Shared by Time Trap Photography Instagram page. I'm dedicated to freezing those special moments in life that can be revisited and admired for generations to come. - Shannon Bourque
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A heap of cool photo stories are trending today with announcements from Leica about new lenses, Sony about the finalists for their major photo competition and several wonderful new tutorials from some of our photography blog friends.
Sourced by Time Trap Photography sharing the best photography tips, news and tricks throughout the industry. Time Trap Photography is dedicated to freezing those special moments in life that can be revisited and admired for generations to come. - Shannon Bourque
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The aim of post-processing, broadly speaking, is to bring an image as close as possible to how you visualized it when taking the photo. A camera can only do so much in capturing a photograph but post-processing, when done correctly, can bring out the best in the photo.
While post-processing workflows vary from one photographer to another based on their requirements and preferences, there are some steps that are generally deemed essential to get the best results.
Most of us are aware, to some extent, of the common steps involved in post-processing like color correction, brightness adjustment, contrast and saturation enhancement, sharpening and the like. In this post, we are going to look at some essential steps that often get overlooked in a post-processing workflow.
If you like to print your photos but the prints don’t look the same as the photos do on your computer screen, it is likely that your monitor isn’t properly calibrated.
Monitor calibration is an important step if you want the colors and shades in your photo to be reproduced correctly in prints and to be sure that your photos look their best when you post them online for others to see.
A monitor calibration device. Photo by FHKE on Flickr.
For best and most accurate results, a monitor calibration device like Datacolor Spyder or X-Rite ColorMunki is recommended and is definitely worth the price you pay for it. However, you can also calibrate your monitor by using the built-in Windows and Mac tools, using the steps outlined here, though they are not half as accurate as a dedicated calibration device.
This isn’t something that you do every time you post-process your photos, but is a key one-time step that prepares your monitor to correctly display colors. If you have a monitor calibration device, you may want to recalibrate your display every month or so for consistency, if you’re really serious about it.
A digital color space is similar to a painter’s palette – it governs the range of colors or shades that one can draw from. Technically, a color space is how colors are organized and quantified which allows for reproducible representations of color. Let’s take a look at the image below to understand it better.
The horseshoe shape encapsulates all the visible colors, while the outlined regions or ‘color spaces’ cover a portion of it. Many color spaces have been created, but the image shows two main types of color spaces in digital photography – Adobe RGB (Red-Green-Blue), and sRGB (standard RGB).
If you’ve dug through your camera settings, you would have encountered the Color Space setting where you have to choose one of the two. Or you might have also come across this option in your post-processing software. As you can see from the image above, Adobe RGB has more color range than sRGB, which would make you think that a bigger color space like Adobe RGB should be a logical choice while working on your photos. Not really.
sRGB came first, and is the most widely used color space. In fact, almost everything on a computer is built around sRGB – the internet, applications, mobile devices – everything has sRGB as their standard color space. You cannot go wrong with sRGB – it has a simplified workflow, displays correctly for web, and is suitable for prints.
If you’re a professional photographer and want more accurate colors for prints and know how to work with the more complicated workflow associated with Adobe RGB, you can choose it over sRGB. You can learn more about the differences here.
A histogram is a great tool to help you assess the lighting and exposure in an image. It is a graph that represents how light is distributed through the image. You come across histograms in your digital camera settings as well in your photo editing software.
It’s important to know how to read a histogram as it can help guide you not only when you’re taking a photograph but also during post-processing. Technically, a histogram represents the number of pixels in the photo distributed according to their brightness or luminosity, from shadows on the left to highlights on the right, with midtones in the middle.
A photograph with a histogram bunched to the left has a lot of shadows and can mean that the photo is underexposed, unless it’s of a dark subject or is a low key image. Similarly, a photo with a histogram bunched to the right has excess of highlights and can mean that the photo overexposed, unless it’s of a light subject or is a high key photo. A photo with a bell shaped histogram curve with the peak in the middle is usually considered a ‘well exposed’ image.
During post-processing, keeping an eye on the histogram can help you avoid clipping highlights and shadows, and retain details in those regions, especially when applying adjustments that change luminosity of the image like brightness, contrast, curves, etc. You can read more about histograms here.
Almost all photos benefit from a certain amount of sharpening in post-processing, to eliminate those fuzzy edges and make the photos pop. Of course, it’s important to consider if and how much sharpening was applied in-camera when the photo was captured.
A properly sharpened image pops, like this one. Photo by Salva Barbera on Flickr.
Sharpening is often the last step in a post-processing workflow. And how much sharpening a photo will need depends on the intended output, which can be print or digital. When outputting for print, the amount of sharpening required varies with the type of paper used – a glossy paper requires less sharpening compared to that for matte paper.
When sharpening photographs, always look at the photo at 100% size and beware of creating halos due to excessive sharpening. You can learn more about sharpening here.
