photography

A tutorial introduction to colour popping with tintii

Rose Street, between its namesake mosaics that welcome passers by at either end, is a quiet retreat behind the busy thoroughfare of Edinburgh’s Princes Street – boutique stores and character pubs in the shadow of the high street giants. I snapped the original photo for this exercise four years ago off the back of a 30 hour flight. You’ll forgive the washed out sky and stark contrast I hope; what I’d tried to do was draw focus to the red umbrellas in the bottom left, but the result was disappointing. Now aided by tintii, however, we can truly make those brollies pop.

tintii is a Photoshop filter plugin for selective colouring. It takes a colour photo, churns through its colour profile, and with a few quick mouse clicks from you, the user, keeps a handful of those colours while draining the rest into a black and white backdrop. It’s a commonly used technique, known variously as colour popping, selective colouring or colour selection. It’s been put to popular effect in movies such as Schindler’s List and Sin City. You’ll see it in magazines and plastered on billboards all over. The point is that tintii makes it easy, without the tedious selections and masking that characterise alternative approaches.

This tutorial will step you through basic use of the tintii plugin. Use the page numbers below to navigate to the next page to begin.

A quick request out to tintii users on flickr — any photos that you’ve put up where you’ve used tintii somewhere in the process of preparation, please tag with "tintii". What I’d like to do is get a group together soon to collect these examples together into one place. There’s a certain critical mass needed for such a group to be successful, so we’ll just start with this simple tagging scheme for now to see if there are enough of us out there.

Please drop me an email to let me know if you have tintii photos up on other websites, or even just send your work to me, it’s always great to see!

I’ve finally finished the long upload of photos from our recent trip around southern Africa — Johannesburg to Cape Town — 7,200km through South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia. I purchased a new 300mm lens for the occasion to try a bit of wildlife shooting on our game drives, and managed what I hope are some nice shots. Other challenges were trying to capture the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever witnessed, and picking just a few of so many inspiring scenes in the Namib desert, which turned out not to disappoint as the "photographer’s dream" we were told it was.

Here’s a taste, but see the photography page for the full set:

A few more photos added today from a day walk to Loch Avon, in the Cairngorms near Aviemore: