Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

The weather forecast for New York calls for temperatures to dip into the single digits this weekend, and if you’re like me, you find it challenging to keep your digits warm while out-of-doors with your digital camera. Here’s a little trick I learned back in my salad days when Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan were in my territory and I was a sales rep with Minolta Corporation.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could resize a batch of images simply by right-clicking them and selecting their new dimensions from a menu? Windows users now can—even on 64-bit machines running Windows 8.1.

Forget Photoshop for a few—let’s talk about three physical filters that you’ll fully enjoy while the fall foliage flourishes as well as later when the yearend holiday festivities finally flow in. In fact, you’ll find them fun to use anytime, frankly. 

The White Balance feature on your digital camera does more than advertised. Read this Easy Tip to learn how to add subtle adjustments to sunset and sunrise shots.

Many, many years ago a coworker at Altman Camera in Chicago showed me that it was possible to screw a Vivitar +10 Macro Adapter into a partially disassembled set of Nikon K-series extension rings and thereby build a soft focus lens that practically exploded with delightfully horrendous aberrations. It was fixed-focus, you had to bob to-and-fro like a drunken sailor to use it, but it was sensationally unsharp and I’ve been hooked on this genre ever since.

Many features of Photoshop Elements can be customized to suit your liking. Surprisingly, some experienced users overlook this powerful capability. A great place to start is at the Preferences menu. This screen shot is from the Mac version, but the same concept applies to Win as well as full-blown Photoshop products.