Month: April 2019

Editing Camera Raw Files In Adobe Lightroom

Adding white balance

When you click on white balance option, there is a pop-up list of white balance options such as daylight, cloudy, tungsten and more. You can use one of the options to fix the white balance of your raw image or try better options from the list.

Color and Tone Correction

Adjust the color balance in photographs. Clarity, vibrance, hue, saturation, tone curve etc. are some of the Lightroom options to correct the color and tone of the images. The vibrance slider is used to control saturation but it does not oversaturate skin colors.

Correct the exposure

The raw image may be overexposed or underexposed. Use the exposure slider to increase or decrease the exposure values.

Enhance the details

Use the fill tool to bring back the missing detail in the image which is present in the raw file.

The amount of brightness captured by the raw image is much more than a regular jpeg image. Adjust the values in the highlights slider to recover the details from a raw image in Lightroom.

Vignette effect

Lightroom has a post crop vignetting feature which can be used to add effects to a cropped image.

If you have a lot of highlights in your image then choose the Highlight Priority effect. Choose the Color Priority effect to preserve color hues in your raw image. Select the Paint Overlay option to blend black and white colors with original colors of your raw image.

Grain effect

Add a film grain style to your raw images to create grain effect. For revealing a part of the image, add the grain effect to rest of the image area with a higher value as grain amount. You can control the size, amount, and roughness of the grain. For a blurred image, increase the size of the grain particle to more than 25%.

Dehaze effect

There are times when weather conditions can lead to a hazy image with smoke or fog. To fix the haziness or adjust it, use the dehaze effect. Once you have made the required changes to the photograph by adjusting the color, brightness etc., go and select the “Dehaze” options in the effects panel.

Radial Filter

To focus on people or objects in an image, you can use the radial filter. After you select the radial filter from the toolbar, you need to select an area of focus. The filter gives you the choice to apply the modification inside or outside the circle drawn by you.

While working on projects for photo retouching services, you can add more radial filters on the images to bring multiple objects into focus.

Paint with the Adjustment brush

Lightroom gives you the freedom to paint the local adjustments such as brightness, tint, saturation, clarity and more. This alternative lets you paint adjustments in parts of the images as per your choice.

Similar results can be achieved with the Graduated Filter tool.

ISO in Digital SLR Photography

Many digital SLR cameras also have an auto setting for ISO. Canon and Nikon cameras have this feature; however, many Nikon cameras will not allow you to use the auto feature when shooting in aperture priority, shutter priority or manual. I do not recommend the auto setting for anyone who wants to learn photography as it will impede the learning process.

The exposure triangle is an important fundamental in SLR photography. The exposure triangle consists of an aperture (or f/stop), a shutter speed and the ISO. The aperture is the size of the lens opening that allows light to reach the camera’s image sensor. The shutter speed is the amount of time the shutter is held open that allows light to reach the sensor. A change is one of the items will impact the other two. Generally you will set the ISO first based on the available light. Next you will set either the aperture if a certain depth of field is desired, or you will set the shutter speed if you want to stop or blur action. If you see blinking in the viewfinder then you need to make an adjustment. If a Nikon camera blinks “subject too dark” you must boost up the ISO. With a Canon, if you see the aperture blinking then you have to boost up the ISO. Keep increasing the ISO until the blinking stops. You can also change the aperture and/or shutter speed.

According to Cambridge in Colour from the Exposure Triangle: Aperture, ISO and Shutter Speed, “There are many combinations of f/stop, shutter speed and ISO that will result in the same exposure. Each setting however, can impact the final result of the image, so it is important to know that aperture controls the depth of field, that shutter speed affects how you want to show motion (stop it or blur it) and how ISO controls the sensitivity of the sensor to light and that a high ISO could result in noise.” For this reason, it is sometimes better to change the ISO instead of the aperture or shutter speed so that the final outcome of the image will be as expected.

