Post Processing Tutorial: Healing Brush and Patch Tool by Sean Armenta via Fstoppers

I have seen many tutorials on photoshop, or image retouching on the Internet over the years. I dare to say, there isn’t any which I would bookmark their site, and revisit their tutorial sets over, and over again.

That has now changed. I first came upon Sean Armenta‘s video on one of FStoppers‘ blog entries. He was featured as one of the guest to give away valuable tips on how to improve on improving your beauty shot. Now, it seems like Sean has joined Fstoppers’ team as a regular contributor on the website. That means, we will get to see his tutorial on a regular basis.

The reason why I like Sean’s tutorial is that, the video is always clear, and straight forward. He has since introduced some of the ‘alternate’ ways of achieving the effects on image retouching. Besides that, his narration throughout the video is pretty good. He’s definitely not monotonous, to me, he knows what he talks about.

I guess the fact that he’s a photographer himself, helps the course, as he could connect to photographer much better.

Anyways, here is one of his recent tutorial. It’s on post processing — how and when you could use healing brush and patch tool.

Tilt-Shift Photography

The usage of Tilt-Shift lens in modern digital photography can be interesting. Tilt-Shift lenses are commonly used in architectural photography to control perspective, and in landscape photography to get an entire scene sharp, as quoted from Wikipedia entry on Tilt-Shift Photography.)

Tilt-Shift lenses don’t come cheap. For example, among the recent Canon lenses – the Canon TS-E 17mm f/4L and Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II both are listed at MYR 8,295.00 and MYR  6,995.00 respectively (as listed in Shashinki.com). The miniature effect is pretty cool, and many have simulated the effect through processing via Photoshop, Tallboyz is one of them.

So, I thought why not giving it a try myself. So, I google some tutorial online, and experimented it myself. Here’s what I’ve got:

Allen Ang © 2010 www.allenang.com

Allen Ang © 2010 www.allenang.com

I wanted to snap a better composition, from a better vantage point, to try this technique out, but, I decided to grab a sample from my archive to try first. I shot this piece in September 2009, during the mid-autumn festival (aka Mooncake Festival) at Carpenter Street, Kuching.

I wouldn’t reproduce the tutorial here, as there are a lot of comprehensive tutorials available online. Just type “Fake Tilt Shift”, and you will get plenty in the yielded search result. Here are two of the many available:

Good luck in your attempt! Happy shooting.