News

Dirty camera sensors are a common source of degraded image quality, resulting in tedious post-processing work to clean up the photograph. This problem is the bane of those who shoot outdoors in dusty conditions, and is particularly acute when using small aperture settings that tend to exaggerate imperfections.

Avvenu, Inc., has announced that its new remote access and photo sharing service
supports Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.0 and the newly announced Photoshop
Elements 4.0, Adobe's (Nasdaq:ADBE) powerful, easy-to-use photo editing, sharing
and organization tools for consumers. This integrated support lets Photoshop
Album Starter Edition and Photoshop Elements users share images directly from
their collections, as well as remotely access these images from any web-enabled
computer, laptop, PDA or mobile phone. Avvenu eliminates the inconvenience of
uploading photos to a web-based photo service and large email attachments, making
it extremely fast for sharing digital photos.

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Kingston Technology Company, Inc. announces that leading documentary photographer
Colin Finlay will reveal his latest tip on Kingston's `Icons of
Photography' Website. Finlay, fresh from a three-month educational tour
teaching photo students at 25 top universities in the U.S., hones in on lighting
in this month's profile.

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If you want to make photographs with impact, it’s important that they tell a story, and “speak” to the viewer. No matter how beautiful an image appears, if it doesn’t provoke an emotional response, you haven’t quite finished the job.

Over the years we've discussed why some photographs are more compelling when converted to b&w and how some processing methods are more complicated than others. And this holds true for landscape scenes, portrait photos, nature images, and other popular genres.

Despite all the advancements in imaging—including the advent of color and the now dominance of digital—there’s something about classic black-and-white photography that will never go out of style. That’s not to say that just because a photo has been shot or converted to monochrome it’s guaranteed to be a great photo. The choice to go black and white must have some meaningful relationship to the subject matter or scene to be effective. For this assignment, we asked readers to submit their best black-and-white photos that use the dramatic impact of monochrome in a powerful way. Our six favorite images here certainly show just that.

One key challenge when processing our images is to achieve maximum dynamic range to enhance details in shadows, highlights, and everything in between. This is important with color images and perhaps even more critical when processing b&w photos for maximum impact.