Selective Color Removal, How to Use Layer Masks to Remove Part of a Layer

Lyn Marie

I was processing this image of Lyn Marie in Photoshop and the longer I looked at it the more I decided the color of the door frames, carpet, and walls took away from her colorful clothing. It made sense to me to remove all color from the image except Lyn Marie. In this tutorial I will show you how to do that. The simplest approach was to create a black and white layer on top, and remove part of that layer so you can see the color layer of Lyn Marie underneath.

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Photoshop’s Easy to Use Background Removal Tool

Nicole, casual portrait, Grove City Ohio, May 7, 2018.

Seven years ago, the Graceland University Choir (from Lamoni Iowa) was on tour and I caught their performance at a church in Grove City Ohio. I was in the lobby taking casual portraits of the choir. This young women happened to step into the sunlight that was streaming through a lobby window, making for wonderful, warm “short side” lighting.  Short side lighting means the light is shining on the side of the face that is away from the camera.

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To Book Ahead, or Not?

Motel rooms in Ludington Michigan.

Last summer I went to Michigan on a photo trip. I did not book any rooms in advance. Why?  Flexibility. What if the conditions were so good at Trillium Ravine Nature Preserve (SW Michigan) that I wanted to stay another day? What if a photo location didn’t pan out and I wanted to move on much earlier than I had planned? The point is, I often don’t know where I will stay overnight until late in the afternoon.

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Total Photos vs Choosing “Selects”: What Is Your Percentage of Keepers?

The Conference Chamber, The Auditorium, Independence Missouri. My favorite image of the morning.

I was photographing a Communion service at a church conference in Missouri using two DSLR cameras and an iPhone. All told, during this one service and the short time before and after, I created 354 images.  So how many “selects” did I pick?  When an editor asks you for “selects” from an event, that means they want your best images in chronological order. The editor will narrow that down even further when deciding which images to publish. Several photographers were covering this event as a team so I didn’t have to worry about capturing everything. This article explores the selection process between taking the photos and the final published images.

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Blue-winged Teal

Blue-winged Teal

I take our dog for regular walks at our local lakes.  I watch the waterfowl come and go with the seasons.  I always have my “toy” camera gear with me, just in case (link below). For the last two weeks I watched the number of Blue-winged Teal slowly drop from 54 to 11. I wanted a photograph but they were always way out in the lake and too far away for a good image. And then it happened.

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Loons, Seney National Wildlife Refuge, and the Return of ABJ

Loon, Seney National Wildlife Refuge, July 1, 2019.

Seney National Wildlife Refuge is one of my favorite places on the planet. Loons arrive every year in the spring, one of the many reasons to go to Seney. Not only are they fun to watch and photograph, there is nothing quite like hearing the call of a loon. Seney is in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula just north of Germfask.  As an added bonus, ABJ has returned once again to Seney this spring. More about him later.

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Graceland University Symphonic Band Concert – April 18, 2025

Jack Ergo, pianist, Graceland University Symphonic Band Concert

After 24 years at Graceland University, Jack Ergo is retiring, so this is his last performance with the band as a faculty member.  Parker Worden, the band director, planned the concert as a tribute to Jack. This is a selection of photos from the concert.

Click any of the images to see a larger version.

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Happy Birthday, John Muir!

John Muir

John Muir

Today is John Muir’s birthday! He was born April 21, 1838. He had a profound influence on how Americans viewed our wild lands and his influence led to the establishment of many of our National Parks and other protected lands. He was nicknamed “The Father of our National Parks”. Tomorrow, April 22, is also Earth Day, so I am combining the two in this article.

Here are photos from some of my favorite national and state parks along with quotes from John Muir.

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Living Art Studios Dance Recital, Spring 2025

Dance Recital, Living Art Studios

One of the highlights of the year in Lamoni Iowa is the annual spring dance recital featuring the dance students at Living Art Studios. The award-winning Graceland University Gadets also performed. This is a selection of photos from this year’s recital.  If you want a print, you can order prints here. Ordering information is at the bottom of this page.

Click any of these photos to see a larger version.

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The Starscope Monocular, It Is The Same Old Scam

Starscope Monocular Telescope ad.

We’ve been down this road before (see the first link at the end). The scam works like this. Pick an inexpensively made product from China, jack up the price, make up ridiculous and false claims about the quality of the product and what it can do, and sell it on dozens of web sites using ads thinly disguised as articles. Go to the internet and grab professional photographs created with high dollar professional camera gear and put the photos in the ads to give the impression the photos were made with the Chinese product. And for good measure, say in the ads that the product was designed by American or German engineers and manufactured in the U.S. or Germany. Create fake customer reviews to go in the ads, and for good measure, create fake reviews sites to endorse the quality of the product.

