And by “strike” I definitely don’t mean in the “strike out” sense, but in the “I just struck gold” sense. The other day I posted Tricks for Shooting High-Key Macro wherein I link to a cool in-studio tutorial by Atlanta photographer Alex Koloskov. Alex and his wife run AKELstudio in Atlanta, Georgia and are now literally brain-dumping all of these great tutorials and behind-the-scenes views onto the Internet and I’m loving every minute of it.

==[caption id=“attachment_904” align=“alignright” width=“125” caption=“Genia, AKELstudio\’s Photoshop Mastermind”][/caption]==

Anyway, I really enjoyed Alex’s high-key macro behind-the-scenes and some of his in-studio video tutorials on shooting products under water (if you want to check that out you can read it here,) and then I found out that his wife, Genia, is actually the Photoshop mastermind behind all of AKELstudio’s post-production and has her own blog, too!

You may not know this about me, but my first contact with Photoshop was in my middle school’s computer lab. They had version 2.5, which was the first version that shipped for Windows and also the last version that didn’t have layers. Version 3 was shipped in 1994 and introduced layers for the first time. I have been using Photoshop on and off since then, and almost on a daily basis since version 5 or so. Needless to say, I’m sort of a Photoshop junkie. To say that I “like” Photoshop would be an understatement.

Another thing that has really excited me lately is HDR (or compressed dynamic range, as it should properly be called, but that’s a discussion for another time). I just caught wind of this article Genia posted back in June of outdoor HDR images that Alex photographed and she put together using Photomatrix Pro (my favorite HDR program, by the way, you should buy it from Amazon right now) and Photoshop.

Go and check out this HDR images. I really appreciate HDR that you can’t quite tell is HDR, though Genia does enjoy the more exaggerated HDR effects as well, which is cool, I’m into that. You can hover your mouse over each image to see one of the exposures from the “before” that contributed to the final version.

You can do so much with Photomatix, I would highly recommend giving it a try. You can download a trial version.html from HDRsoft and if you like it, please please please buy it from Amazon so I can keep paying my web hosting bills.

High Dynamic Range Images Before and After via The Perfect Photo Blog