on all my photos:
I call it Creative Quarantine. It’s not a fancy technique, but a strict policy: Whenever possible, I do not publish (or otherwise send off) images the same day I retouch them.
All my retouched photos go into quarantine for about 24hrs, usually meaning that I have got a good night’s sleep between looking at the close-to-final image and actually finishing it. What this does for me is giving me some distance, staring at and working on an image in Photoshop for hours doesn’t exactly improve your perception of it. Go to sleep. Eat something. What I noticed is that often I would spot areas that look overdone – lower that opacity a bit. How come I missed that spot yesterday? – heal it out. Uh, that skin softening looks just a little to gaussian – you get the idea.
I suggest you try this the next time you get all excited about that gorgeous photo that you can’t wait to get some feedback on. Don’t rush things. - Following the example of Chase Jarvis, I picked up the habit of taking more photos. With my iPhone.
Feels kind of like running around with a digital Holga – OK, it’s not that awesome, but it smells the same. I also “retouch” my iPhone shapshots (but only using native iPhone apps, no Photoshop involved), because I believe that retouching is part of the creative process of making the image.
You should try it!
Update: Looks like the iPhone is becoming the overall most popular camera on flickr… While photographers aren’t producing as much digital assets as video people, a couple of thousands of raw files and a good load of PSDs can build up quite a storage need over the years.
While I was looking for a storage solution, I had four priorities:
- Expandability: I had to copy all my stuff once to get them onto a bigger drive – I never want to repeat that experience.
- Encryption: A good deal of my photos is not meant for everyone’s eyes – I think it’s my responsibility to protect the privacy of my models from anyone who might eventually get their hands on one of the drives.
- Cost: Storage systems can cost nearly unlimited amounts of money – money that I’d rather invest in a new lens.
- Fault tolerance: Obviously.
After some testing I came up this totally insane solution:
Take my existing two 500GB WD USB drives and put two shiny (actually, they’re black.) new 1TB WD USB drives next to them. Next, using Linux software RAID 1, I mirror the identical disks, so I get a redundant 500GB and 1TB volume. These volumes are now being encrypted with three different cipher algorithms (yay for paranoia) using TrueCrypt. The final layer is an LVM volume group using the TrueCrypt volumes as PVs.
Here’s some ASCII art:
+-----------------------+ | LVM | +-----------------------+ | | TrueCrypt TrueCrypt | | RAID1 RAID1 | | | | +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ | 5 | | 5 | | 1 | | 1 | | 0 | | 0 | | T | | T | | 0 | | 0 | | B | | B | | G | | G | +---+ +---+ | B | | B | +---+ +---+This setup covers all of my four priorities (the only limitation is that you have to expand it in steps of two identical disks). Naturally, this monster isn’t that fast. According to bonnie++, I get about 10MB/s for writing and about 18MB/s for reading. Enough for me.
If you know a better way to get 1.5 TB expandable, encrypted and fault tolerant storage for less than 250 EUR, feel free to email me.