(Part 2) Best products from r/postprocessing

I just bought this one and have been pretty happy with it. Dell UltraSharp U2515Hx 25" Screen LED-Lit Monitor, Black https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M0LDXTL/

Scott Kelby's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book for Digital Photographers is an excellent resource and is well worth the $30.

https://www.amazon.com/Its-Purple-Someones-Gonna-Die/dp/0240806883 Check out this book, it's a super cool resource on colors and their meanings in cultures through the world.

The first image is a sparkler, the second could be something as simple as this punk hair toy. One of the tools I use to light paint is a $30 LED brick that works great.

Setup a tripod, depending on your light source and the object you're lighting it will be 1-30+ seconds. If you're using a model they've got to sit very still for as long as the light is interacting with them.

This will probably affect the colors that you see, but what really helps me with extended monitor viewing are these:

Gunnar glasses

Skin

How to cheat in photoshop

Most things by this publisher are great resources. I recommend the one on color management, and camera raw

If you're the book reading type, I can highly recommend 'Light Science & Magic'. It'll help you grasp the fundamentals of light and how it works and can be manipulated.

Non affiliate Amazon Link

The one I do my coloring on is a HP Z22i. I wanted to get a better monitor and calibrate it for color and use this for UI. But based on what people are saying I may just be able to calibrate this one and call it a day? Any thoughts?

Looks like the same price at amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/Datacolor-Spyder5PRO-Designed-Photographers-Designers/dp/B00UBSL31Q/

Thinking that you might benefit from one of these.

Calibrate, then look at your previous attempts.

You WB is off. Both the temp and the hue look out of whack. Get a gray card like this and be sure to take a shot of it under the lighting conditions before your shoot. Then set the WB from that once you start processing. It will make all you colors be more true.

http://www.moderncolorworkflow.com/dan-margulis

https://www.amazon.com/Photoshop-LAB-Color-Adventures-Colorspace/dp/0321356780

Both are good books on color, color correction and color theory.

If you learn better from books than online tutorials, this book taught me how to use Curves and you can buy it used for 9 cents plus shipping: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Photoshop-Classic-Guide-Correction/dp/0471403997/ref=pd_sim_b_8?ie=UTF8&refRID=03VVNKZQBM42Z7J110NB

I believe this guy has one of those GoPro mouth mounts. Something like this maybe?

Looks like there is room for 1 additional stick of ram, you can get something like this to double the amount available: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-PC3L-12800-SODIMM-204-Pin-CT102464BF160B/dp/B006YG8X9Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511889953&sr=8-1&keywords=ddr3l1600+sdram

Though, what you could do is opening up the task manager when you have Spotify and LR/PS open and see how much RAM you have left. This will tell you if RAM is indeed a problem (I suspect it is, as LR/PS uses a lot of RAM).

Another contributor to the issue would be the 1TB HDD. Usually laptop hard drives are spin slower and thus the lower read/write speeds. When your laptop runs out of memory, Windows will attempt to use your hard drive as memory swap, since the hard drive is slow as well then you are waiting a long time and Spotify would stutter due to lack of memory and slow read/write.

So here's what you could do:

1. Add an additional 8GB of RAM.
   
   
2. Purchase a SSD, something like (I'm not familiar with UK prices, may want to shop around):https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00P73B1E4/ref=twister_B013ZJ4EWC?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
   
   
3. If you do get the SSD, what do you do with the 1TB that you had before? Two options: external enclosure, so you can use it as a portable, or get rid of your DVD drive and buy an adapter to put your 1TB drive where your DVD drive used to be.
   
   With the suggestions above, you'll end up spending probably close to your $300 limit, but no new laptop :(. I did have a look on Amazon and the closest laptop that's got 16GBs of RAM and 512GB SSD is selling for about $800, though it does have better graphics card and CPU. Though refurbished laptops are selling for $450 to $700, maybe you can consider those, but be wary of the warranty.

Get one of these. It will help.

Honestly pretty much any modern IPS display nowadays from a reputable brand will be fine, especially for non-professional work. Dell, LG, BenQ are the names you'll see most often at a consumer level.

Another thing to keep in mind is resolution. A lot of people have issues with 1920x1080 on anything larger than a 25" monitor because the individual pixels start to become more noticeable. Unfortunately a jump in resolution also means a jump in price though.

I'm currently rocking this but I got it on sale a couple months ago.

"Best way" is to avoid them in the first place.

If you don't want reflections, don't shoot through glass.

Or, consider that glass has a little of the characteristic called 'direct reflection'. The reflections that you see, are 'direct' reflections of the light sources that fall within the family of angles (angle of incidence equals angle of reflection). So you could place the camera (or lights) so that the lights are outside the family of angles, thus the reflections wouldn't be in the photo. Or you could eliminate or block the light sources from being able to fall on the reflective surface.

Next, you could try using a polarizing filter, which helps to remove polarized direct reflection. This may or may not help, depending on the surface you have. In this case it would probably help, but may not completely eliminate the reflections from showing up in the shot.

Light: Science & Magic

If all else fails...I guess you can try to fix it in post.

Maybe a couple of these?

Start with a 30 day trial of Lightroom 4 and purchase this book