Software How To

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a budget-friendly image editing package that’s designed for casual users and amateurs. Under the hood, however, there are dozens of advanced features and hidden capabilities that are accessible via plug-ins. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could unlock, say, 130 of those features with one add-on product that costs less than fifty bucks? Then here’s good news: you can. 

The folks who brought you PortraitPro, the software that turns average looking men and women into superstars (or as John Oliver might say, “Turns ones into tens faster than a South American counterfeiter”) now brings you LandscapePro, a similar application you should think of as “cosmetic surgery for Mother Nature.” But is this a case of “liking what you get,” or “getting exactly what you like?” That, my friends, is the $59 question

Panoramas are easy to wish for, but, until recently, were not easy to get. To shoot high-quality panos often required special cameras that could rotate their lens while simultaneously advancing an aperture slit across a curved film plane.

HDR, as most photographers know, stands for High Dynamic Range, allowing you to capture a wider range of highlight and shadow detail than you could in a single frame. You create an HDR image by shooting several identically framed shots of the same scene at different exposures, often with three brackets such as -2, 0, and +2 EV. The newest kid on the HDR block is Aurora HDR Pro from Macphun, currently for Mac only, but with a Windows version in the works.

There are times when a global adjustment to color, whether it’s a saturation change or a modification to the hue of the image, isn’t appropriate. You may just need to boost the color in the sky or make a small change in the color of some other element in the photo. While you can do this type of adjustment with Photoshop through the use of adjustment layers and masking, that can be quite a bit of work and obviously it requires Photoshop, or something similar, and not everyone is willing to invest in or learn another piece of software.

One of the easiest ways to capture that classic black and white look when shooting an IR- converted SLR is to shoot in Monochrome mode. If your camera doesn’t offer that option, you’ll have to convert the image into black and white after the fact. That may be the better of the 2 choices because that approach will give you more control over how the final image looks.

There’s more to black-and-white photography than simply a lack of color. Maybe we wouldn’t feel this way if the first photographs were made in color but that didn’t happen and I grew up admiring the works of W. Eugene Smith and other photojournalists who photographed people at work, play, or being themselves in glorious black and white.