tutorials

3 posts

Photo Basics – White Balance

Do you want your whites their whitest?  Use Tidy Det…. no, wait, wrong commercial.  Do you want your whites their whitest?  Use White Balance.  That’s better.  OK, I’ll stop with the bad humour now.

In this instalment of the ongoing Photo Basics series, we’re going to look at a camera control that can be confusing but really shouldn’t be:  White Balance.  In very simple terms, white balance is used to keep white things white.  Or grey things grey.  And all other colours their ‘proper’ colour too.  Note that I’ve highlighted the word ‘proper’.  We’ll come back to that later in the article.  Essentially white balance is used to maintain a ‘neutral’ colour balance.  Continue reading

HDR Tutorial

After completing the review series on various HDR software programs and talking about how well each could create realistic and grunge/surrealistic results, I figured it might be appropriate to put together a more in depth tutorial on how the results were obtained as well as some of my own, personal, approaches to shooting and editing for HDR.

The tutorial will concentrate on using Photomatix from HDRSoft but the techniques discussed for using PM apply to other HDR software programs as well. The names of the individual tonemapping operators may be different but the functionalities are much the same. Continue reading