Exposing to the right
Exposure is a critical element in photography. 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. Film In the days of film, I used to consistently under-expose by half a stop because the slide would retain more colours and so the resulting image would have a richer saturation. Digital With digital images, it was commonly practiced to boost...
Read MoreHDR 1 – taking the exposures
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. Click Highlights and Shadows The idea behind an HDR image is that you are able to retain details in the highlights and in the shadows. On a single exposure, the shadow detail is lost (black) or the highlight detail is blown-out (white). By carefully controlling your exposures, you should be able to prevent losing shadow detail and...
Read MoreHDR3 – Photomatix Engineering
HDR2 – Photomatix Engineering Click below to load an interactive flash tutorial covering the generation of an HDR image… Tonemapping with Photomatix Using the photomatix software to generate an HDR image. Please tell me what you think?? Tours Experience this yourself with one of my Photography Tours notice
Read MoreLayers and Masks 2 – Adjustment Layers
Layers and Masks 2 – Adjustment Layers Adjustment layers do just that, they allow you to make adjustments to your images in a stack of layers. This has two benefits to the way you might normally adjust a picture; You can go back and change any part of you adjustment, i.e. the curves or levels You can use masks to affect only certain parts of the image. Let us start with an image and create an adjustment layer. This will create a new layer with the sole purpose of adjusting the light levels of the image. See Basic adjustments – levels and curves for more details of how to make...
Read MoreBasic adjustments – Curves
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. Open an image in photoshop and go to Image – Adjustments – Curves This action will open the curves dialogue box. Click on the line at the intersection as shown Adjust the output to be 10 points lower than the input level. The output level should stay around the 65 mark. What happens to the straight line in the curves dialogue box? What happens to your image? The...
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