Below are examples of the three settings which result in the same exposure but the results would be very different:

• f/22 at 1/15 ISO 100
• f/16 at 1/30 ISO 100
• f/11 at 1/60 ISO 100
• f/8 at 1/125 ISO 100
• f/5.6 at 1/250 ISO 100
• f/4 at 1/500 ISO 100
• f/2.8 at 1/1000 ISO 100

There are some trade-offs using high an ISO (800 or higher). Shooting at a high ISO might allow you to photograph indoors in an auditorium or an outdoor night scene; however, digital noise results from using a high ISO. Noise is degradation in image quality which results in discoloration of the image. This greatly depends on the camera type and size of the sensor. Full-frame sensors found in more expensive digital SLR cameras tend to have significantly less noise than lower priced digital SLR cameras that do not have a full frame sensor.

Like everything else, learning how to select an ISO will come with practice. Experiment shooting at night and in different lighting conditions so you can test a different ISO with the available light. Soon you will be looking at a scene and dialing in an ISO without hesitation. Once you become an experienced photography you will be able to look outside and say “it’s a 400 ISO kind of day.”

Learning Skills To Take Professional Pictures

Lessons Learned in Class

Taking pictures for a living goes beyond snapping photos on your cell phone or with your personal camera. Professionals are required to take a number of elements into consideration to ensure that the image comes out just right. If a picture does not come out right, it cannot be sold, and you effectively might have wasted your time.

The lessons you take in school will allow you the knowledge to take these elements into consideration. One of the first things that you might learn involves how to control the lighting around the subject. If there is too much light or glare, the subject might be obscured. The light may reflect off of it and cause the photo to be unrecognizable.

Likewise, you may need to control the shadow. Images that are too dark also may not be recognizable. It may not have the color or dimension that your client wants. You may have to take the photos over, costing you time and money.

The training could help you avoid these mistakes and get the photos taken right the first time. You may then build a portfolio and references that you can take to clients and get hired for more jobs. The right skills can also help you make more money.

Applicable Industries

Once you gain the skills you need for this profession, you may wonder where in the marketplace you can use them. You might find work in the fashion industry taking pictures of models. Models need photos for their portfolios. Clients who hire them also want pictures that they can sell or offer to potential customers to show that they have models who can wear the clothes or cosmetics that the customers want to sell.

You also may find work as a still photographer working for advertising agencies that sell food, housewares, and a host of other items. Your images may be published in magazines or newspapers. They also could appear on TV or online. You will learn how to place the items in a way that makes them appealing to consumers.

Inevitability of Image Cut Outs in Photoshop

It is rightly said that pictures speak louder than words. But if the pictures you see in any medium are poor in quality, the impact of the entire exercise will be lost. Hence it becomes imperative to edit and enhance the quality of each and every image which has to be published in any medium – whether print or digital.

No matter what image you are editing, you can be sure that almost every image will require an image to be removed from its background for providing some effect or the other. Although this can be done through many software programs but in most of the cases image cut outs in Photoshop provide the best quality and the needed impact.

In today’s times of e-commerce portals, putting your products in the best light is the most important task, because the buyer gets to know your product only by seeing its image. The more detailed and impressive is the picture, the more inclined will the buyer will be towards buying that product.

While looking at the majority of products featured in magazines and blogs you’ll usually find them as part of “trends” or “style” features. But as most of the photos are shot without giving much attention to the background, image cut outs in Photoshop is the most effective solution to get rid of the unwanted elements of the background, or to altogether change the background.

Some products, especially women’s apparel, jewelry and other accessories often look good and explicit without any background. The process of image cut outs in Photoshop is applied to such pictures to make them look exclusive and elegant, thus helping in increasing their appeal, and ultimately sales.

Although images of most of the products need to be edited, but not all products require cut-out images. Wallpaper, flooring, interior designs etc are often displayed best in lifestyle shots. Some photos might need cleaning of the picture or the background, but do not need an image cut out in Photoshop.

Knowing Lighting Ratios

A general scare exists among photographers at any photo studio about lighting, but in fact there is no mystery about it. There exist two aspects of it: exposure and shadows. Of course, there are more things to it that need to be taken into consideration like color, composition, background, makeup and hair if it is shooting a model.

