My birthday gift from Mother Nature came a couple days early in 2019 as I awoke to the sight of dense fog outside my hotel room in Hochatown, Oklahoma. Wake up call came well before dawn, and only the lights of the parking lot outside gave any indication to the heavy blanket of fog outside the hotel room door. In an instant my original plans for a vivid sunrise vanished, replaced instead with new ideas and new locations that I had scouted on previous visits to the area. Grabbing our …
Lightroom for Landscapes – Controlling Color
Without light, there is no photography. So it’s no wonder that when it comes to editing, most people dive into the light first. However, light and color are tied to the hip when it comes to editing in Lightroom. Where in Photoshop you have different blend modes, such as luminosity, that helps decouple these two elements of the image, in Lightroom where one goes, the other isn’t far behind. So understanding these two parallel concepts on their own as well as how they interact is vital to your ability to create …
Lightroom for Landscapes – Controlling Light
Without light, there is no photography. So it’s no wonder that when it comes to editing, I first start with the light. The human eye can see at least twice the dynamic range as your camera’s sensor, even the best cameras out there no where near the human eye in this regard. Add in a slight misjudgment of exposure settings that need to be corrected, or simply artistic style decisions that you wish to make, being able to successfully edit your RAW files in Lightroom for light correction is the …
Show and Tell – Barn Burner Vertical
As they say, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” – as so was the 2018 Fall trip to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. And that enemy in our case was Hurricane Micheal. It’s path up the east coast put it squarely over where my shooting partner and I were planning to be. So a detour into Kentucky was quickly planned on the fly so we would be on the outer edges of it’s influence instead of sitting right under it in a downpour for 2 days. …
Photoshop Fundamentals – Understanding Layers
Making the jump from Lightroom to Photoshop can be an intimidating proposition. Much like that first time you switched the camera from Auto all the way to that frightening ‘M’, suddenly you had more tools to work with than you knew what to do with. No longer was the camera handling everything behind the scenes and making the majority of the decisions for you; now you had to know the correlation between Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO to make the image you wanted. While Lightroom isn’t exactly the ‘Auto’ of …
Exceeding Photoshop’s PSD 2GB File Size Limit
I remember when my family got their first computer. It was an Acer, it was this huge, heavy, dark colored tower case and even heavier 15″ CRT monitor. It was top of the line, Pentium 100 mhz (yes, mhz), and it had a 1 GB hard drive. Our neighbor exclaimed that we’d never possibly fill up a 1 GB hard drive. Six months later my father was none too pleased when I proved the old phrase “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Somehow, over a 56k modem, I had …
Eliminate background clutter!
Photography is all about light – and with light comes contrast. Anything that contains contrast – be that color, light, sharpness, anything – will draw attention. And while I plan to give the subject of contrast in its many forms a full length article in the future, a photo I was editing this afternoon gave a wonderful example of why you should take a few moments to clean up the background, and also the foreground or edges of your frame – either before you take the photo – or afterwards …