Digital Darkroom

Most of the tutorials we post involve techniques for shooting various kinds of photos, image-editing methods for enhancing your work, or a discussion of different types of gear. This post is a bit different, as it quickly explains an important imaging concept that will enable you to make more compelling photographs.

A common question among digital photographers is, “How much better is a Raw file than an image captured as a JPEG?” The video below attempts to answer this question “once and for all,” so take a look and see if you agree.

It is ironic—and a bit sad for those of us who grew up with film—that the day I began this review, Kodak announced that it would permanently stop production of slide film. So what is a digital photographer to do who still yearns for the look of film emulsions? Fortunately, DxO’s FilmPack 3 (www.dxo.com/us/photo) digitally emulates the quality, style, color, contrast and grain of 60 different film stocks, black and white and color, positive and negative, and adds 25 creative effects.

Adobe announced this morning that final release versions of Lightroom 5.6 and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) 8.6 are now available.

Adobe customers can can get the apps through the update mechanism in Photoshop CC and Photoshop CS6, or through the download links at the bottom of this page. Adobe says these updates correct "issues reported in earlier versions of Lightroom 5 and Camera Raw 8," without being specific about what those issues were.

One of the reasons photographic purists usually refer to black and white prints as “monochrome” is that it’s a more precise descriptive term that also covers images produced in sepia and other tones.

The tips I am going to share here are all done in Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is not the only imaging-editing program but it is the most widely used.

When our resident digital guru's Digital Darkroom Resource CD appeared in 2003 it debuted to much fanfare. The first volume included 11 chapters; shortly thereafter, Brooks released a second volume containing 16 chapters. He's now outdone himself with a new, third volume that contains 26 chapters, totaling 318 pages in PDF format plus a folder of images for print test...