In the studio, special attention needs to be paid to the exposure relationships between the different light sources, which is expressed as ratios and determine the places where it needs to be placed to make the subject look good. Here comes the role of shadows.

Lighting Ratios: If light is placed in front of a model directly, there is no need to consider about ratio. The exposure is straightforward. To set up the image, a meter could be used in incident mode and the metered reading taken.

With two lights, the input can be varied (hence the exposure) with each of it by changing the distance between the subject and the source and also making changes to the power setting. With light ratio of 2:1, the difference between the main light and the fill light is one f-stop.

For a 3:1 lighting ratio, there are one and a half f-stops of discrepancy between the two sources. Digital cameras use 1/3 f-stop increments to measure light, though the 3:1 ratio as was used traditionally is taken with half f-stops.

Due to the ability of sophisticated handheld light meters to read light in tenths of an f-stop, one can easily determine one and a half f-stops if there is a requirement of such ratio.

The positioning of a handheld meter helps in precisely measuring the light on a product of face and is a great advantage to the photographer. By measuring a reading from the position of the subject after pointing the meter’s white dome toward the primary light source, the correct exposure can be determined for the main source.

Then on removing the white dome away from the main light projecting toward the fill, a precise reading on a fill light could be taken. By taking note of the f-stop readouts as given on the LCD and making adjustment to the light, the ratio could be found that will help in making the subject look in the way that is needed. It is not always necessary that studio lighting is taken in the studio itself. The outdoor location could be turned into a studio.

How to Make Beautiful Photo

  • To make your photos interesting you must have a camera with function, which allows you disable the automatic settings and set them manually. Often in practice it’s SLR digital camera. It also has a better matrix, which affects the quality of the photos and you can change lenses, allowing you to take your photos more diverse, giving you more space for creativity.
  • Try to take pictures as best as possible, to make minimum adjustments on the computer later. Try to mentally divide the frame into nine equal parts and possibly put important objects on the intersections, not in the center of the photo. This will make the photo composition more dynamic.
  • Don’t get carried away with the flash. It often makes blurry photos and faces can be flat. To avoid blurry photos lean hands on a firm surface and press the shutter during the pause in heartbeat. Only practice helps you to hold the camera confidently and steady.
  • Look for unusual angles and subjects. You can make an interesting shot when you photographed only part of the object, composition can be built in abstract forms.
    Look for bright and unusual color combinations. Try to remove any small objects from the frame, they can distract from the main view.
  • Analyze why you like or don’t like your photos, it will help you in the process of shooting.
  • Shoot animals and children from the floor or at the level of their eyes, it will make your pictures more interesting.
  • Try not to “only press the button”, photography – thoughtful process. It makes sense to get around with the different parties of the object to choose the best angle.
  • Learn to observe. This is crucial for the further development of you as a great photographer. Look around to notice interesting and unusual events that can become the basis for photography.
  • Get used to the fact that you are still a beginner. If you just started studying photography and you make a “brilliant photos”, then your self-esteem somewhat overstated. In this case, you just need looking for the slightest faults and getting rid of them.
  • Try to make a lot of different photos and practice will make you better!

Nikon D3400 White Balance

There are two ways of looking at the Nikon D3400 white balance. The most obvious one is when you are looking at the back of the camera as you press the i button and D3400 white balance is third along the top line and that gives you the option to select the white balance that you want. However it does not let you change the white balance within those settings. If you want to do that you need to go into the MENU OPTION and then go into SHOOTING MENU, then you go down to white balance and you will see that you have all the options that you would see when you look in the i button, but, should you press your multi-selector to the right, it will give you the option of either deciding to have a different option within that main sub-option (so for fluorescence, for example, you have seven further options in fluorescent which are all slightly different) or if you do not have different options then you have an option which allows you to change that option within the camera. You can do that by using the multi-selector and you can make either more green or more magenta or blue or more red. Personally, I think this is probably far too detailed unless you are going for a very specific look, but the general way of changing, which is to go back and just look at the general options in white balance when you are in the shooting menu, should be sufficient for you to decide your best option. But if you want to go in and change cloudy for example and make it a little more red or a little more blue then you can do so but you can not make those changes to that option from the i button.