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The Best National Parks to Photograph in Spring

 Ocotillo. Big Bend National Park. Texas.

Ocotillo. Big Bend National Park, Texas.

Which national parks are at their very best in the spring? If I could go on a fabulous spring photography trip to the national parks of my choice, all expenses paid, which ones would I pick? Here are my choices, grouped by state from west to east. This list includes the favorites I have been to and want to go back to again, plus the ones I haven’t seen and most want to photograph.

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Exposure Warning: Turn On The Blinkies

Camera LCD Display With the "Blinkies" Turned On

Camera LCD Display With The Blinkies Turned On. Washed out pixels in the photo are flashing white and black.

Some camera’s come with a highlight overexposure warning, commonly called “the blinkies”. If you have overexposed, blown out pixels, those pixels in your image will flash white and black. A quick look at the LCD image will tell you if part of your image has white, washed out, featureless pixels. If your camera has a highlight overexposure warning, I suggest you turn it on. If you see the blinkies and you don’t want washed out pixels, tone down your exposure until the blinkies go away.

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Satellite Communicators: The GPS Messaging Devices That Can Save Your Life

Garmin GPS Map 67i

You need help. You can barely move. You are far enough from the trail that no one can hear your voice. You have no cell phone signal. What do you do?

Every now and then you hear tragic stories about people who lose their lives simply because they didn’t have a cell phone signal and couldn’t call for help in an unexpected emergency. A $300 satellite communicator would have saved their lives.

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How To See and Photograph the Blood Moon Eclipse, March 13-14, 2025

Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse from Lamoni Iowa, May 15, 2022.

Don’t miss it. This total eclipse happens this Thursday-Friday, May 13-14 (depending on your time zone). This article will show you how to photograph it. To see it, just grab a lawn chair, a warm blanket, a cup of hot chocolate, and go outside and enjoy the show. A pair of binoculars adds to the show. Continue reading

Some of the Best All Purpose Photography Books

photography books

Some of my favorite all purpose photography books.

Out of hundreds of books in my photography library, these are my favorite all purpose photography books. This is a list of the books that were the most helpful to me when I took a serious interest in photography, and I continue to refer to them. These books were written back when film was king, but that makes them all the more valuable to today’s digital photographers. Some digital photography books get so bogged down in digital technical information that the heart and soul of photography gets lost. The best film photography books are about the heart and soul of photography. They talk about light and shadow, subjects and form, texture, line and shape, and visual impact – all of which also applies to digital photography.

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Winter, Great Sand Dunes National Park

Deer, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado

I usually prefer to go to Colorado in the fall to create landscape images, but I needed to be in Denver in early March anyway. So I headed south to the Great Sand Dunes and arrived February 28, 2008.  The temperature was 44 degrees, so pretty pleasant for photography. It can be much colder in late February.

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Sami Lynn, A Valentine Portrait

Sami Lynn with rose petals.
Sami Lynn with rose petals.

It was a week and a half after Valentine’s Day and most of the dozen Valentine’s Day roses in a vase on the dining room table were done and had been thrown away, but a few were still looking good. I asked Sami to lay on the floor, handed her a long stemmed rose, and I carefully arranged her hair. Then I stood up and pulled the best looking petals off of more roses and randomly dropped them on her. Some didn’t land quite right so I re-positioned a couple of them.

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Patrick Demarchelier, Fashion Photographer

Patrick Demarchelier

I recently watched The Devil Wears Prada for the first time. Fascinating and fun movie. In one scene, Amanda (Meryl Streep) the very particular and tough-as-nails editor of RUNWAY magazine says to Andy (Anne Hathaway) her new 2nd assistant, “Did Demarchelier confirm?”  Andy is clueless. So Emily (Emily Blunt), Amanda’s 1st assistant, grabs a phone and says, “I have Patrick”. I got the Demarchelier reference instantly. I am a huge fan of Patrick Demarchelier’s work. You may not recognize his name but you have probably seen his work.

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Some Days Are Amazing!

Snowy Egret Feeding

Some days are “so so”, some days are average, and some days are amazing. Summer is not my favorite time of year to photograph birds at the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, but July 14, 2016 was an amazing day. This photo of a feeding Snowy Egret was just one of many fine images from the morning. He stabbed at his prey and it came out of the water but not in his beak.

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