Iceland Aurora Photographic

So you have the night photography bug. You sit twiddling your thumbs in the daylight hours waiting for the light to fade so that you can go out and leave your camera perfectly still with its shutter open for many tens of minutes. You are not alone!!

Until recently it was common practice for landscape photographers to slightly underexpose image to increase highlight detail and increase saturation. But there is a new school of thought which suggests over exposing just short of blowing out the highlights will actually give you a better range of colours.

This tutorial looks at ways to convert your image to black and white using the tools available in Photoshop CS3. There may be work arounds for other versions of photoshop or other image editors, but the work horse in this tutorial is the powerful 'Black and White Tool' in CS3 which has a great selection of filter presets. To emulate this without the tool, you could try blending channel levels.

This tutorial offers an alternative to the saturation option when you wish to dramatically boost the colours in an image. We will make a photoshop action for this colour boosting technique so that it  can be applied easily to any image in the future. More information about creating an action can be found here.

HDR2 - RAW file treatment

Click below to load an interactive flash tutorial covering the basic processing of files to be used in an HDR image...

HDR 1 - taking the exposures

HDR means High Dynamic Range photography. It refers to a method of capturing a larger range of light detail than is possible with a single exposure. This article will look at the technique of multiple exposure capture with a DSLR.

Like layers, curve adjustments is a way of adjusting the brightness/ darkness levels in an image. The emphasis is put more on contrast and adjusting curves is a very smooth and sophisticated way of adjusting contrast.

Basic Adjustments - Levels

When you adjust levels, you are adjusting the range of the brightness/ darkness levels in an image.  This is determined through a histogram. The histogram displays the distribution of the different light value in an image. For example, a dark image would have a lot of value at the dark end of the spectrum (left hand side of the histogram), a bright image would have a lot of values at the bright end (right hand side).