So let’s have a look at what the D3400 white balance options are when we come out of menu and we will have a look through them with the ibutton. The first one is AUTO. This tries to select the most obvious white balance itself. It has quite a good auto detection for white balance and in most cases you will be fine on AUTO with the Nikon D3400. It is pretty good for most circumstances. The next D3400 white balance option is INCANDESCENT or tungsten. That has quite a yellow tone to it because it is more like candle light or home and residential lighting which tends to be tungsten lighting and so it will try to take some of that warmth out – some of that orange and yellow and add some of the blue to make whatever is white in that picture more white and less yellow.

The next one is FLORESCENT. Florescent lighting is a little bluer and it is the sort of lighting that you get in offices – strip lighting often – which gives a very blue tone to things. As a consequence of that the camera will try to add a little yellow to the picture. Then we get on to DIRECT SUNLIGHT. Now direct sunlight is actually a lot bluer than you might imagine and so the D3400 white balance setting does try to add a little more yellow to that just to give it a more natural look. The one after that is FLASH. When you fire the flash, whether it is the built-in flash or an external flash, it is a very cold white shade. So as a consequence of that the Nikon D3400 tries to add some more yellow to give a more natural tone to the color, and especially, obviously for skin tones which is quite important. Then the next two which are CLOUDY and SHADE. As we move further up the scale the environment becomes more and more blue so the D3400 white balance settings will be trying harder to add a little yellow and a little orange just to warm that picture up and make it look less cold. If you are shooting in shade or in cloud then there is a natural inclination for the image to look slightly blue, slightly cold, so you want a little orange to warm that picture up.

A good experiment is to take the same picture, going through all the Nikon D3400 white balance settings. Then you will be able to see exactly how the white balance changes the ‘feel’ of a picture. D3400 white balance can be used very creatively once you have mastered it, as it is a very simple way of affecting the tone of the image. For example, adding yellow adds warmth to a picture and give the impression of sunlight which in turn can make the image feel like a summer shot. Conversely, adding blue can make the image seem quite cold. It is really useful to experiment with these D3400 white balance settings.

Street Portraiture

I’ve been reading a lot about Street Photography. It piqued my interest and I spent many nights, scouring the internet. The main issue that I had was that it was too detached for me. The almost voyeuristic detachment with which the street photographer hangs back and observes what is going on, before clicking the shutter at the Bresson-esque decisive moment, generally goes unnoticed by the subject. Despite street photography taking place in public places, such as a train or a cafe, the photographers aim is to avoid having any impact on the scene unfolding before them. Anonymity is key. For me, I like the interaction. I like to talk to people. I wanted my subjects to be involved. I can only advise that anyone who is going to try the same thing as I am, should take a look at the ‘Humans of New York’. The photographer approaches and speaks to the subjects before taking a photograph of them. In my own opinion, this makes the photograph more about the interaction between the photographer and the subject and less about the observation of people.

I’m certainly not claiming to be an innovator here. There must be a million photographers before me who gone down this well trodden path, but I’m not interested in them because this is my personal project. I’m starting a collection of photographs of people that I’ve never met before. Throughout the course of any day, we all see many, many interesting people who we don’t know. Perfect Strangers. People who for some reason capture our attention and interest. The reason may be good, or bad, but for some reason, they stood out and made us wish that we could photograph them. It’s difficult to break down the social boundaries that stop us from approaching a total stranger and talking to them, it’s even more difficult to ask them if they will let us photograph them. For anyone in the same position as me, I’d recommend this project and the aim is simple. To eliminate the fear that we have of being rejected, photographically speaking. Our aim should be to encourage ourselves out of the comfort zone, to force ourselves to approach the people that previously, we’ve only imagined talking pictures of. What’s the worst that could happen? They might say “no”.

