Season’s
Greetings
And Best Wishes During
the Holiday Season.
I will be “off the air” for most of the holiday season but will have limited email access. So if you have any questions about classes, and especially the upcoming Image Management and Raw Workflow Workshop in early January, please send an email and I’ll be in contact soon.
The first digital darkroom tool to be popularized was stitching software that blends together a series of overlapping captures. The most common use of stitching software is in making panoramic images. The image below, the interior trusses of Hayes-Clark Covered Bridge in Chester County Pa., would have been virtually impossible without stitching software.
(Sorry for the small size but with the limited width this is as large as I could make it.)
Stitching software can also be used to create very high resolution images. Instead of capturing a single image with a WA lens a photographer captures the same scene as a series of images in matrix form with a telephoto lens. For example he could capture three rows of four images each, overlapping sides and tops; and stitch them together to form a high resolution image (on the order of 6x larger) in the same format, 3×2, as the single capture. When creating both panos and high resolution images, the stitching software is used pretty much the same way. The difference is the photographer’s intent when the capture was made.
The next tool that photographers starting using in the digital darkroom was focus bracketing Read more »
As I wrote this it went from a quick and simple post into one that’s too big for a single post so I’m going to spilt this into 2 posts. Part 2 will come tomorrow.
With that headline all of the engineers and matamaticians out there must be thinking I’ve gone off the deep end. Well of course we’re not breaking the Laws of Physics because …. well …. because they are the Laws of Physics and cannot be broken. This is simply a way of organizing three somewhat disparate digital photography techniques into one bucket. So it’s not so much a tip or anything that you can use directly but simply a different way of thinking of things.
Back in film days, before desk top scanners, there were four areas that photographers were limited in by the physics of light and lenses. They struggled to overcome these limitations:
Since we had such good fortune at Zebriskie Point the night before (see Day 1) we decided to give it a try for sunrise the next morning. The contrast range was so high (even with a 3 stop grad) that I mostly shot HDRs. Back home I batch process them in Photomatix Pro and generate three files for each bracket sequence: Tone Mapped, Detail Enhancer, and Exposure Fusion (this a type of exposure blending while the first two are different ways to do the HDR tone mapping). I then look at the files. Sometimes I like one of the three and will further process it in Photoshop. But most of the time I will like one section of the scene from one file and like another file for the rest of the scene. I’ve not figured out under what circumstances which way of processing will produce the best results. That’s why I generate all three versions.
When most people think of brushes in Photoshop they think of a tool that allows you to paint new pixels onto a layer. And I use the Brush Tool a lot to paint on a layer mask to hide/black (or reveal/white) part of that layer. But the Brusch Tool is not the only tool to use brushes. They are common among many of Photoshop’s tools; for example, the heal/clone tools, the quick selection tool, and the dodge/burn tools. Since they are used a lot, it’s good to have a number of ways to modify their attributes. Read more »
A couple of years ago the most frequent answer to that question would have been 1024×768 pixels. Nowadays, with wide screen LCD monitors, the answer to that question is going to be something like 1680×1050 pixels. And even wider for HD LCD displays, something like 1920×1080.
So how do you find out the resolution of the display you are using. On a Windows platform, right click on an empty portion of your desk top and select Properties from the drop down menu. In the Properties Dialog select the Settings tab. In the middle left of that tab you will see a section called Screen Resolution. The slider below will let you change your display resolution. If you want to change your display resolution from 1280×768 pixels to 1680×1050 pixels this is where you can do that (assuming that the version of the OS you are running supports it). Note that the slider that changes the number of pixels in each direction is call Screen Resolution.
But wait a minute, Read more »
In Part 1 of this series on White Balance we defined WB and in Part 2 talked about using WB to control the colors in our images. If the WB setting matches the color temperature of the light hitting our scene we would get accurate rendering of the colors in the scene. And if the camera WB setting did not match the color temperature of our light source the image would be rendered with a color cast. And that as creative we photographers sometimes want to purposely shift the colors in the image to control the emotional content of the image.
You may have noticed that in Part 1 the example images had the WB set at the time of capture and that the example images in Part 2 had the WB adjusted during post processing (during the raw conversion step). This leads to the question, “What is the best time to set WB and are there any advantages to doing it during capture or in post production?” The answer is that it depends on the file format you are capturing your images in, jpg or raw. But before we answer the question lets take a look at the differences between jpg files and raw files. Read more »
In an earlier post I showed one of my favorite images from my recent trip to Death Valley. I thought I would start a series where I shared some images from each day and gave a bit of back story for each image.
We flew into Las Vagas, picked up a high clearance vehicle, and drove to Death Valley. Read more »
