HDR – High Dynamic Range Photography

Website cambridgeincolour has a good tutorial on the technique of creating HDR photos from a series of bracketed exposures.  The result is an image with with incredible tonal range.

This is acheived using Photoshop’s built-in ‘merge to HDR’ feature, and then tweaking the results.  The tutorial is a little on the technical side, but very good.  Read the full article here.

Online Tilt-Shift Tool

I’ve been playing with this cool website for the past few days.  Tiltshiftmaker.com lets you upload a photo and then automatically apply a tilt-shift effect.  It basically makes your image look like a photo of a miniature model.When your file has been transformed, the site will let you download it.  Unfortunately, it also resizes it to 72ppi, so you can’t print from it.  However, I found a tutorial on Design Pitstop that shows how to get this same effect using Photoshop.  Have fun!

The importance of using the right color space

Don’t listen to them!!  I saw a speaker at the recent PPAMass convention who told the audience of photographers that if their lab uses SRGB color space, “fire your lab!”  This comes from a man who outputs his own work on his sponsor’s inkjet printers.

What he doesn’t realize is that wedding and portrait photographers who use color lab services (virtually the whole industry) need to use the SRGB color space since the printers the lab uses operate in SRGB color space.  While the Adobe 1998 color space offers a broader range of space, the end result is that much larger corrections need to be made to “rein in” the image to print correctly.  Any extreme corrections, be it in Photoshop or in the nondestructive database corrections used at LusteColor via the Kodak DP2 printing system, cannot give an optimum result.

Bottom line is set your camera to SRBG color space to get the best prints possible for you and your customer.

For a more in-depth look at the differences between color profiles check out this article from Will Crockett.

Competition prints, the basics

Print competition is coming soon, well at least is is usually coming up somewhere most of the year. Unlike years ago where the labs had to engage in a very labor intensive effort to produce prints for competition, nowadays photographers can do the heavy work, i.e., the creative work on their own as a direct result of the digital revolution. You can shape and place your image in the file with creative use of backgrounds and accents. When preparing files, be sure to size them correctly. Either size at 16×20 at 200dpi or 8×10 at 250 dpi, any more than 250 dpi is overkill. Keep backgrounds and accents simple and subtle. Remember the overall presentation is judged, not just the image. Placement of the image is part of the composition. Doing your own work inevitably increases your skill level in Photoshop, imagine that! Be very careful in making adjustments especially saturation and levels. What may look dramatic on the monitor usually doesn’t translate to paper. A good rule of thumb is to back off by about 50% of that “dramatic” look. Over saturation leads to “neon” colors and overdone levels leads to loss of detail in the whites and blacks. Since prints are made darker for competition, loss of detail in the blacks is very sensitive. Helpful guidelines for PPA level competition can be seen by clicking on this link: http://www.ppane.com/merit_image.htm At LustreColor the competition prints can be ordered easily through LabLink Plus. The price includes a glossy print on the regulation thickness mount. If you want the lab to put file together for you, the backgrounds and accents are priced a la carte. Just tell us what you want. I like to use a pinstripe accent very narrow and offset about a 1/4 inch from the image. Some photographers like it directly adjacent to the image. What do you think? When using a background other than black, I prefer to avoid the “blank color” look by adding a texture such as a grain look to the color to combine visually better with the image area. What do you think? Above all stretch yourself, be creative and have fun.