Photo Booth in Every Occasion

Make everyone feel special

Most events are incomplete without a few good photos. Be it a corporate event or a wedding, visitors will appreciate if you can give each of them a photo memento of the event, and a photo booth will make it possible. You can make each and every person who attended your event feel special. For example, in a wedding, visitors will be thankful for having their photo brought inside a corner with various types of assistants to run with the topic of the occasion.

An opportunity for the guests to mix and mingle

If you are organising a large gathering, not everyone attending the event will know each other. It will bring that fun element into the event. It will give your guests not only an opportunity to have fun with the people they know but will also give them a chance to interact with strangers at the party. Moreover, it gives everybody a chance to have their picture taken at the event either with the guests or hosts or both.

Fix the boredom

At a wedding we normally see the bride and the groom busy getting photographed by a professional photographer while all their guests will be sitting bored waiting for their turn to click snaps with the couple. When you have a photo booth your guests will be in a fun mode even before the start of the actual event. They can have all the fun while you are busy getting photographed by a professional cameraman.

Add to the entertainment value of the event

Photo booths come with exciting props, which are essential if you want your guests to get excited about your event. When you hire a photo booth make sure they have fake moustaches, feather wigs, and oversized hats, eyeglasses, picture frames, etc. Such props will encourage even shy guests to try out and act silly. It will add to the entertainment value of the event and your event will be the talk of the town for months or years to come.

Quality photos to keep

This is the age of selfies, but they cannot beat the quality of pictures captured through a DSLR. Now, there is a general misconception that pictures clicked at photo booths offer sub-standard photos, which is not at all true. There are so many photo booth companies which offer great quality services at cheap rates. They will ensure you get bright pictures on high quality paper. That way you will get the best photography experience. Not only that. By hiring it you can gift your guests a great souvenir. The high quality of photos printed at a photo booth is in no way inferior to the pictures clicked by a professional photographer.

A chance to give your event more publicity

To recall the best moments at an event you need good quality pictures. That is the main reason why we take pictures at any event. By hiring a photo booth you will be able to give every visitor a chance to leave the event with a specific picture, and your event will be etched in their memory forever. Your guests might even share the pictures taken at your event on social networking sites and more and more people will get to see your event. That way your event will get more publicity and could also makes personalized photographs possible at big and small events.

3D Stereoscopic Photography

Set up

To take 3D photographs, you need a tripod and a camera. The first step is setting up your tripod and camera on a level ground. You can choose to take a photo of anything. Your subject should however be on the center.

Take your shots

Once everything is set up correctly, take your shot. After the first shot, slid your tripod to the left or right for approximately 2.5 inches or 63 mm. If necessary, you can consider adjusting your camera’s direction so that your subject remains at the center of the shot. After making necessary adjustments, take your second shot from your new position.

Consider using additional cameras

The above step works perfectly for still subjects. If you want to capture perfect 3D photos of moving subjects i.e. a pet, you need additional hardware like an extra camera. A 2 camera rig which mounts perfectly on your tripod can come in handy at this step. You should ensure cameras are mounted approximately 2.5 inches apart (from center to center). In case you don’t have an extra camera, you can consider constructing a mirror splitter. The splitter will help you capture both views perfectly using a single camera.

Viewing with glasses

Once you have your photos, the next step is viewing them. It is important to note that you need a viewing system to be able to view 3D photos. In our case, we will focus on the most common viewing systems which are 3D glasses. These special types of glasses superimpose right and left views. As a result, the glasses filter the image forcing each eye to see the appropriate view only. It is important to note that there are many 3D viewing systems when talking about 3D glasses.

The most common include; color filtering, active shutter and polarized glasses. Color filtering glasses display 2 colors only, one for each view. Polarized 3D glasses use 2 sets of polarized light filters to project the picture through each pair of filters. These glasses are perfect for viewing over-colored filter systems. Active shutter glasses switch display between left and right views in every other frame. Depending on the type of 3D photo you have, you can choose suitable viewing glasses. Alternatively, you can choose to make your own glasses.