Single-Serving Photo

Using Lightroom is a joy compared to Photoshop. But it isn’t a joy compared to, for example, cheesecake. It’s definitely nice to be able to adjust nearly every aspect of an image with convenient sliders, to have all of the settings right in front of you without having to open lots of dialog boxes. At the same time, though, your mouse hand can get pretty tired, and that never happens with cheesecake, now does it?

Never fear, there is finally a solution. Well, the beginning of a solution. A solution in the early stages of beta testing, but a solution nonetheless, and it doesn’t involve uninstalling Lightroom and eating more cheesecake. Although you are welcome to eat more cheesecake anyway if that’s your thing. (more…)

Photoshop. The program that became a verb, a lifestyle, an indispensable tool. The first time I ever used Photoshop, it didn’t have layers. Now it feels like the third hand I never knew I wanted but couldn’t reasonably live without. I have used it seriously and continuously since version 4 and as much as I love free and open source software, there is absolutely no replacement for it.

Few people in the world know any of this better than Scott Kelby. As the president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (by the way, you know your software is influential when a 70,000-member association springs up around it), he is intimately in touch with the pulse of the Photoshop user and the photography industry. (more…)

Have you ever wondered about that “gamma” thing you keep seeing? You nerd.

Really, though, gamma is important and you have probably seen the word all over the place in photography and design. It’s actually a really cool thing and when you understand how it works you will likely feel better about yourself, your photographs, and about the universe. Well, you’ll feel smarter, anyway, and you will be. You’ll also be able to add another item to your lists of:

1. Answers to questions nobody will ever ask you,
2. Greek letters you recognize, and
3. Awkward things to bring up on a first date

You can already check off number two if you look up on the right there. Yup, that’s gamma.

Additionally, if you are friends with other photographers and they don’t know what gamma is or how it works, you might come out of this looking like a rockstar. At least to the extent that rockstars are knowledgeable about non-linear power-law expressions. (more…)

And by “strike” I definitely don’t mean in the “strike out” sense, but in the “I just struck gold” sense. The other day I posted Tricks for Shooting High-Key Macro wherein I link to a cool in-studio tutorial by Atlanta photographer Alex Koloskov. Alex and his wife run AKELstudio in Atlanta, Georgia and are now literally brain-dumping all of these great tutorials and behind-the-scenes views onto the Internet and I’m loving every minute of it.

Genia, AKELstudio's Photoshop Mastermind

Anyway, I really enjoyed Alex’s high-key macro behind-the-scenes and some of his in-studio video tutorials on shooting products under water (if you want to check that out you can read it here), and then I found out that his wife, Genia, is actually the Photoshop mastermind behind all of AKELstudio’s post-production and has her own blog, too!

You may not know this about me, but my first contact with Photoshop was in my middle school’s computer lab. They had version 2.5, which was the first version that shipped for Windows and also the last version that didn’t have layers. Version 3 was shipped in 1994 and introduced layers for the first time. I have been using Photoshop on and off since then, and almost on a daily basis since version 5 or so. Needless to say, I’m sort of a Photoshop junkie. To say that I “like” Photoshop would be an understatement.

Another thing that has really excited me lately is HDR (or compressed dynamic range, as it should properly be called, but that’s a discussion for another time). I just caught wind of this article Genia posted back in June of outdoor HDR images that Alex photographed and she put together using Photomatrix Pro (my favorite HDR program, by the way, you should buy it from Amazon right now) and Photoshop.

Go and check out this HDR images. I really appreciate HDR that you can’t quite tell is HDR, though Genia does enjoy the more exaggerated HDR effects as well, which is cool, I’m into that. You can hover your mouse over each image to see one of the exposures from the “before” that contributed to the final version.

You can do so much with Photomatix, I would highly recommend giving it a try. You can download a trial version from HDRsoft and if you like it, please please please buy it from Amazon so I can keep paying my web hosting bills.

High Dynamic Range Images Before and After via The Perfect Photo Blog

Seldom do I employ such emphatic punctuation in a blog title, or such bombastic portmanteaus, but it seemed appropriate given the out-of-control creation of panoramas that I’ve been engaged in lately.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m out here in the great American west—“big sky country,” if you want to call it that—and some of the sights I’ve seen were nothing less than demanding of a panoramic treatment. On top of that, I suffer from a devastating case of technolust and wanted to really put “AutoPano Giga” through the paces. Well, I sure did. I also probably melted the heat sink off my poor laptop’s CPU…

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the case of AutoPano Giga, I think he was wrong; I think it actually is magic. I have tried a few panorama tools out there; the free and open-source Panotools, a couple of Mac-exclusive ones, and so on. AutoPano Giga is so easy and so fast and so accurate, it blows them all out of the water. Of course it also costs an arm and a leg, but at least you know why.

After the break, actual panoramas! (more…)