Attached Link: Shoot Smarter

www.shopshootsmarter.com/

I have not yet tried them myself, but I have heard good things about their DVDs from professional photographers.

You should be able to find someone who can answer your copyright questions at WPPI( Wedding and Portrait Photographers International).

[www.wppionline.com/

](http://www.wppionline.com/)

I'll try to respond to your post on a point-by-point basis.

I can't speak about the global market, but in the parts of the photography industry that I've brushed with, the only people who care about your CV are fine art buyers, museums and schools. In all other areas, they only hire based on portfolio.

A good rule of thumb for me is "Let them be concerned with their concerns, and let me be concerned with mine." They want you to fill in? What do you want? Are you working elsewhere? When does your schedule fill up? This is the best way to determine how much advanced notice you need for scheduling. Once scheduled, an assignment should be in stone for you, subject to cancellation only by the person paying the money (ie, don't try to cancel scheduled events for better paying gigs-- it's rude).

Use of the studio by those working in it is what might be called a "standard perk." Yes, it is very nice of them, and certainly a show of trust if they let you use it without supervision, but it is also a pretty common thing.

By law, assistants in the US get paid a flat daily rate for a 10 hour day, which includes 30 minutes lunch, and two 15-minute breaks. For every hour beyond the 10, we charge an overtime rate equal to (DayRate / 10 * 1.5), time-and-a-half of the hourly-equivalent rate. I charge a half-day rate, 5 hours for roughly 2/3rd of my Day Rate. Again, this is based on US Law. Find assistant photographers or other types of freelancers and sub-contractors in your country and ask them about it. The assistant photographers should be able to give you an idea of a standard day rate.

In the US, the specific services I perform for the day are irrelevant. I get paid on a per-day basis. I might have a relationship with a photographer or studio where I can bring my own clients in on off-hours and rent space and equipment from them, in which case I am the active studio, and regardless of my relationship at other times, they are my assistants and rental company. The deciding question is, "Who brought the client?"

Copyright law is a really complex question, particularly as you cross borders. I wouldn't want to be held legally responsible for any opinions you hold. Normally, I would direct these questions to the ASMP( www.asmp.org )or the APA ( www.apanational.org ), but both of those are American organizations. If you'd like, I can ask them for the equivalent organization in your country of origin.

However, the base of your question is whether you are their employee, or a sub-contractor they regularly work with. In the US, this is a very important distinction, as employees are entitled to a range of benefits which sub-contractors are not.

I hope this helps.

The difference between the red circled sections is the difference between specific processes. These detail variations are why we use homemade bumps.

At a guess, I would say that they decreased the overall contrast and then painted in the mortar with a black brush of some type. There are a variety of ways to do this, and all of them are equally valid.

For example, you could add a grey fill layer set to Color blending mode, or make the transformation with Curves or Levels. I could also do this with a Screen-mode curves layer. There are other methods, but these are sufficient.

It sounds like you're unsure of the reason you're doing this, the why which underlies the method. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but if I'm not, it would be helpful to you to learn this first.

I encourage you to read the following two books:

"Photography Your Way" by Chuck DeLaney
and
"The Photographer's Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion" by Maria Piscopo

If you've never run your own business before, I suggest you pick up the "Entrepreneur 2006 Essentials" CD set by Learn2, which I found many copies of at my nearest Half Price Books.

Frankly, if the best place you can think of to find advice on starting a photography business is a 3D rendering web community, then I doubt you're ready to give up your day job just yet. Photography is a business rife with nepotism, and the best way to get jobs is to find a community of working photographers and be useful and enjoyable company to them. There are many useful organizations for this purpose: the APA, ASMP, EP, WPPI, et al.

Alternately, I suggest finding local photographers in a variety of fields and assist them. The guy you've been working for doesn't seem like he's a good model to learn from. You don't make many in photography by acting like a good bargain.

Sorry, but this technicality bugs me. A Sepia Tone is when you tone your image with sepia. A "Sepia red tone" is actually just a "red tone." My apologies for the grammar-nazi urge that I had to sate right there...

Sepia was originally a popular toning process to apply to black and white prints because the chemistry involved created a slightly more durable photograph. It also mimicked the discoloration process that happened to earlier chemical processes. Thus, sepia toning in the digital age is a cultural response. We think of images colored in this way as having an Olde Time look, and so it's a nice way to create a sense of history in an image.

Valerie-Ducom's sepia toned image illustrates the point nicely. The sepia image gives a sense of a much older nature scene than any of the others.

If it were my photo, I'd consider adding a Hue/Saturation layer beneath the toning layer, which shifted the blue to a noticably different value, to help seperate the background. I tend to find that this sort of monochromatic toning creates a very graphic-illustration look to my images, so I'm less concerned about maintaining realism in value-relationships.

Thanks, Encrypted! This seems perfect for me.

Google searches yielded me about seven incredibly insufficient freeware programs, and several expensive commericial programs. My google-fu is weak, indeed.

I use www.bluehost.com, and have had few problems with them, but because I have had no problems with them, I cannot comment on their customer service.

Kerem,

You've got essentially no control over how your images look on other monitors. Ignoring the issue of color drift, keep in mind that the shape of pixels is not even the same between one resolution and the next on the same monitor, let alone across different monitors.

It sounds like, rather than calibrating your monitor, you are using pre-packaged, company-supplied profiles. Consider that these numbers have nothing to do with how your monitor emits color, or what environment they emit color in.

