Migration of Servers 5, 6, 9 and Our Company Server

Posted on April 25, 2012

We were recently notified by our hosting company that they need to move a few of our servers as the area they are in is set to be permanently closed April 30th. If your site is on one of the servers you should have received an email yesterday explaining how this would affect your service with us. In case anyone missed it the details are below.

For everyone else, our company server is also being migrated. When the DNS changes start propagating there is a chance we will lose some emails or tickets. If you do not hear from us within 24 hours please contact us again.

In the next few days we will be working on migrating your services to a new server. The copy over will begin Thursday, April 26th and they have told us it will be complete by Friday, April 27th.

How this will affect you:

1) There will not be downtime for your site. We will not be migrating accounts during high traffic times and your site will remain up on the current server while the domains propagate to the new server.

2) The IP address for your server will change. This means the temp link you were given in your welcome email, if it has a series of numbers in it, will not work. To edit your site you should be using the following format: http://www.yourdomainname.com/sitezadmin

3) This IP address change will affect any third party programs you are using on our server, such as machforms or blogsites. If these stop working after the migration please make sure to contact us at support@portfoliositez.com and we will fix it for you. Please DO NOT attempt to fix it yourself as these changes can be difficult and often create larger issues if you do not know what you are doing.

4) We recommend not making any changes to your site during the migration. If changes are made to your site during the migration they will not appear when the domains propagate to the new server and you will need to make those changes again.

We will be updating the News area of our support (http://portfoliositez.com/support/index.php?_m=news&_a=view) with the progress of the migration. Look for “Sitezhosting5.com Migration,” “Sitezhosting6.com Migration,” or “Sitezhosting9.com Migration” for information on your move. There you will find when we started the migration, when it was finished and what your new IP address is.

If you have any questions or concerns about the move please email us at support@portfoliositez.com. Thanks!

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Restoring Images and Operation Photo Rescue

Posted on April 19, 2012

OK so it is possible I overestimated the amount of time we would have to do these projects. ;-) Once a week was optimistic but I can promise we will try to do these as often as we can.

For now, I wanted to call to your attention an organization I sometimes volunteer with, it is called Operation Photo Rescue. I started working with them when I was in school and they were looking for volunteers to help restore photos for victims of hurricane Katrina.

Restoring images are  a great way to get comfortable with using your cloning tool in Photoshop, not to mention color correction. The best resource I have found for restorations is Photoshop Restoration and Retouching by Katrin Eismann.  Chapter 6 in that book is dedicated to “Damage Control and Repair.” I have used that chapter so much that the book simply opens to it now when I drop it on my desk. ;-)  The main tools I use are the Clone Stamp, Quick Mask, the Warp option of the Transform tool and the lens correction filter. If you know how to use those tools you can do your own restorations for your family or friends or volunteer to keep those skills sharp! I would also recommend checking out OPR’s site as they also have a great archive of tutorials from other volunteers.

Below is an example of one of the restorations I did for a family friend. The best tip I picked up from this one was selecting the color channel with the fewest imperfections, in this case it was red, and then dumping the rest of the color channels when I set the image mode to grayscale. This gave me a much easier jumping off point than the before shows.

 

 

More amazing examples of restorations from OPR:

 

posted by Bambi Operation Photo Rescue. “The Wedding.” Posted by Bambi. January 15, 2012.

posted by LisaroseOperation Photo Rescue. “Lady in Vest.” Posted by Lisarose. March 4, 2012.

posted by glennabOperation Photo Rescue. “Christmas in B&W.” Posted by glennab. December 19, 2010.

 

 

 

 

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Photoshop Before and Afters

Posted on April 6, 2012

In a perfect world all the photos we take would look inspired SOOC (Straight out of camera). Photography is an art form. When I take a photo of a family or child I try my hardest to capture their laugh or a particularly telling look that reflects the essence of their personality. Most of the time my SOOC shots are not doing the captured moment justice and could use some artistic touches from Photoshop. This is why I’ve decided to do a series of before/after shots for inspiration. Post processing images can be very time consuming which is why I have invested in a couple Photoshop action sets.  Actions allow you to perfect your images MUCH quicker then doing each subtle change to the image from scratch. My absolute favorite actions of all time are the ones from Paint The Moon at http://paintthemoon.net/blog/ . I’ve invested in the The Essentials, Fresh, Blessings, and Moxie sets. They range from standard photo correction actions to fun actions that can turn any photo into a beautiful piece of art ready for framing. A lot of the actions allow the photos to be more artistic which works great for printing on canvas. Another good set is the Totally Rad actions at http://www.gettotallyrad.com/ .

