The clipping paths have been completed. The sample sent to the client was approved with high marks. Ahhhhhhh. Now to relax at a gala!

Belinda and I methodically made our way through the 91 compound clipping paths. Now our client will be able to use the file with a white background and their product on a white (shiny) mannequin. They can select the next layer up and have an image of the white mannequin+their product on a transparent background, with an embedded clipping path, or they can go to the next layer up and have an image of their product sitting on a transparent background with no mannequin ---- but with a very nice, attendant clipping path.

It takes more time when the mannequin needs a few little scuff marks retouched, etc.

I made good use of the curvature pen tool and also the "select and refine" option.

I finished the project in enough time to have a late lunch, to pack and to head downtown for a gala at the JW Marriott Hotel for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Austin.

The glamorous life of a photographer....

Tonight I'm packing a dedicated (TTL) Godox flash for Panasonic/Olympus, a GH5 with the 12-100mm lens and a bunch of batteries. Too set in my ways not to bring along a back-up rig so I've also packed a G85, the small and lightweight 12-60mm lens and an extra manual flash. And again, batteries for all.

At least business is brisk.

VSL Reader Help Requested. Clipping paths get more complicated in latest PhotoShop.

This is a measured plea for help. By measured I mean that I am not yet panicky but a bit frustrated. Maybe you can help with a clearer workflow for me.

Stuff I think I know:

There is no substitute for hand drawn paths with bezier curves for documents that will go to print.

There is no way to automate complex selections.

White on white is its own problem.

I know how to use the pen tool and how to create a path. In previous versions of PhotoShop, if you needed compound clipping paths (paths within a path or multiple paths in a file) you could draw one path hit the shift key and begin another path. And another. And another. Then you could click on each path and they would all work in concert to create a clipping path.

Not so anymore. Now I can create a new selection, see it in the work path icon (in the paths palette) but when I go to select the multiple paths I only get the first path or a subsequent path as my selection and not the multiple paths.

A good example would be a product with many holes through which you can see the background. In preparing for printer files each hole would have to be part of the overall clipping path. The primary clipping path would be the whole product (to clip it from the background) but I would need to create smaller clipped areas for each of the holes as part of the working path.

This is where I am stumbling. Not every file has these needs but enough of them do to make me grit my teeth.

My partner is working on an older version of PS and has no issue whatsoever producing as many smaller clipped areas inside the overall clipping path. None at all.

If you understand the clipping path workflow in PS CC 2017 I'd love to have the largess of your greater skill and brainpower.

Help?

P.S. I've searched for tutorials for hours. I can composite a fashion model on a background now but only if the composite doesn't require me to make paths inside of paths..... grrrrrrr. KT

Help us all understand this admittedly specialized part of the new PhotoShop!

Back into the weeds of commerce. Clipping path saturation!

I've written enough about cameras this week. You would think I'm a review site! So I'll write instead about what I'm working on right now in the glamorous and scintillating world of commercial photography. You'll no doubt be so jealous that you'll walk away from your job as chief off shore banking expert at Goldman Sachs to toss your hat in the golden ring of product photography. One day, you to might know the pleasure and satisfaction of ..... the nuts and bolts of photography.

Last Thurs. and Fri. I set up the studio and completed the principal photography for an international client whose H.Q. is located in Germany. Their north American headquarters is here in Austin. I was tasked with photographing 24 medical products displayed on a (shiny) white mannequin (top half of thebody...) against a white background.

We had a product manager, an project manager, a technical specialist to make sure the products were correctly fitted to the mannequin, as well as a person who was there to learn how these kinds of shoots are done so she can supervise her own projects in a different, but related, department. I made coffee and Belinda baked a loaf of pumpkin bread the night before. We also had fresh bagels and creme cheese as assorted fruit. We want to keep our clients well fed.

The products were things like body braces and immobilizing medical devices that might be used for patient who had been subject to trauma or were in recovery from spinal surgeries and neck surgeries. The products were mostly black with some plastic trim pieces in white or mid-gray.

We set up a shooting table in front of a white background and covered the table with shiny white dry erase board material. Since we would need multiple angles of the mannequin+each device I put the mannequin on top of a very basic turntable after covering the turntable with bright white paper.

Exact exposure for this shoot was important because we needed to clearly separate the shiny white mannequin from the pure white background. Important because at some point some poor bastard would need to create two clipping paths per file....with over 90 files.

