SLR technology is always improving, and one key area is the image quality of photos shot at high ISO settings. But what if you don’t have the newest SLR or have raw images with potential that are suffering from image noise? Help is at hand! By utilising the power of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) software, it’s possible to rescue noisy raw images in a flash.
Selling your pictures to an agency isn’t as simple as uploading them and then sitting back waiting for the money to roll in. However, if you plan your approach carefully – and if your shots are good enough – then it’s possible to generate some useful cash through one of the many stock photo agencies online.
A solargraph is a long-exposure image that shows the path of the sun as it arcs across the sky, usually over several months – and sometimes even longer. Because it’s such an extreme long exposure, the image formed will record how the path of the sun varies over the weeks and months that it is exposed, and can produce pictures that are both scientifically interesting and beautiful to look at.
In the traditional darkroom, split tone effects are applied to images using a combination of chemicals to tint different tonal areas, such as the shadows or the highlights. This effect can be recreated in the digital darkroom by using this very simple method for split toning in Photoshop.
Learn how to use the Refine Edge controls in Photoshop to perfect selections and get rid of unwanted bits of background colour.
Using window light to take photos at home is perfect when it’s available, but when it’s in short supply you need a more reliable and predictable light source. The ultimate solution is a studio flash set-up, but there’s a simpler and cheaper option: a tabletop studio.
Off-camera flash is a great way to create a backlight effect that can boost your still life photography. It’s an easy technique to master, and can add real depth and character to still lifes.
The trick is to create a lovely light rim around your subject, which will show off its shape and edge detail – the prickles of our thistle look great when they’re lit from behind.
The ability to sharpen an image after you’ve taken it is a saving grace. Sometimes a shallow depth of field or a wrongly chosen autofocus point can mean that key details in an image are soft. Using the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop can bring back these lost details, and prevent an otherwise great photograph from being destined for the recycle bin.
In this Photoshop tutorial, we’ll show you how to blur the background in Photoshop and sharpen detail in your foreground interest. Here we’re going to apply two layer masks to our snowy egret image: one to sharpen the fine feather details and one to blur out the background.
Lenses don’t always perform flawlessly. By understanding when they’re likely to let you down, and knowing how to take corrective action when taking the picture, or in software later, you’ll get results that meet your expectations. And don’t forget that lens problems can also be embraced as creative solutions in their own right…
In the days of the darkroom, film would be chopped into fours or sixes then lined up and used to create a contact sheet. In most cases, this served as a useful overview of the roll of film, but there are more creative possibilities. We can achieve similar results in Photoshop from a single image by making a duplicate layer for each contact sheet window to recreate the effect of an old film contact sheet.
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