Photo by Senmu

I’m moving to Chicago today, so excuse the lack of a morning article. It should be business as usual on Wednesday.

Instead, check out this tutorial by Sam Lu on how to use the Auto Align and Auto Blend features in Adobe Photoshop to seamlessly stitch together a series of images. I’ve struggled to create panoramas either by hand or with some third party tool, but the results from Lu’s process look promising. I’m eager to take a couple images and try it out.

If you’ve used this process before, let me know what you think of it in the comments. People on Lu’s site seem pleased with their own results.

Auto-Align tutorial (via gosammy.com)

Film grain was a feature of the non-digital era, like this scan of a film image by moominsean.

A lot of people think digital cameras have taken the fun out of photography. In an era of RGB sensors, super saturation and noise reduction, the image that comes from the camera may be almost too perfect. It loses the gritty feel that was a feature of the film-era.

In response, a lot of photographers use digital camera settings or post-processing filters to add grain back into their images. It’s a divisive decision. When done well, it may enhance the feel of an image. Others think it is simply “over-processed Photoshop crap“.

In the digital era, film grain ever appropriate?

Read the rest of this entry »

An S-shaped curve boosts contrast in your digital images.

Contrast can make or break your image, and it’s something that a lot of photographers are just plain getting wrong. Take a look around Flickr - the site is rife with examples of poorly-processed images. Either the images are hazy and lacking contrast, or the photographer played around with curves or levels so much that the photo just looks over-saturated and fake.

Part of my job on the paper I work for is preparing images for print. Here’s the technique I use in Adobe Photoshop to fix contrast on a digital photo, but the same technique works in GIMP or any other image editor that has a curves palette. See how after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m traveling today, so I don’t have time for a full article this morning. Instead, I’ll leave you with this cool link to a innovative use of Photoshop’s color match utility to improve the tones of your photographs. The technique requires having a photo and a digital copy of a painting that generally reflects the color scheme in the image. The Color Match utility changes the tones within the photo to match the (generally richer) palette in the painting.

It sounds weird, but in some cases it leads to some interesting results. In others, the photo just winds up looking goofy. Still, it’s definitely something worth playing around with. Check out the full tutorial and a bunch of examples here (via unfocusedbrain).

Digital workflow is everything that takes place after you click the shutter.

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about one of the most important processes in photography today, something that doesn’t involve apertures, shutter speeds or cameras at all –digital workflow. The digital workflow is everything that happens after you click the shutter, and it’s something that most of us end up spending a lot of time on.

Having a good digital workflow affects the quality of your photos. I’m going to guide you through the basic tenets how a professional may go their post-processing, and make a few suggestions for ways to set up an effective and efficient digital workflow of your own at little or no cost.

Pick it up after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »