I am pleased to be able to offer my Creative LAB Color in Photoshop and Photoshop Backgrounds & Textures courses for standalone purchase. Each course costs $44.99, and you can have it yours for good without having to worry about subscriptions, unsubscribing, and all the rest.

The courses are available from LinkedIn Learning. As I noted, you can buy my courses individually; alternatively, you can still subscribe to the entire platform of LinkedIn courses (not just my LinkedIn Learning courses). The subscription is really a pretty good deal: you get the first month free (and can cancel at any point), and with the wealth of Photoshop course offerings it is a great way to hone your Photoshop skills.

Here’s some more information about my courses!

Photoshop Backgrounds & Textures

Click here to buy or view my course on LinkedIn Learning.

Course Description:
Turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Learn how to transform relatively straightforward photographs into distinctive visual art, using Photoshop backgrounds and textures.

In this course, photographer and digital darkroom expert Harold Davis walks through the technical specifics of adding backgrounds and textures to your Photoshop compositions, and provides the inspiration and resources you need to get fantastic results.

Learn how to provide context and “frames” with backgrounds, and use textures as nondestructive overlays to enhance the look and feel of your images. Harold shows how to use scans and photos of found objects as the basis for custom textures, and even license textures from commercial libraries.

Plus, discover a post-production workflow for the iPhone that maximizes your flexibility, mobility, and creativity, and explore four iOS apps that Harold recommends for iPhone photography.

Topics Include:

• Using blending modes, masks, and selections to build backgrounds
• Creating and sourcing backgrounds
• Creating effects with textures
• Adding textures to portraits and landscapes
• Licensing textures
• Creating texture-based effects on the iPhone

Duration: 2h 18m

Click here to view my course on LinkedIn Learning. There is a free preview. The full course is behind the paywall, but note that a free trial subscription is available for one month. Alternatively, you can buy my course as a standalone.

Creative LAB Color

Click here to view or buy my course on LinkedIn Learning. Here’s a preview:

 Photoshop: Creative Lab Color by Harold Davis

Course Description:
Explore the tools, techniques, and creative possibilities of Lab Color in Adobe Photoshop. Lab opens new opportunities for photo enhancement and creative image making, enabling you to apply contrast, sharpening, inversion, and equalization adjustments to individual LAB channels. If you want more exciting images, it’s time to explore Lab Color. In this course, Harold Davis explains how Lab compares to other color spaces and how it is implemented in Photoshop. He walks through his own professional post-production workflow for enhancing and transforming images with Lab Color. Then learn how to use Lab for more creative fun and image-making prowess with Harold’s custom Photoshop Lab action, color channels, and blending modes. Plus, learn how to leverage images in Lab for pattern making and surface design.

Topics Include:

• Converting images to Lab Color space
• Applying Curves to Lab channels
• Selective sharpening
• Inverting channels
• Making per-channel equalizations
• Using the Lab action
• Combining Lab Color with blending modes
• Making patterns with Lab images

Click here to view or buy my course on LinkedIn Learning.

As George Carlin put it in one of his most memorable routines, a house is nothing but a pile of stuff with a cover on it. In contrast, I suppose a home might be something more important than the mere stuff in a house, having to do with where the heart is. Since a home is where the heart is, it is transportable: your home is where ever your family and those you love are.

In any case, love stuff or hate it, we all seem to gather it. Here are two photos, and one variation, of some of the stuff in my house, made with a macro lens on a black background of some of our stuff. The first image shows flowers from my garden that have been drying for a while, along with shells, lichen, a sea horse, and a blue jay feather I found on a walk the other day.

Collection © Harold Davis

The next image is of a pile of elastic bands, specifically, rubber elastic bands used to keep hair under control. I’ve been telling Phyllis I would photograph these for years, and somehow she never believed I really would. Finally (far below) I made an LAB adjustment in Photoshop, by equalizing the L-channel, of the elastic band image, with somewhat surprising results.

Elastic Bands © Harold Davis

Elastic Bands – L-channel Equalization © Harold Davis

I’m very pleased that my new book, Creative Black & White, 2nd Edition, is now available. The publisher, Rocky Nook, is offering a 40% discount. Click here to buy Creative Black & White 2nd Ed directly from the publisher. Use the code “HDAVIS40” [no quotes] at checkout to apply the discount (you can also use my discount code for all other Rocky Nook books, by the way!).

Here are the links for my book on Amazon.com and on B&N as well, so the choice of supplier is yours.

If you like Creative Black & White, 2nd Edition, I would really appreciate a thoughtful review. Thanks!

Creative Black & White has been revised, substantially expanded, and brought up to date.  I’ve added entire sections, substantially enlarged the book (it is 80 pages longer than the first edition), and most of the photos are new. Every photo includes information about how it was made, both from a technical perspective, and also the story about my thinking behind the image.

Click here to buy my book from Rocky Nook (please use the HDAVIS40 discount code for your discount), here for my book on Amazon, and here on Barnes & Noble.