I used a light meter to carefully meter the background and then the plane of the subject. This is, for me, a tough metering situation since the white in the background had to go texture-less while the mannequin would have to read at about 90% even when printed on so-so four color press paper stock. But I would also have to preserve good, ample detail in the blacks!

We worked our way through all the products and kept notes that will tie each product to a set of filenames/numbers. At each step we got the client's approval and, at the end I had that exhilarating feeling that we'd gotten through the project without a single hiccup. The files were shot simultaneously on two SD cards (because I presumed I had jinxed myself earlier by ragging on the idea of duplicate card slots and redundant back-ups) and immediately ingested into Lightroom with folders created across two hard drives. All that remained for my part of the project would be to go through and clean up the files a bit, make sure they all matched for color (never varied) and tonality, and to quality check them for focus.

Then I asked the project manager how the in-house designer would like the files delivered. What format would she need in order to facilitate the creation of clipping paths? Big Tiffs? .PSDs? Should I deliver them on memory sticks? Add them to a small hard drive that we use to shuttle big files? Upload them to an FTP address? They had always done the clipping paths in the past.

Maybe the designer was overloaded or overbooked. I might never know... but the project manager asked me if I could do the clipping paths. Being customer service oriented (meaning I want my clients to be happy so they'll: A. Pay me. and, B. Use me again), I said "Sure."

Then he gave me the details. We would need one masked layer with just the mannequin with product on a transparent background. We would need a second layer with just the product (no mannequin), complete with a clipping path for the product. In this way the client could easily drop the mannequin+product into a catalog or just grab the clipped product layer alone and pull that into some other use.

What that means to me is very precise selection (via pen tool) for the overall separation from the background. This selection would go through the refined edge process in PhotoShop and I would select "selection with layer mask" in the "select and mask" menu. Then I would duplicate that layer and, again using the selection tool, I would create a clipping path in the top layer around the solo product. I would then select and inverse the path to drop out the rest of the background (including the mannequin) from just this layer. Finally, I would save the entire file in layers and deliver it as (client preference?) a layered Tiff or .PSD file. Uncompressed the Tiff files done in this fashion; with layers, weigh in at 126 megabytes per. That will give me about 11.5 gigabytes of deliverables.

I did a sample file today and sent it along to the client to get confirmation that we are on the "same page" and that this is indeed their preferred methodology. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes to do each file which means we have about three ten hour days of time in front of the computer to celebrate!!! Of course it's all billable time but it's hardly as captivating as sitting around on Maui with a bunch of bikini models, sipping Cuba Librés and waiting for the light to get neat...

If you wonder why I fantasize about cameras and lenses too often it's probably a direct result of enforced captivity...and a convenient conduit to the internet.

Before all you smart guys rush to tell me all about some clipping services in India that will do this stuff for a song please let me interject that I've been down that road a couple of times and each time I rushed to re-do the work before delivering it to my clients. There is a difference between a ho-hum factory clipping path and careful precision. If you have the right clients then the clients will know. Because, you know, the client's art directors and designers know just as much about good clipping paths as we do....

My workaround is to split the job with my art director/designer wife/partner and share the excitement!!!
Of course, she'll charge me her regular rate but I know her paths will be immaculate and unimpeachable. And that's about all you can ask for in 2017.

Excited? Wanna join in the fun? If you just adore doing clipping paths and need a nice hobby I can send you a folder full of files just waiting to be clipped. And if you own an ad agency in Toronto and can think of a better method than the one I outlined I can send you the files instead... :-)

And that's what we're doing here in the world headquarters for the rest of the week. Enjoying the amazing benefits of the freelance lifestyle --- tied to my desk chair.

Maybe creativity and technology exist on a spectrum. The further you go to one side the more stuff becomes art. The further you go to the other side.....

I tend to vacillate like a sine wave between camera equipment with very high resolution and lots and lots of controls, and gear that some might consider pedestrian or incapable of producing the good results under all circumstances. I bounced from a Nikon D810 to a super zoom camera. From a Sony A7Rii to a gaggle of pygmy-sensored Panasonic cameras. It's never a completely conscious decision but I think I've worked out what my motivation is for the changing systems. 

I buy a high performance, do-everything camera and a bag full of choice lenses because I buy into the fear that most photographers experience. It comes from the idea that if your work isn't strong enough, or interesting enough, then maybe it's your gear that's holding you back. Bad, faulty logic but some of us are highly susceptible to it.

