Are you ready for today’s ride into the Mind of Vanelli? I hope so cause here we go!!

Vanelli is having trouble finding his notes on Ben Willmore’s class on “Mastering the New Adjustment and Masking Panels” and Jack Davis’s class “Lightroom 2 Enhancement Effects with Presets”. Jack Davis is the preset king… he has a preset for everything! His philosphy is that anything you do in Photoshop, create a preset so that you can go back and immediately do the same effect on any other photo. During the class, Jack gave away hundreds of his own presets to conference attendees. He tells everyone to take his presets, adjust them to fit your own needs, and then save them as a new preset. Then jokingly he added that you could them sell them on eBay as your own. We all know Ben Willmore as a guru when it comes to photography. But he has really advanced his photography in recent times in his ability to capture an image and the wide range of colors in a scene.

Vanelli’s last class of the day was with Vincent Versace on sharpening a blured photo. Versace went through a very intesive action that he made that brings back that sharpness. In order to explain what all he did you would have to talk to him directly as it was that intensive. But here is the theory to give you a general idea… As usual you follow the same process as other photos… get rid of the noise first, then do all your enhancement techniques, and then run the unsharp mask at the very end before you save the file. High Pass filter and set that layer to soft light. He would do this multiple times to build up the sharpening. The amount of sharpening that he does all depends on how he is going to print or display the image.

A few quotes from Versace that Vanelli really likes… “Don’t confuse workflow for habits.” and “Think globally; global to granular.“

Vanelli apologizes to everyone for losing his notes for those two classes but said he is going to find them and provide more information on those classes soon.

I want to take a second to throw my own words in here to quickly discuss the two quotes that Vanelli picked up from Versace. If you are familiar with what a workflow is, it is basically the step-by-step process you follow when processing an image. When you constant follow the same procedure it gets habit forming and you miss out on taking advange of new techniques or processes that could benefit what you are doing. For example, I used to have one workflow. I used it for everything; photoshoots with models, HDR landscapes, etc. One day I realized that I could be saving a ton of time in Lightroom 2 by organizing my HDR bracketed images in a different way than my portrait work with models. So do not form a habit around your workflow. Be aware of what you are doing and read up on what the pro’s are doing. If you read something good, adopt it into your workflow. If you find that you are doing something better than the pro’s, write a blog on it or post it as a comment on other blogs! The key is that your workflow is YOUR workflow… do what works best for you… But be careful not to form a habit around it and not adopt better techniques.

As for the second quote, I think the idea there is to start on an image zoomed out looking at the image as a whole. Do whatever adjustments you think are needed to the image as a whole. Then start looking at smaller parts of the image and processing just those areas using layers, adjustments, and masking. Don’t get me wrong… you do need to look at the image as a whole when adjusting each area to make sure that your composition isn’t negatively affected by local changes. I would be very interested in hearing more about this from Vanelli or Versace to get a clear picture of exactly what Versache is recommending.

I should have the Day 2 dispatches sometime today and will get them posted shortly after I receive them. I know yesterday was a big day for Vanelli with Midnight Madness and all. I’ve only heard bits and peices so far but I heard it was a riot. Stay tuned!!