In a word: Yes.
When I wrote The Digital Zone System: Taking Control from Capture to Print in 2012, the concept of luminance, or luminosity masks was still relatively new. Tony Kuyper was the one who really introduced the concept to photographers back in 2006. Not a lot of photographers were aware of the concept, or the power that the technique gave them in editing their photos. Since then, several others have written and blogged about the technique.
Continue reading →Many photographers travel for both work and pleasure.
Much of the time the travel is temporary. A week, or so of vacation. A few days, or a week traveling on an assignment. Managing images in these situations isn’t usually that difficult. You take along a laptop, perhaps an external hard drive, or two. Generally editing is kept to a minimum until back home.
Continue reading →Go grab some snacks and your preferred beverage because this one will be somewhat lengthy.
In the digital era of photography, interest in astrophotography has really gone <ahem> sky high. The relative ease of capturing and processing hundreds of photos to create compelling star trail images and dynamic shots of the Milky Way has helped propel interest in the genre. Nightscapes are very popular and are beautiful to look at. Darkness only exists in our minds. There is plenty of light at night and lots of great photos to be made.
In this article, I’m going to concentrate specifically on the Moon.
A couple years ago, a client engaged me to do a really fun and exciting project. It was a road widening in Kitchener. On the face, that doesn’t seem too exciting. What is fun is that the design included many elements that evoked the industrial and manufacturing history of the city.
Continue reading →A client engaged me to photograph an urban park/trail design and construction project they did for a community in the northern Greater Toronto Area.
A highlight of the project is the metal sculpture at the trail head. It’s a skeleton of a boat, invoking the maritime heritage of the town. Continue reading →
I was engaged by a client that had done a redesign at a radio station – all of the office areas, public spaces and broadcast studios.
If you have ever been in a radio broadcast studio, these are not large spaces. The lighting is typically not great because it doesn’t need to be. This can present a challenge to photograph. Continue reading →
The discussion of editing has been left till now because it is, to me, of lesser importance than the rest. But it is also logically what follows what has come before it. Only after we have been out taking pictures do we begin the work of editing. It is for that reason, as well, that the next section on telling stories through a body of work comes after this one. It is only after we have culled and edited that we can begin to curate the finished photos into a coherent story, ready to show to others. Continue reading →
Photography, perhaps more than any other endeavour is replete with the equivalent of ‘get rich quick’ schemes. There are any number of software companies and individual photographers hawking ‘one click fix’ solutions. From snapshot to amazing shot-type books and tutorials. Action sets that will set your heart a flutter at the ease with which a couple mouse clicks will make your photo a masterpiece. Continue reading →
If you read the musings here you’ll know that I like to co-opt song titles and lyrics. So, with a nod to Edwin Starr we’re going to talk about the idea of ‘workflow’.
What is workflow? It’s a term used a lot in photography but is it a term that people generally know what it means? Continue reading →
Image restoration is a task that has been made easier in some ways with digital tools but even though it may be easier, it’s still not a 5 minute exercise as some may want to lead you to believe. In a past article I discussed the process of recreating a photo of a mural that had been damaged. That project took about 9 hours of editing time to complete.
A lot of the commercial work I do is architectural. Recently, I was hired by an architectural firm to shoot several of their projects. One of those projects was a nearly 200 year old building. As you might expect with a building that old, there had been modifications done, there had been additions, there had been repairs and there had been settling over time. The work my client had done was converting the structure from industrial to mixed use commercial/residential. This included work on the exterior, cleaning up the brickwork, adding new – but period looking – detail and the design work on the interior.
I was hired by an architectural firm to photograph four mural panels at a local college. The architects had been engaged to do some redesign work at the school. Part of the redesign included covering up the murals. The murals are mixed media pieces and include some relief elements on two of the panels.
In a recent article we looked at using luminance and density masks as a tool for sharpening images. Today we’re going to look at using luminance masks as a tool for blending images to extend dynamic range. It’s a very slick trick and much easier than manual blending using layer masks and painting in the image. Continue reading →
There are countless ways to sharpen an image. Unsharp Mask, Smart Sharpen, High Pass. A while back I wrote an article on sharpening using Smart Objects to make your sharpening more versatile. Today we’re going to look at a different way of doing creative sharpening using luminance and density masks. Continue reading →
As many know by now, Adobe has released the first public beta version of Lightroom 4. For those not familiar, Lightroom is Adobe’s terrific Digital Asset Management/Image Editing application. Each version has been stronger than the previous and LR4 is no different. I’m going to cover a couple of the major changes in this article but won’t go into all of the new features. Continue reading →
….. if that is the question then the answer is: Bracket. At least if you want the best of what HDR can give you.
There’s still a belief in some circles that taking a single image, making multiple copies of it with adjusted exposure settings and tossing those ‘fake brackets’ into the HDR cooker will produce different and better results than just tonemapping a single image. Some also think it’s as good as shooting an in camera bracket. Let’s dispell an HDR myth, shall we? Continue reading →
There are many ways to go about sharpening digital images. Some very simple, others very complex. Some better than others. One of my personal favourites is the High Pass method which I wrote about in an earlier tutorial.
Something that seems nearly universal is the desire for ‘editable’ sharpening. That is, being able to go back and change it in the future if desired. The simple, straightforward methods like Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen don’t allow this. There are several ways to have adjustable sharpening; however, and we’ll talk briefly about a few of them and in more detail on one in particular. Continue reading →
The folks at HDRSoft released a new version of their HDR software recently. As a beta tester for the software I got to see some of the new features during development and there’s some really good stuff in this update.
The first thing that’s evident is the speed. The speed increase was introduced with v4.0 a few months ago. PM has never been sluggish but the uptick in the new version is certainly welcomed. Continue reading →
In the last instalment, we looked at a millenia-old compositional tool called the Golden Mean. This time we’re going to look at one that’s popular more in photography and also can be a bit controversial. It’s called The Rule of Thirds. I know, there’s that nasty “rule” word. Despite the name, again, think of it as a guideline rather than a hard and fast rule. The reason it’s one of the most basic is because it’s so simple to implement. The reason it’s so controversial is because some treat it like a dogmatic edict from the Mount Olympus of Photographic Art and think every image must adhere to it without wavering in the slightest. The simple part is true. The dogmatic edict part is pure codswallop. Or as some of my UK friends would say, bollocks. Continue reading →
We’ve talked about how various colours convert to different shades of grey in earlier instalments of this article series. We’ve also talked about the importance of certain colours in greyscale and about the different components that make up colour – and thus grey – in the third part of the series.
In this part of the series, we’re going to take a look at something more subtle but nonetheless relevant. That’s white balance. Can the choice of white balance affect a conversion from colour to black & white? It definitely can. This is something that film shooters have known for years, that the colour of the light in the scene would have an impact on the effect of colour contrast filters used on the lens and rendered on the film. Intuitively it makes sense. Continue reading →