So I splash out hard cash to buy (or re-buy) whatever the best camera of the moment is and I start using it for everything. But the process becomes too routine and too easy. You can routinely fuck up and the camera will save you. You get sloppy. You get complacent. You know that if you just shoot raw with something like an A7Rii all you have to do it get stuff reasonable in focus and the rest you can fix after the fact. Did your boredom with the gear lead you to ignore technique and now you have overexposed frames? No problem, your miracle camera can pull down exposure at least a stop if you shot raw. Were you too busy oggling the models to read the exposure meter? Did you just default to auto because it's all so damn easy? No problem, you can push that underexposed frame up three stops, thanks to Sony sensors (Don't try this at home with Canon cameras....).  And the bottom line is that aesthetically you begin to play to the camera's strengths. Everything is a showcase for dynamic range or infinite detail or ultra-bokeh-ism.

Eventually the cameras become boring and the certainty of knowing you are covered and can produce something that's at least acceptable to a client sucks the nervous energy, the fear of failure, out of the project and makes work just about the work. At some point I get depressed reading that we're all shooting with the alpha---omega of cameras and I crave some fear and some creative adrenaline and some challenge. And that's when the big purge kicks in. The other side of the sine wave. 

I dump all the bourgeoise "safe" and "reliable" gear and start pressing cameras like the RX10iii into service. Or I grab a lens that's nearly as old as I am and put it on the front of a dinky frame camera and try, by sheer force of will, to make that combination make work that's as good as the stuff I can do blindfolded with the $3200 cameras. But more interesting in its imperfections. I think humans, in general, like challenges. If you are operating well above a subsistence/survival level I think you like to show that the art comes from you and not the camera.  That your point of view is more important than the pedigree of your glass. That you don't need a crutch to make interesting or fun photographs. 

That's when I grab the >$1,000 "do everything" compact camera and try to make it sing like a Hasselblad. Because --- if I can make good work with something small and cheap and non-professional it means that the idea worked or the style worked or, even, the point-of-view had value that outweighed the much more mundane idea of perfection. 

When I'm on this side of the sine wave I generally feel that "perfect" cameras and "state of the art" cameras are for pussies. Until I come across a client with a hand full of purchase orders and a bunch of projects to do. Then the fear kicks back in and I succumb to my own insecurities and head out looking for the next perfect camera. Afraid to risk the promise of cash just to champion a Quixotic quest with lesser cameras.  But in the back of my mind I know I'll be back at the edge of the envelope, down the road. A few months later. Maybe a year...

The same thing goes for the actual work. I'll be busy for weeks at a time, sitting in the studio post processing late into the night, shooting all day. And the more I work the more I wish I had time just to do my own art. But then, when work slows down or stops, I feel unmoored from my business connections. I convince myself I may never bring in another job. I start to fear the void. And then instead of doing my "art" I get busy marketing so I can hook the next tranche of paying work. Which makes me anxious to do my own work all over again....It's a different version of the vicious circle I described above. But it's the best observation I can self-apply in the moment. Go figure...

When I went downtown to see the new library I took a cheap body and two ancient lenses. Here's what I saw...

First, a program note. I was more or less kidding when I wrote my October 28th post indicating that I might lunge for a Fuji camera. I'm not. The X-Pro-2 is very pretty but I'm not convinced that the system offers anything I don't already have. You can stop cautioning me against the purchase, or, conversely, you can stop goading me to give it a try. The next camera on my list of "wants" doesn't exist yet but will be the Panasonic GX9. And I'll probably toss Olympus lenses on the front of it.

Today's info: I love the latest Panasonic cameras and the coolest Olympus Pro lenses but sometimes you gotta go lower tech just to remind yourself that it's your time and energy that make the photographs, not the provenance of the camera and lens in you hands. Since my options are now much more limited (inventory reduction...) I grabbed my G85 and two ancient Olympus half frame lenses (with adapters), the 20mm f3.5 and the 40mm f1.4. The first half of the post is almost entirely shot with the 20mm f3.5. The second half was almost entirely shot with the 40mm f1.4. There's no real takeaway here other than the idea that getting out and shooting trumps sitting at home with cutting edge glass and a computer screen in front of you. 

I will say that the older lenses have a different (heavier) look to the files they create. 

  40mm below....