One Brief Moment

This article is part one of a two part series on how to improve the performance of Lightroom. Lightroom is a very resource intensive application and you’ll find that as you get quicker and more efficient in Lightroom, the actual software itself will be what’s slowing you down. This tutorial is going to give you 10 tips on how to improve the performance of Lightroom on your machine without purchasing or upgrading your existing hardware.

In this article, we are going to talk about Lightroom preferences and system settings. While in the second part of this two part series we will create a hardware guide where we will teach you which components to upgrade first for the biggest performance boost.

via 10 Tips to Improve Lightroom’s Speed and Performance Without Additional Hardware.

Bookmark It

Vintage fades and washes seem to have recently become quite popular. Perhaps since the modern DSLR has enabled everyone to shoot such high quality/high definition images, there is more of a desire to reach towards the past with these vintage effects. Regardless of the reason, in this tutorial, I am going to show you just how simple it is to create a vintage wash in your images by cross processing your image with Curves in Photoshop. The best part about it, this technique will literally take you less than 1 minute to do manually, and only seconds if you turn it into a Photoshop Action.

via Vintage Effect in Under a Minute in Photoshop.

Bookmark It

Post processing is an important part of a photographer’s work and can be time consuming and overwhelming. The more time you spend behind a computer post processing, the less time you have to spend behind the camera. Luckily there are things you can do to streamline your post processing.

Adobe Lightroom 3 has a number of tools that you can take advantage of to dramatically cut down on your post processing time. In this article I will cover five tips that will save you time in Lightroom 3.

via 5 Tips That Will Save You Time in Lightroom 3.

Bookmark It

Photoshop is universally considered to be a killer digital image editor and for digital photographers it is an extremely powerful post-processing tool. But the professional post-processing is not restricted to Photoshop only, you can use the same adjustments to fine-tune the images in Lightroom, Capture NX or GIMP as well. With the proper information about the adjustments involved in color correction, image enhancement and fine-tuning the image for sharpness, contrast, etc. you can bring out the best in your photos. Here are 7 Photoshop tutorials that will help you get familiar with the tips and tricks involved in post production process using Photoshop (which you can of course try out in other photo-editors as well). These tutorials serve as the guide to get started with the Photoshop adjustments but the final result is largely influenced by your personal liking.

via Photoshop Post-Processing — 7 Photoshop Tutorials For Image Post Processing.

Bookmark It

Lens distortion is a potential problem for any photographer without access to a tilt shift lens, and not all of us have the ability or desire to dump a couple grand on one. There’s a lot of things that two grand could go towards besides a niche lens like a tilt shift. If you’re an architectural photographer, that is certainly a different story, but most people aren’t.

There are quite a few types of lens distortion, but this article is going to focus on perspective distortion. I’ve found, for photographers, lens distortion only becomes a problem once you discover what it is, and if you haven’t discovered it yet then I apologize in advance because now it will drive you nuts when you don’t want it! When I first started out, I had no idea that my lens distorted reality and therefore I never noticed it in my images. I remember when I first started posting photos to flickr when I was brand new photographer, I put up an image I took at a really old Methodist church. I took the shot from the second floor balcony, which unknowingly to me at the time was probably the best place to shoot when trying to get straight lines all throughout your image. Unfortunately for me, I tilted the camera down a bit, which caused the vertical lines in the scene to lean in towards the center of the image.

When somebody tried to point this out to me, I was befuddled. I looked and looked at the image, but I couldn’t see what he was talking about. He just told me that the lines weren’t straight! I wasn’t looking at the lines in the scene in comparison to the edges of the frame, I was just looking at the lines themselves. They looked pretty dang straight to me, and I was getting pretty ticked off at this guy! Eventually, he told me to compare the lines in the scene to the outer edges of the framing itself and that’s when I had that first “aha” moment with lens distortion.

It’s important to note that lens distortion isn’t good or bad in and of itself. Like most things, it just depends on how and when you use it, and whether or not you meant to use it!

If you are unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, here are a few examples of intentional lens distortion…

via Correcting Perspective Lens Distortion In Photoshop.

Bookmark It

Let me start off by saying that I don’t use textures all that often, but there are certainly times where I feel that an image could use just a little something extra. Textures are just another one of those things in digital photography that can be overused and overdone if you’re not careful, and there are certainly right and wrong ways of going about it.

So, for those that have never heard of this before or have yet to try it, you may be wondering what it means to add a texture to a photograph? Simply put, it means taking one image usually of some sort of texture like peeling paint, a scratched surface, a textured wall or fabric and applying it as an overlay to your actual image. The effect is achieved by changing the blend mode of the texture in photoshop so that the texture actually becomes translucent and part of the actual image. For this tutorial, I’ll take a simple image I took in California during a surf competition, and add a texture to bring it to life. Here’s the image straight out of the camera and the texture we will be using from my library…

via How To Apply Textures To Your Photographs.

Bookmark It

How to Create A Simple Composite: Photoshop Creative.

Bookmark It

Almost any portrait subject over the age of 25 can use some under-eye cleanup, but many photographers struggle to make this common retouch look natural.

via The Fast Way to Remove Dark Circles Under Eyes in Photoshop.

Bookmark It

Focus stacking is a technique used to increase depth of field in a shot with post production. This works especially well for shots using long lens and in this case, a macro lens. Let’s go back to some photography 101 here. There are three factors that will affect depth of field or ‘bokeh’:

1. Focal length. Essentially the longer your lens, the more shallow your depth of field is.

2. Distance to subject. The nearer you are to your subject, the shallower your depth of field is and it very much applies to macro lens.

3. Aperture settings. The more you open up the aperture of your lens, the resulting image has a shallower depth of field. This, however, does not matter as much where the photo above is concerned.

via An Introduction to Focus Stacking.

Bookmark It