Well I had to post something about our trip to the IMAX in Manchester to see U23D. This is a U2 show from the Vertigo Tour filmed completely in 3D using special cameras. 3Ality are the company responsible for making the technology work and National Geographic helped bring it to the Cinema.

Well in a word, AbsoBloodyBrilliant. Just amazing really, me and Bex went to see U2 in Nice, France in 2005, and this was defimately the next best thing. Except better in some respects. Floating above Larry Mullens drum kit as he’s playing Sunday Bloody Sunday. Or being directly in front of Bono as he sings One.

At the beginining when Vertigo kicks in you are placed about 5 rows back in the crowd, and you can see the expressions on peoples faces, the images on mobile phones being taken, and drinks beiong thrown around, which is weird because it seems like the fluid is going to hit you.

Bex was rather taken by the fact that sometimes Bono focusses his attention on the camera, and almost comes right up to you with his arms out. Also you can really see the emotion in his face on ‘Can’t make it on your own’ and ‘Miss Sarejevo’ when he’s singing Pavarotti’s section.

The other amazing thing is the sound, when you are hovering around the drum kit and Mullen is performing some of the more complex sections, you can pick out every beat, beats you didn’t know existed before.

Another highlight is the beginning of ‘Where the Streets’, the whole crowd start bouncing, its a massive stadium there must be 100,000 people, and when they all bounce you get the sense that you going to bounce right out of your seat.

When it came to the section towards the end that starts with ‘The Fly’ they left in a mega balls up, the guitar effects seem to have forgotten to do ‘The Fly’ sound and you can here Bono saying ‘Wheres the Fly?’ its just cool, and I’m glad they left it in.

Well I’m not going to carry on, only to say, I’m looking for excuses to go and see it again.

Well my recent post on my photoblog is of our friends dog Millie. We went round recently and I was trying out my new SB600 flashgun on the dog. Anyway, whilst experimenting with processing in Lightroom I came across one shot that I discovered worked well with the ‘Matts 300 Look” preset. So starting with that this is how it progressed. The original shot below was taken into the ‘Develop’ view in Lightroom and the I’ve hit ‘Auto’ to let it auto process it, that sort of gives me a default start point.

I actually quite like it just like this, but I was in an experimental mood so carrying on I applied the preset ‘Matts 300 Look’. Which basically plays with the White Balance, boosts the Blacks and Fill Light and Recovery. Then I’ve tweaked the settings further actually reducing the effect of the preset quite substantially. The Basic setting look like this;

Some Noise reduction and sharpening and then the image starts to look like this.

Then finally the image is opened for editing in CS3, where I resize, sharpen, and do some localized saturation on the eyes, curves and levels elsewhere. My layer palette ends up looking like this.

Then save a jpeg and upload it to the photoblog, done.

In this little tutorial we are going to create what is sometimes refered to as a fake depth of field effect. Basically we are going to blur the background of an image using a lens blur effect. This tutorial forms part of a shortcourse that I deliver called ‘Photoshop - Enhanced’, although sometimes I add it on to ‘Photoshop - The Basics’ depends on how fast the delegates are catching on!

Firstly we need to create a selection based on the background of an image. Open Blur Masking original. Now in order to select the background we need to use a combination of the magic wand tool, and the lasso. This requires some patience but the effect will be worth it.

Set the tolerance quite high, about 40 on the magic wand and click on area of background, then to select more hold down the shift key. You may find that you select to much, when this happens select the lasso tool, hold down Alt and lasso the areas you want to deselect.

Once you have this all selected go to ‘Select / Save Selection’. In the pop up window select name and name your selection ‘background’. This will now appear in the channels palette as a new channel. Now we are going to create another channel, this time from within the channel palette, select the new channel icon (same as the new layer icon).  

Now select the gradient tool and and fill the canvas with a gradient fill.The gradient fill will be black and white. It needs to start with black at the bottom of the image as above.  Now we have two new channels which we now need to combine. Doing this requires us to open the Calculations window. This is at ‘Image / Calculations’.      

Above are the settings you need to apply, this calculations window allows you merge two images, layers, or channels together from any two psd files. In this case our two sources are from the same PSD file ‘blurmasking.psd’, we want to merge them, and the two sources are channel ’Gradient’, and channel ‘background’. Finally we want the result to be a ‘New Channel’. Now we can use this new channel as the basis for the lens blur effect. Now making sure you have your image layer selected go to ‘Filter / Blur / Lens Blur’. 

The new window that appears is the lens blur options window. There are many settings you can play with and feel free to have a go. But the main thing you need to do is set the ‘Depth Map’ source to the merged channel you have created, to select it click on the dropdown menu next to  source and select ‘alpha 1’. This will change the mostly blurred preview to a nicely blurred background, and sharp subject.

Your finished product should look something like the below image.

Well next Monday will be my second visit to Chill Factore. This is the new Ski slope in Manchester just off the M60. The first time I went was virtually the first time I’ve ski’d. So I had a taster lesson which was just to basic and slow, and I didn’t get much chance to get on the slopes. So Monday I’m going to give the main slope a try, I can control my speed and turn etc so I should be alright.

Anyway I hope I don’t end up like this poor individual…

It looks like she hit it pretty hard! I imagine I won’t be going that fast, although Bex will be racing down. Also in a few weeks my sister is coming up from the Isle of Wight for a trip and she’s having a private lesson there, so we will all be prepared for our Ski holiday next year, probably going to be in Les Saises, France. And judging by the below webcam view, its looking pretty good.