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- The Creative Digital Darkroom [Book Review]Today
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In this post Sime (our forum admin) reviews Creative Digital Darkroom by Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan and gives it a 9 star rating.
The Creative Digital Darkroom by Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan is a 400 page extravaganza filled with everything you could possibly want to know about the digital darkroom and the tools surrounding it. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks taking this book with me everywhere, reading a chapter here and a chapter there, making notes, and one thing I’ve learned is that I know hardly anything about my “digital workspace” by comparison to what this book teaches so very well…
Does anyone remember the smell of the darkroom? The Creative Digital Darkroom starts out just before you walked out of the darkroom and wandered into digital photography.
There is so much to take in with this book, it’s best to do it chapter at a time - I found. The book guides you step by step through pretty much everything you’ll n
- 5 Tips For Travel With Only One LensYesterday
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Whether traveling for business or just on a well deserved vacation, there are times when we all don’t feel like carrying around our full compliment of lenses, flashes and accessories. During trips like this the inner photographer in each of us starts to panic; “What if I need my wide angle lens?” “I want to capture some great close-ups” and they all too familiar “Which lens DO I take?” Right about now it’s best to tell your inner photographer to relax, everything will be ok. And then remind it of the benefits of traveling with just one lens:- Simplicity
- Only one filter size needed
- No lens changes means less dust on the sensor
- A lighter camera bag or no bag at all! (gasp!)
And I’m sure there are more to be had, but the basic fact is it’s easier to travel with just one lens sometimes. Especially if you’re squeezing some photography into a business or family trip. My own reason for traveling with just one lens stems from a three week trip to Nepal last month that included 19 days of trekking in the Himalayas with plenty of dust. After seeing quite a bit of dust on the sensor from my wife’s last trip to Nepal, I decided it was time to stick with one lens, especially when everything that came with me would need to be carried by me for over
- Turn Ho-Hum Color into WOW! with PhotoshopDecember 1
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Guest blogger Helen Bradley (from www.projectwoman.com) shows how to use the LAB color mode in Photoshop to give a punch to your photos.
I like to see lovely saturated color in my photos but sometimes the color I capture just doesn’t do justice to the subject and it isn’t what I remember the scene looked like. Boosting the color can turn a lackluster image into one that totally rocks. So, if you find that the color in your photos is lacking, here’s what I do to make it better. The process is ridiculously simple, it requires no selections to be made, and it can be recorded as a simple action. It’s my kind of fix – quick, easy and very powerful.
A word about LAB
The fix uses the LAB color space. This is not an often used color space and it isn’t available in most other programs so you won’t be able to mimic this effect in, for example, Photoshop Elements. However, LAB has been around in Photoshop for years.
In the RGB color space you work with the red, green and blue channels and in CMYK you work with cyan, magenta, yellow and black channels. In LAB you have three channels; L, a and b. The L channel is the lightness channel and, if you adjust it you adjust only the lightness in the image and you don’t change any of the color in th
- 9 Tips for Getting Backgrounds RightNovember 30
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Backgrounds present both opportunities and challenges to photographers. On the one hand they can put a subjects in context and make it stand out in a way that highlights it wonderfully - but on the other hand backgrounds can overwhelm subjects and distract from them.
Some of the common problems that photographers have with backgrounds include:
- Distracting Focal Points - we’ve all seen this happen - we line up a shot of a friend to take as a portrait and just as we press the shutter someone else pops their head up over their shoulder with a silly face. The result is that the real focal point of the shot becomes the face pulling person. This is an extreme example of distracting focal points in the background but it’s something that happens quite a lot.
- Protruding Elements from Subjects Heads - I nearly didn’t include this one but it’s so common that I just had to mention it. When shooting a portrait one of the common mistakes is for some background element to look like it’s sticking up out of a person’s head - like a horn. It’s often trees
- This Week in the Digital Photography School ForumsNovember 29
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Weekly Assignment
This week we don’t have any assignment winners for you because we are in the middle of our most recent assignment, Drive, and it has been sponsored by G-Technology who have donated one of their award wining, quad connection G-Tech Q 1TB drive as a prize for the winner of the Drive assignment. You can interpret the theme however you would like, so long as it shows us the idea of Drive. The rules are nearly the same as always. In order to be eligible for the contest to win the drive, your photo needs to have been taken between 12 November - 3 December 2008, your post must include the words “Assignment: Drive” somewhere in the post, the EXIF must be intact, and it’s helpful if you include the main points in your post (e.g. camera, lens, date taken, ISO, shutter speed, and aperture).
