Here are a few more of your questions from twitter, keep them coming these are great! If you aren’t following us on twitter, check us out here: http://www.twitter.com/digitalphotobuz. Also you can view our last series of Q and A here: Photographer’s Questions and Answers

Okay, I have another question I was wondering how do you take pictures in direct sunlight? I’m not sure if it’s exactly direct sunlight. Here are some examples: 1. http://bit.ly/74d2d4 2. http://bit.ly/7Mjgq6 3. http://bit.ly/6PujaN 4. http://bit.ly/6dU36A

These shots or type of look are actually fairly simple from a lighting perspective. They are shots done in the full sun only with available light that is at the subjects back.
If you want some lens flare in the shot the sun has to be low enough to be included in the frame. The main part about getting a shot with this feel to it is getting your exposure right, you have to zoom in tight on the subject and get your exposure. Then lock that in or set your camera to manual at that exposure. That way the brightness of the background won’t fool your camera’s meter. You want the subject to be exposed correctly and then the background can blow out.

Here is a shot I recently did with this type of backlight (you can also see a article we have on backlighting here: Getting creative with natural light

The other part to these images is in the post production. In the example I have above I wanted that beautiful yellow light to really shine and add a glow to the image so I actually enhanced the color and saturation slightly. In the images referenced in the question you would want to bring down your saturation, look at the models skin tone in the examples. The color is very muted. So to get this just bring down your saturation (you might want to also tweek the levels or curves to get the contrast to your liking)
Here is the same shot above but taking the saturation down a bit:

Omg where do I start. Can u make eyes pop if u didn’t shoot in raw?

Making someone’s eyes pop really isn’t a question of RAW vs Jpeg, its really in the lighting of the shot. Shooting in RAW in my opinion is always a good idea, you are capturing all of the possible data with your camera instead of having your camera compress the photo and basically throw away data. Also as technology improves and RAW processing gets better you can always go back to your RAW files and improve them if needed. With the low cost of hard drives I always suggest shooting in RAW.

But back to the original question about making the eyes pop. You can always go into a shot in photoshop and try and lighten up the eyes to make them pop better but its always best to get the lighting right during the shoot so the eyes already have a pop to them. The most common mistake I see with some portraits is having the subjects in too dense of shade with no fill light.

Try and use a reflector to bounce some light back to your subject and fill in their eyes or use an external light for a little added fill.

We appreciate your comments and keep those questions coming! You can always leave questions in the comment field below (which we do respond to all comments) or send me a twitter message.

We got some great comments and questions via twitter the last few weeks and I want to answer them all here. Remember to shoot us over any questions or what you would like to learn more about with your photography by commenting on any post or send us a message via twitter (http://twitter.com/digitalphotobuz).

Here are some of the great questions everyone had:

Is the “tabbed” layout I see in CS4 an option in CS3?
Unfortunately no, the “tabbed” layout of CS4 was a brand new feature to CS4. For those who don’t know about the tabbed feature it’s a way to organize all of your open windows in Photoshop and merge them into one window that is tabbed (kind of like most browsers now). CS3 doesn’t have anyway of merging your windows into one view.

Why use Lightroom instead of Photoshop? What’s the difference? Can’t I make the adjustments in Ps than Lr?
Speed is really the key to using Lightroom vs. Photoshop. For my workflow (and going through thousands of images per week) I need to be able to go through and do some adjustments to all images that I shoot in a quick way but still having a lot of control over the image. Lightroom lets me edit about 95% of what I shoot and then when I really need to do a lot of work to an image I will open it up in Photoshop. Since lightroom doesn’t have the concept of layers to a file it is somewhat limited but most of my shots don’t need a lot of layers to get the results I am looking for.

Lightroom is a full featured image editor, and with lightroom 2.0 and above you can even do localized adjustments to your photo.
For each shoot we import into lightroom and then can do many adjustments (the same type of adjustments as you can in photoshop just in a much faster method). Normally I will adjust exposure, shadows/highlights, brightness, contrast, and a few other things for each image and then save as a JPEG file. I can go through a few hundred images in just about 20 minutes so much faster than a photoshop workflow.

Here are some of the main features of lightroom 2:

Also check out a great video on Lightroom’s develop module:

  
Is it possible to add blur to a certain zone in a picture using lightroom 2.5? Like using a mask or a layer in Photoshop?
You can do localized adjustments in lightroom 2.5 like using a mask in Photoshop. Most of the local adjustments you will do are with exposure, if you want to lighten or darken a certain part of an image Lightroom’s adjustment brush really works great. Lightroom’s adjustment brush basically lets you paint in a mask on the photo so you can make changes to just one specific part of the image and not effect the rest of the photo. Here are the different things you can adjust with the adjustment brush:

There isn’t a blur tool in Lightroom so if you want to blur out a certain area of a image I would still use Photoshop to have the most control. One way to get a similar effect in lightroom is to use the adjustment brush and move the clarity down real low which will in turn blur out the image. Here is a photo where I used the adjustment brush to paint around the edges of the image. Then I moved the Clarity slider in the adjustment brush menu down to 0. Here is the before and after photo:

There are a few more great questions that came in that we will answer soon!

– Mark