For those readers that are “local” to the West Chester PA area,  I’ve published the classes and workshops I’m offering this Fall and Winter. I have them listed on two interlinked web sites:

• The Workshops and Classes Page on this blog
• The It’s All About the Light Tours web site.

There are a couple of new entries: Advanced Raw Workflow with Lightroom and/or Adobe Camera Raw Workshop and a Digital Black and White class for the Chester County Night School. Both of these are relatively short, at three sessions.

And if you are not local. can’t fit a class or workshop in your schedule, or prefer learning on your own you can visit this blog’s Resource Page for book recommendations. If you buy a book , or anything for that matter, after clicking through to Amazon I get a few pennies and you get a warm felling all over because you helped keep this site going. Thanks!

This image is a composite of two different interpretations of the same raw file. One with a cool White Balance to enhance the blues and greens in the sky and foreground grass. The other version is a warm White Balance to enhance the coat of the horse. I outlined the technique for Double Processing a Single Raw File in yesterdays post.

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Last night I was getting caught up listening to some podcasts that have been setting in iTunes for a while. And I though these three audio podcast from Brooks Jensen’s Postcast on Photography and the Creative Process went along with and enhanced an idea I had for a blog posting. So I thought I would combine the two.

In my recent classes I’ve been reinforcing the idea that digital photography is a two step process: image capture followed by post processing. And if you don’t do much post processing you are doing your images a disservice. Tasteful post processing will allow you to bring out the emotions that you were experiencing while you were photographing. And this will cause the viewer of you images to become more engaged. Read more »

In previous posts in this series I’ve talked about what white balance is and how it can be used creatively, both in the field and in post production.  In Part 1 we noted that if the camera’s WB setting matches the color temperature of the light hitting the subject; white, and all other colors, will be rendered correctly. And that we could change the mood or fell of an image if we intentionally used an “incorrect” WB to render the image warmer or cooler.  But if colors can be accurate or intentionally changed which is correct? I addressed this question in Part 2 and gave two different approaches or strategies that can be used to determine which WB setting to use: Accurate and Creative. And in Part 3 we discussed how shooting in the raw format allowed for greater flexibility in setting any WB after the shoot. And that when shooting in jpg the photographer needed to pay more attention their camera’s WB setting during capture.

In this post I’m gong to discuss ways to determine what your WB should be set at. Read more »

Part 2

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.

Part 1

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:

• Image Detail (Resolution)
• Angle of View
• Dynamic Range
• Depth of Field

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 the first part of this series on White Balance we learned that the look, feel, and/or mood on an image can be changed by using different WB settings. Here are three different versions of the same image:
                  

The original is a raw file shot with the camera’s WB set to Auto. The center version was converted from the raw file using a setting of “As Shot”. And this pretty much matches the gray color of the overcast day when this image was made. The other two are from the same raw file but the one on the left had a much cooler WB set and the one on the right had a much warmer WB set during conversion. These images all have a different mood to them. So you may ask, which one is correct?

When it comes to selecting a WB there are two very different strategies or approaches that can be followed: Read more »