Digital Photography Software & Techniques

August 5, 2013

DPP Solutions: New Features In Lightroom 5

The latest version of Adobe’s workhorse software has some particularly useful tools

By Staff
2013 has been a big year for Adobe. Their biggest announcement, of course, was the change in licensing of their software to a pay-as-you-go subscription model facilitated through their Creative Cloud service. Around the same time as the Creative Cloud announcement, and almost lost in the din of controversy that it generated, was the Lightroom 5 Public... Read more
June 2, 2013

Animate your Stills

The latest trend for photos online is making parts of them move. We’ll show you how to do it

By The Editors
Cinemagraphs are in. If you haven’t heard the term, a cinemagraph is a still photo that has some part of it animated. These images are meant for web display, and they’re a great example of how digital means for displaying images are bringing new aesthetics and possibilities. A cinemagraph is different from a video clip in that only a portion... Read more
May 1, 2013

Heresy In Library Organization

Keep track of an ever-expanding digital archive by getting things right from the start

Text And Photography By George Jardine
Scanning the horizon, there are so-called workflow tutorials everywhere you look. Each and every one of them is promoted under the guise that it will help you become "fast and efficient." But what fast and efficient really means for most of the gurus out there is automating everything, and trying to do all 10 steps (or whatever) of the workflow... Read more
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January 2, 2013

Highlights And Shadows in Your Photography: Take More Control

Use new controls in Lightroom 4 and Adobe Camera Raw 7 to fine-tune the yin and yang of highlights and shadows

By George Jardine
Just when you’re becoming comfortable with image controls in your editor of choice, an update comes along and changes everything, so I sympathize that it sometimes feels like you’re aiming at a moving target. But no matter what image processor you’re using, I always try to urge photographers to think of “image correction”... Read more
September 2, 2011

The Raw File Shuffle

How to keep organized and sane when you’re working and reworking your RAW files.

Text And Photography By George Jardine
Adobe Photoshop has been around for 21 years now. Given that, I think it’s safe to say that we’re finally dealing with an adult. For the better part of that 21 years, Photoshop was the place where you went to work on, to crop, to color-correct or to manipulate, more or less, one image at a time. In the process, Photoshop became synonymous... Read more
August 12, 2011

DPP Solutions: Get Connected

A quick guide to the interfaces for video and audio that you’ll encounter as you get into working with motion

By Mel Lambert
Connecting a DSLR to a peripheral used to be simple. You had a USB cable, a card reader—maybe USB or FireWire—and you were done. Images could move from camera to computer fast and easy. Times have changed, and now DSLRs can connect to TVs, projectors, computers and other devices. You’re shooting stills and HD video, and you may be recording sound... Read more
August 10, 2011

DPP Solutions: AV File Formats

As you get into multimedia, the alphabet soup of file formats can be confusing. Here’s a quick reference guide to common file types.

By Mel Lambert
The following is an annotated list of the data file types you may encounter while working with audio/video recorders and editing systems. Uncompressed Audio Files WAV: Flexible PCM file based on the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) and capable of storing virtually any combination of bit rates and sample frequencies; ideal format for data interchange... Read more
July 2, 2011

See In Black & White

How to understand the role of color contrast in black-and-white

By George Jardine
Back in the days of film photography, creating strong black-and-white photographs was an entirely different process than it is today. One important difference is that when shooting film, each of your decisions was virtually chiseled in stone as you went along. First, you had film choice. If you wanted black-and-white as your final image, it generally... Read more
April 23, 2009

DPP Solutions: When You Need A Big File

With the right software, you can increase resolution and maintain top image quality

By Mike Stensvold
You can’t beat megapixels when you need big prints. Genuine Fractals 6 Professional Edition from onOne Software gives you more pixels—incredibly good pixels—from a digital image. That’s enough pixels to make a 4×6-foot print at 300 dpi from a 6-megapixel original image, or a 6×9-foot print at 300 dpi from a 12-megapixel original—or... Read more
April 9, 2009

Black & White

From capture to final output, there are many pieces to the puzzle for producing the ultimate black-and-white images

Dave Willis And Mike Stensvold
Getting a great black-and-white print is easier than ever. Deciding the best way to get there is the hard part. The more you understand about the black-and-white process, the better the prints you’ll produce. While a single perfect method won’t work for every image, there are plenty of routes for optimizing the unique properties of individual black-and-white... Read more