Nesting Bowls and a Nautilus Slice © Harold Davis

The graceful curve of the interior of the Nautilus shell is beloved by artists, and has often been a subject of my imagery. The other day, I placed a slice of a Nautilus shell showing its spiral within a series of kitchen bowls. 

X-Rays revealed the interior spirals within two intact Nautilus shells (below). An actual Nautilus shell before it has been sliced is pretty solid looking (as you can see in my photo of a whole shell on Flickr), but the x-rays don’t care about the outer, opaque casing, and reveal the inner spirals in all their glory.

Nautilus X-Rays © Harold Davis

One of my best-known Nautilus images, Nautilus in Black and White,  was captured on a light box, the back lighting accounting for the inner glow at the core of the spiral. In post-production, I inverted in LAB color, swapping white for black and black for white, and simulating a black background in the image (below).

Nautilus in Black and White © Harold Davis

Another very well-known image of mine is a Photoshop composite in which a spiral staircase (from San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center) blends, apparently seamlessly, into an enlarged Nautilus shell spiral at the bottom of the stairwell (Spirals, shown below).

Spirals © Harold Davis

Weaving with Light © Harold Davis

Recently I was asked, “Ok. I have to know what these are and how were these lovely pieces produced?”

A fair question, but one I have some ambivalence about answering. Not (as might be supposed) because I fear giving away secrets. There are no secrets anymore. Actually, I’d rather have folks immersed in an image. Not thinking about me, and certainly not thinking about my techniques.

But it is a fact that I have been working on these images for a while now, about six months, and have amassed a considerable body of work. You can check it out using these links: Bottled Light Exploration; Easy Travel to Other Planets; Earthlight; Blue on Red; Homage to Rothko; A Point of Information; Approaching Indigo; Playing with Light; Cosmic Misunderstanding; Life is Strange; More abstractions!; The Making of the Abstractions; Abstracts, and a Photographic Mystery.

Mostly, this style of image making is “a hecka” fun! I am having a blast.

Natural Bridge © Harold Davis

To get down to the nitty-gritty, I set the photography up using glasses and glass vases. There is liquid in the glassware, mostly (but not always) food color. Sometimes I use clear water in colored glass, and other times I use a fluid such as wine or maple syrup that has a color on its own.

The imagery is primarily created using strong back lighting, so each colored vessel of water casts a variety of colors on the vessels in front.

Finally, I use a macro telephoto lens, often with an added extension tube, handheld at a fast shutter speed and a wide-open aperture (f/1.8) to create very low depth-of-field photos focused very close, and capturing whatever phenomenon the light is creating.

I actually think you’d have to see the setup to believe it!

Blue Bars 1 © Harold Davis

Mostly, these are single shots, pretty straight from the camera, and with almost no serious tweaking in post-production. I like keeping things simple, and it is fast and easy not to need to spend a great deal of time in Photoshop.

But in a couple of images—think Cosmic Misunderstanding and Weaving with Light, the image at the start of this story—I’ve added Photoshop post-production doodling, photo composition, and photo-compositing of an image with itself to the mix.

After all, why not?

Blue Bars 2 © Harold Davis

Yellow Vase and Blue Vase © Harold Davis

This one was photographed on a mirror, into a standalone glass concave lens, with a smaller aperture and more depth-of-field than I usually use for these images:

Optical Wheel © Harold Davis

I am featured on episode #46 of the lively and entertaining Macro Photography Live Chat Show. Click here for the YouTube replay of the episode featuring my work recorded recently. 

Pale Garden © Harold Davis

On the hour-long show, my interlocutor, the enthusiastic Janice Sullivan, and I had a wide-ranging discussion. One topic covered was my Artist Statement, which I haven’t looked at in quite a while. It was so cool to take a look at this with fresh eyes and be able to say: Yes, this is me. This is what I aspire to be as an artist. Harold, you keep on truckin’!

Tulips X-Ray Fusion © Harold Davis

If you haven’t seen any of the videos of my presentations of my work, here are some that might interest you:

The Art of Photographing Flowers for Transparency (B&H)

Black and White in the Digital Era (2017)

A Creative Palette of Possibilities Using Topaz (2018)

An oldie-but-goldie (from 2009): the KQED-TV segment showing me at work!

Degrees of Translucency © Harold Davis

Danse Macabre and the Tree of Life © Harold Davis

Want more fantastic imagery? Check out Surreal Lady Fish, my Multiple Exposures portfolio of in-camera model photography, and a selection of Impossible composite imagery.

The Danse Macabre a/k/a “The Dance of Death” is an allegorical artistic genre of the late middle ages. The point is that no matter what our station in life, we all die. Danse Macabre images are a kind of momento mori, to remind folks of the vanity and ephemeral nature  of all earthly things.

This image is a Photoshop composite of five photos: two in-camera exposures of a model (each containing a number of exposures), a background canvas used as a texture, a skull from the Paris catacombs—and, of course, the Tree of Life from the slopes of Mount Diablo.