One of the most frequent questions I'm asked is about the proper, or "best," way to sharpen images for printing or web use. Almost everyone has struggled with getting this right. Software has improved greatly over the past couple of years, both within Adobe's Photoshop, which recently added the Smart Sharpen filter, and with third-party tools like...
No matter how careful you are, soft happens. Your subject, whether a femme fatale or a flower, may move. The light level may be low so you have to shoot at a slow shutter speed, and camera movement blurs the photo slightly. Or you may be photographing under bright overcast conditions outdoors--plenty of light for most situations--but you're shooting soccer...
Stymied by all the buzz about megapixels, dpis, ppis, and what-have-you? Should you use a digital camera? Or shoot film? And which is really better? Well, yes, it's a veritable jungle of competing facts, pseudo-facts, and ideologies out there. Then there is the obsolescence factor. As someone who bought a Nikon F Photomic in 1968, a Linhof 4x5 in '70 and proceeded to...
In the real world, as often as not, there'll be a problem with your background. In the precise spot where the light is right on your subject, the background might be too light, too dark, too cluttered, or you might even see the proverbial telephone pole sprouting from your subject's head. You needn't...
I'd be a rich man if I had a buck for every time I've stumbled upon a great landscape scene only to mutter to myself (and anyone else within earshot), "What a horrible sky." There's something entirely deflating about finding an interesting foreground scene with a sky the color of aged...
Corel Print House 2000 Although there is a large selection of consumer entry-level photo applications for Windows, there are few off-the-shelf packages for the Mac. The Corel Print House 2000 is a welcome alternative. In fact, at...
Retouching a portrait using film used to be a pretty simple task. Send the negative to your lab, check the “retouch” box, pay $5 or so, and the job was done.
This article is for those of you who color correct and adjust your image files to attain what looks like an ideal photograph on screen, but whose prints don't match that perfect screen image. Of all the challenges and disappointments digital photographers express to me in e-mails I receive almost daily, matching screen to print is the most common. It is also the most...
Are you looking for a way to make your digital photos really stand out? Starting with one of your existing color shots, here's a great way to create a dynamic new image that will really catch your viewer's eye. By combining a black and white...
Many people tend to associate JPEGs with poor quality. However, when a JPEG has poor quality, it's the result of the format being used incorrectly, not a flaw in the format itself. Used properly, JPEG can and will produce a file that cannot be distinguished from any other format.
The main advantage of JPEG is clearly its superior compression. An RGB image...
The new Photoshop CS has a greatly expanded Filter section. One of the new filter options is called Filter Gallery. The Filter Gallery is so extensive it just boggles the mind! In order to give you a little introduction into this feature-rich area of...
Years ago in the old-fashioned wet darkrooms we used to constantly fight the problem of originals that were too high in contrast to print well onto paper. Typically, slides and other chromes simply gave us fits. At that time, if you wanted to print slides onto Cibachrome (later called Ilfochrome), you just about had to perform some sort of contrast control masking in order to have...
Remember in the old days how you used to tilt the easel when you made a print under the enlarger if you wanted to correct for some optical distortion? Well, there is a way to do something similar using Photoshop when you are working in the digital...