Night Photography 2 – overcoming the darkness
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...
Read MorePhotoshop Basics – noise reduction
Posted by Tony on Aug 21, 2009
in Photoshop Techniques | 0 comments
No camera is perfect. If we push it to the limits of iso and low-light scenes, we are going to experience the number one weakness of a digital camera – NOISE. In camera noise control When you use the long exposure noise reduction setting on a D-SLR, it takes the same shot with the shutter closed and then takes the information away from the original exposure. This is why you will have to wait the same amount of time again after taking the shot this can be an inconvenience if you want to keep shooting. You can save this time and do this yourself with photoshop or similar photo editor. If...
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
Posted by Tony on Aug 6, 2009
in Photoshop Techniques | 0 comments
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...
Read MoreBasic Adjustments – Levels
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). To start adjusting the levels, open an image in photoshop and go to image – adjust – levels The purpose of adjusting the levels is...
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