If you want to add a dark and brooding sky to your black and white photos then a graduated filter is the obvious way to do it. As long as the sky still has a full range of tones, i.e. it’s not burned out to a solid white anywhere, you can practically do what you […]
General
Transform tricky shots with tone mapping
Sometimes you get scenes where the brightness range is so great you just can’t bring out all the different tones in the picture. This is lighting problem, not a dynamic range problem. Even if your camera has the dynamic range to capture all the tones in the scene, there’s no way of showing them all. […]
10 tips for using digital graduated filters
1. Shoot raw You can’t recover detail in an overexposed sky if it’s been clipped and lost forever in the original image. With a JPEG, what you see is what you get, but with raw files you’ve generally got an extra 1EV of ‘invisible’ highlight detail which can be recovered with a good raw converter. […]
12 tips for better HDR
HDR photography can produce spectacular images. It can also produce a supersaturated, overcooked look that we’ve probably all seen too much of. Getting that balance right is an art in itself. For now, though, here some HDR tips for shooting and then editing your images. 1. In-camera HDR In-camera HDR is becoming more common and it can work pretty […]
6 tips for getting an authentic analog film effect
Modern cameras can reproduce the world with utter, clinical accuracy. The trouble is, it turns out that’s not what we wanted after all. A lot of the time, what we actually want is the faded, distressed, imperfect look of analog photography. So here are six top tips for getting that analog film effect ‘look’ with […]
10 tips for curves adjustments
Almost any image-editor worthy of the name offers curves adjustments, but they can be tricky things to get right. It’s easy to overcook the results or fix a problem in one area only to cause a problem in another. So here are ten top curves tips to show how they work, what they can and cannot […]
In-camera RAW: the Photoshop alternative under your nose
If you shoot RAW files you’ll have noticed by now that the colours and tonal renditions you get from third-party RAW converters like Adobe Camera Raw, DxO Optics Pro or Capture One do not quite match those of the in-camera JPEGs.
The ticking time-bomb of non-destructive editing
I had a horrible thought today. Like everyone else, I’ve been saying non-destructive editing is fantastic. It’s smart, it’s efficient, and it changes the way we work. It’s the most important innovation in digital imaging this century… But wait a minute. What if I had to stop using Lightroom or Aperture tomorrow? How many images […]