Without calibrating your monitor in a room light as you always light your monitor, there is no way to guarantee color consistency. You need to calibrate your monitor based on the specific conditions of your editing environment before any reasonable attempt can be made to solve any other problem. You monitor probably has a manual system for doing this, where you make adjustments until you can distinguish between one box of color and an adjacent one, or the like. This option, while not optimal, would be a significant improvement over the choice you are making now.

Adobe 1998 is a theoretical color model. sRGB is another one. They are the two most popular ones in use today, with sRGB being the default assumption about images that do not include a color profile. They are an abstract set of definitions regarding how to distinguish between one color and another. The advantage to using either one is only realized if you include it in the file itself (thereby telling other computers how to render each color on the specific monitor they are attached to).

An image file is essentially a collection of numbers, describing each pixel of color. When a profile is attached to an image (or, when sRGB is assumed because you haven't included one), the program opening it knows how to relate the color information in the file to the way the attached monitor displays these colors. If the monitor has not been calibrated, it will display these colors incorrectly. In your case, the problem is that our computers begin with an incorrect assumption: we think you're editing in sRGB, when you're actually editing in a color model that no one but you knows.

Most professionals use Adobe 1998 as a working color profile, under the assumption that their image will be printed at some point. If your images are only going to be seen on a monitor, then sRGB is fine. If your images are only going to be seen on your own (regularly calibrated) monitor, then this is the only time when using Monitor Profile is an appropriate choice.

As you may have guessed by now, I'm a huge advocate of color calibration, and I've probably spent quite enough time on that soap box for now. If you're interested in learning more, I can go into greater detail. But for now, let me step off the soap box and answer your question directly:

In order to get fewer people complaining that your images are too dark, then I suggest you start working in the sRGB or Adobe 1998 profile. Next, you must calibrate your monitor, either using a third-party strategy, or the inexact option built into your monitor's menus. You need to recalibrate your monitor, at an absolute minimum, once every three months (I know people who calibrate their monitors weekly, and some who do it even more often than that). Finally, when saving your images for web display, you must NOT optimize them for web output, and be sure to include your profile in the saved file.

If you do this, then if people still complain that your image is too dark, you can tell them that they need to calibrate their monitor.

Attached Link: Gnomon Workshop: Tileable Textures Tip

.....or Lew could just explain it for me.... grin

babuci - Check out Santa Fe Workshops

The Hindu winter holiday was back in late October, but I'll happy ask Lakshmi to bless me with a studio with 20 foot ceilings and a two-bedroom apartment right above it, maybe even with a rooftop garden on top with a good view of the city. While I'm dreaming, can she stock the studio with a few Profoto lighting kits?

Attached Link: Archetyped Gallery from my website

This is a complex subject that many people earn a lot of money solving. I suggest you google for "bluescreen photoshop," "greenscreen photoshop," and "matte painting."

One simple, yet incomplete, method is to simply use the lasso to outline the subject, and then copy/paste it as you need.

The problem with this method will be the sharp edges which will look unrealistic. You can solve this problem by feathering the selection (Selection -> Feather).

The next problem you'll have is the the edges of your selection will be colored by the lights and nearby materials. Depending on image size and output resolution, this may not matter to you very much.

In order to do a true bluescreen effect, you need to very carefully regulate the light hitting the background so that it is very even, then you can remove the background color by a variety of ways. When doing this you need to prevent the light bouncing off the background from hitting the subject as much as possible. My preferred method to isolate the figure from the background is to use a color selection in order to create a mask, which you can then refine further.

This is how I made several of the images which I link to in this message.

Ariana,

I still can't answer your question until I know how you are applying your colors to the fabric. I don not understand the term "flooding." Nor do I understand what you mean by "true rich deep color."

The first thing I notice from your new post is that the range from darkest-black to lightest-white in this cloth is very shallow. Could this be why you feel the colors don't have proper depth? I assume this is what you mean by "deep color."

What you are doing is best understood in HSB color mode. The optimal way to convert this robe from one color to another without losing detail is to alter the Hue and Saturation (H and S) while leaving the Luminosity, aka Brightness (the B in HSB). Are you sure your method affects both the Hue and the Saturation? I assume this is what you mean by "rich color."

I hope this helps.

In addition to Lewv's suggestions, which are spot on, it is also sadly nessecary to color-calibrate your printer, and this needs to be done for each specific paper type you use.

Thankfully, you don't need to buy or rent expensive equipment in order to do this. You can just print out the appropriate images and mail them to a custom profile company and they'll email you the custom profile. I recommend inkjetart.com/custom_profiles/

Monitor calibration should be done every month, ideally every two weeks if you use a flat screen, and every 3 weeks if you use the other kind. Therefore, if you're serious about color management, it's cheaper in the long run if you buy your own equipment.

For more information, check out the (unrelated website, afaik) Ink Jet Mall's documentation on color management: inkjetmall.com

It's worth noting that this is a problem that existed even before digital image making. Film-based photography suffers the same problem, and was much more costly to resolve, as each image required it's own color optimization routine. The difference is that the print labs bore these costs and handled the color management for us.

I don't know how often you need to profile your printer, but given the nature of modern ink-making technology, I doubt it's more often than once a year.

I strongly encourage you to profile your printer. While most people understand the universal need for a calibrated monitor, few people understand the need for a custom printer/paper profile. Using a cheap printer with a custom profile gives me much better results than using an Epson 4000 wih the company-supplied profiles.