 

I’ve chosen 6 images for my first set to highlight. I always love looking at before and afters so feel free to share your own on our facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/portfoliositez

SOOC Original

PTM Super Sharp, Totally Rad ProRetouch, PTM Brighten and Tone, PTM Simple Pop, TRA2 BurnOut

SOOC original

TRA2 Punch Out!!!, TRA2 Claire-ify

SOOC Original

Totally Rad ProRetouch, PTM Brighten and Tone

SOOC Original

Totally Rad ProRetouch, TRA2- Claire-ify, PTM Brighten and Tone, Adjusted Vibrance and Saturation, PTM Heist

SOOC Original

Totally Rad ProRetouch, PTM Brightness and Tone, PTM Ambience, PTM Hushed Softness

SOOC Original

PTM Recover Highlights, PTM Heist

PTM Recover Highlights, PTM Skin Friendly Color Enhance, PTM Pop My Flare!, TRA2 BurnOut

 

The last example was how to create a different feel with the image depending on the post processing. The first processed one would be great for a white matted frame. The second with the pops of color would look excellent printed on metal as more of an art piece.

If you’d like to see more just let us know. :-)

 

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Photoshop Tip 1: Brightening Up Shadows

Posted on March 7, 2012

We have decided to offer some photoshop tips for those clients of ours who are new to photography. This series will include things like sharpening, bulk saving for web, brightening shadows, using actions, etc. Today I will be explaining how to brighten shadows. You can do this with the shadow/highlight feature built into Photoshop, however sometimes it comes out less than desirable and blows out the highlights. The method I’ll be highlighting today is the ‘Load channel as selection’ way.

 

Step 1: Open up the backlit or shadowed image in Photoshop. Make sure the Channels tab is open. Click On the Channels tab.

 

Step 2: Click on the ‘Load channel as selection’ button in the bottom left of the channels tab. This will select all the bright areas of the image

Step 3: Inverse the selection by going to Selection->Inverse OR using CTRL+SHIFT+I (APPLE+SHIFT+I for Mac)
Step 4. Make a copy of the image layer to be on the safe side
Step 5:  Open up the Curves Tool by going to Image->Adjustment->Curves OR using CTRL+M (APPLE+M for Mac)

Step 6: Adjust the curve line up to lighten the shadowed areas. The curve will affect light areas as well, but this method does create a more natural brightening.

 

BEFORE ADJUSTING SHADOWS/HIGHLIGHTS

AFTER ADJUSTING SHADOW/HIGHLIGHTS

QUICK TIP: Sometimes adjusting the shadows/highlights will affect color balance. To correct go to image->adjustments->color balance OR CTRL+B (APPLE+B for Mac)

AFTER ADJUST COLOR BALANCE

Posted in photoshop tips | 1 Comment



 

 
One Response to “Photoshop Tip 1: Brightening Up Shadows”
show comments ⇓

  1. Matt

    Nice works, guys. Tips like these are always a good reminder. I hope that this becomes a recurring thing you do.

    5:42 pm on 3/7/12
 

Photo Project #1

Posted on March 1, 2012

At WPPI this year, it came to my attention that I have not really picked up my camera, unless going on a trip, in about 4 years. Considering this is what I went to school for it was a rather disappointing realization. All the photographers we spoke to there were so excited about the new technology in cameras and what they do I got a little jealous. ;-)

Because of this Jen and I have decided to do one project per week each. I will do photography projects and Jen, who is a talented graphic designer and photographer, will show Photoshop tricks and tips she uses. You can follow along or if you do any of the projects we do show us! We would love to post what you all are doing too.

 

Photo Project #1 – An Everyday Object Study

I used the Photo Idea Index for the inspiration of this project. They challenged the reader to take over 50 images of 1 everyday object, using different angles and focuses for each image. I figured this was as good a place as any to start as I often take awhile to warm up, especially, being so out of practice.  Below is what I came out with.

I ended up starting the project on Tuesday and finished it Thursday. I took a few pictures each day leaving my camera and the sewing scissors on the table so that whenever I walked by it I took a few. The first thing I found was that my automatic settings on the camera were not helpful. ;-) I ended up fiddling with the f-stops and shutter speeds manually to get the exposures I was looking for. I also turned off my automatic focus and practiced my manual focus skills. Really my favorite images of this set are the ones where I played with the focus.

My favorites :-)

I will be doing another project next week. No idea what it will be yet but I will think of something. ;-)

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