Month: March 2016

Today’s Question: I noticed you were using an Apple laptop. It looked like the 13 inch MacBook Pro? I am about to purchase a laptop for traveling in my new camper. Is the 13-inch display large enough to comfortably work in Lightroom or Photoshop?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, I am using a 13-inch MacBook Pro as my primary (actually, pretty much exclusive) computer. With the Retina display I am very comfortable working with this display size for working in Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as editing my videos in Premiere Pro and laying out Pixology magazine in InDesign.

More Detail: To be sure, my priorities are a little different from those of many other photographers, because I travel rather extensively. Because I am rarely home for more than a couple weeks at a time, and am often away from home for weeks on end, it makes sense for me to use a laptop as my primary computer platform.

It has been more than five years since I’ve owned a desktop computer, and I don’t miss it at all. With a laptop I always have my familiar computer and my data no matter where I am.

I do feel that the 13-inch display size is a good compromise. To me personally a 15-inch or larger display results in a laptop that feels more bulky and less portable. And a smaller display isn’t as comfortable to work with.

With previous laptops I felt that I was compromising significantly due to the relatively low display resolution. I simply didn’t have much screen real estate to use for some of the key applications in my workflow. But with the Retina display I am now perfectly happy. I prefer the higher resolution setting (referred to as “More Space” in the Macintosh preferences), which produces a display that appears like a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. In other words, I have what is very close to a full 1080p high definition display, which works well for demanding applications such as Photoshop and Lightroom.

It is worth noting that if you’re going to use a laptop as a primary platform for working with Photoshop and Lightroom, you’ll want to opt for a relatively powerful laptop. That means opting for the fastest multi-core processor available, upgrading the memory to 16GB of RAM (or even more), and taking advantage of the hard drive (or SSD drive) option with the highest capacity available.

Today’s Question: Crop is an indispensable feature, and the rotate feature usually has crop built in. But sometimes I don’t want to crop when I rotate, and sometimes I want to reposition the object of the photo creating white space at the edge, or even expand the borders in all directions. Is there a software function that will automatically back fill the white space? Else I need to use the Clone Stamp tool to add sky, trees, mountains, or whatever is in the background.

Tim’s Quick Answer: There are a couple of options I would recommend in Photoshop. These are the Content Aware Fill, and manually duplicating a relatively large area of pixels.

More Detail: The first option is more automatic, but the results can be a bit mixed. First, be sure that when you are using the Crop tool that you turn off the “Delete Cropped Pixels” checkbox on the Options bar. This will ensure you can always use the “Reveal All” command found on the Edit menu to expand the canvas so that all pixels in the image are visible.

Next, create a copy of the Background image layer by dragging the thumbnail for that layer to the “Create a New Layer” button (the blank sheet of paper icon) at the bottom of the Layers panel. This will create a Background Copy layer that you can use as the basis of the Content Aware Fill technique.

Now you can create a selection in the “blank” areas created when you rotated the image without cropping into the image. I recommend working with one side of the image at a time to help improve the overall results. With a selection active you can then choose Edit > Fill from the menu. In the Fill dialog choose “Content Aware” from the Contents popup. I also recommend turning on the “Color Adaptation” checkbox to improve color rendering. Click OK and the selected area will be filled with pixels taken from the image.

The quality of results with Content Aware Fill can vary considerably. Sometimes it works great, and sometimes not so great. Keep in mind, however, that you can use other tools such as the Clone Stamp and the Spot Healing Brush to improve upon the results without too much effort.

When the Content Aware Fill approach doesn’t work very well you can use a more “manual” approach to filling in the empty areas of the image. Start by creating a selection of an area that would represent a good fill for the empty area. Then choose Layer > New > Layer via Copy from the menu, or press Ctrl+J on Windows or Command+J on Macintosh. This will duplicate the selected pixels onto a new layer. Use the Move tool to drag that new layer into position to cover up part of the empty portion of the image. You can then use a layer mask to blend areas in, and employ the Clone Stamp and Spot Healing Brush tools to perform additional cleanup work on a separate layer.

The various “automated” capabilities for image cleanup in Photoshop can provide you with a great starting point, though in many cases you’ll still need to perform additional work to produce a satisfactory result. Fortunately, a combination of “automatic” and “manual” approaches can minimize the amount of time and effort required to produce great results.

Today’s Question: You showed a technique for using the GPS in your phone to provide locations for pictures, by using synchronized times (adjusting for time zones). What app are you using on the phone? When I travel to a foreign country, what settings do I need to be sure to have set correctly so that my phone’s GPS works but I’m not hit with lots of extra data or phone charges?

Tim’s Quick Answer: I use an app called “GPSTrack”, which is only available for the iPhone and iPad. And when traveling internationally I recommend that you not enable “airplane mode”, because doing so will disable your GPS receiver. Instead, I recommend turning of the cellular data and other features so that you don’t have to worry about international voice and data charges but can still take advantage of the GPS receiver in your mobile device.

More Detail: To be sure, one of the easiest ways to avoid a surprisingly high cellular phone bill after an international trip is to set your mobile device to “airplane mode” so that all of the cellular features are disabled. Unfortunately, using this approach also disables the GPS antenna in your mobile device, so you cannot take advantage of GPS tagging for photos captured with that device, and cannot use apps such as GPSTrack to record a track log that can be synchronized with your photos later.

Therefore, my recommendation is to become familiar with the configuration settings for your mobile device, so you can disable the cellular features that can lead to high data charges without disabling the GPS receiver that enables the option to record location information with photos captured on a mobile device or through the use of a track log.

In the case of the iPhone, for example, you can go into the Cellular section of the Settings app and disable Cellular Data as well as Roaming. By doing so, you can ensure you will not incur charges for cellular data, while still being able to track your location using the GPS receiver built into your phone.