If you want to get the most out of your photos by utilizing the power of post-processing but do not know where to start and how to proceed, we have a solution for you – The Ultimate Guide to Fundamental Editing. Produced by our friends at Photzy, the bestselling guide gives you a step-by-step post-processing workflow to help you create great-looking photos efficiently and consistently, using popular programs like Lightroom, Elements and Photoshop. Click here now to check it out.
Sourced by Time Trap Photography sharing the best photography tips, news and tricks throughout the industry. Time Trap Photography is dedicated to freezing those special moments in life that can be revisited and admired for generations to come. - Shannon Bourque
Please visit our main site for booking availability and rates.
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There are undoubtedly those who think that most talented photographers acquired their skills through years of tutelage under a demanding but conscientious instructor.
I’m quite unsure as to the validity of this idea in a historical context, but in modern times it’s unlikely to be the case.
Image by Gaetano Cessati
The advent of the Information Age brought with it an ease of access to resources and sharing platforms that have paved the way for a generation of self-taught photographers.
Not to suggest that formal academic training in photography is entirely unwarranted, but it would appear that self-driven education is the wave of the future.
While learning photography on your own may require an additional measure of discipline and dedication, one of the many advantages to this approach is that it’s easier to keep things fun.
Understanding f-stops and shutter speed are vital skills, but it’s not enough to simply have a theoretical grasp of the fundamentals — photography happens when you put those skills to practical use.
And you’ve got to challenge yourself in order to develop and, eventually, master your skills.
Challenging yourself can actually be fun, and it doesn’t require you to run off to the Amazon rainforest to experience real growth. If you’re ready to strengthen and diversify your skill set, keep reading for 10 fun photography challenge ideas that will help you do just that.
Less really can be more. There’s freedom in minimalism and you can discover this for yourself by shooting with just one camera and one lens. Leave everything else in your bag.
Give yourself a predetermined time frame, pick your favorite camera/lens combo and go shoot. If you’ve gotten used to using a zoom lens or frequently changing lenses while out in the field, you’ll be forced to rethink the way you see and compose your photos.
It won’t take long before you notice that you are choosing more meaningful subjects and treating those subjects to stronger composition.
Believe it or not, you don’t need to book a trip to another country to find interesting photography subjects; there are plenty of them right under your nose.
You may look at those things as being mundane, but therein lies the challenge: take common objects and find a way to make them beautiful.
Whether it’s how you light them, the angle at which you shoot them, the environment in which you place them — make it a point to be attentive to the ordinary objects around you and treat them as if they are special.
Ultimately, it’s an exercise in how to connect with your subjects, a skill every photographer needs.
Our third from our list of fun photography challenge ideas is deciding how you go about choosing what you shoot on any given day?
Is it something you decide on ahead of time or just figure it out as you go?
Is it a struggle?
Here’s an idea: choose a subject that corresponds with each letter of the alphabet. I know it probably sounds easy, but once you dig into it, you will see this is a task that tests your ability to find worthwhile subjects that also fit the criteria of the challenge, and some letters will surely prove to be more difficult to fulfill than others.
It’s a fun challenge with almost a month’s worth of variety built into it; the unique experiences you acquire will no doubt serve to expand your vision and sharpen your intuition.
Water may not immediately come to mind when thinking of riveting subject matter, but rest assured it’s something you will want to spend some time with.
Two of the most common water-based projects are water droplet photography and oil-and-water photography. In addition to some basic photography gear (a flash, a tripod), both can be achieved by using items you likely have at home already.
Oh, you will also need a heavy dose of patience — rest assured there will be a lot of trial and error when it comes to lighting, camera settings and timing, but the takeaway is you’ll learn to make exposure adjustments quickly and learn some great lighting lessons.
Eventually, you’ll get some beautiful photos for all your effort.
Click here for an in-depth tutorial of how to set everything up for the water droplet challenge and here for a tutorial on oil and water photography.
If you really want to dive head first into the process of mastering ISO, shutter speed and aperture, then take on a low light challenge.
Whether it’s in a dimly lit theater or nighttime street photography, photo-worthy moments are happening all the time with no regard for lighting conditions.
Putting yourself through the paces of shooting in low light will help prepare you for those spur of the moment opportunities whenever and wherever they may occur.
You don’t actually have to leave your house for this challenge; using the ambient light filtering in from a window, for example, is an excellent way to practice low light photography.
What you learn here can be applied to a pretty wide variety of other situations where light is in short supply.
This is about more than converting your images to black and white in post processing.
It’s about learning to “see” in black and white.
You will need to look for textures, patterns, shapes; light and shadows. Each of these is important in color photos, but absolutely vital to good black and white photographs.
You might go so far as setting your camera to produce exclusively a black and white jpeg; if you’re using a mirrorless camera you can even set the LCD/EVF to display in black and white.
Spend a week or two seeing the world in black and white and you will begin to acquire an eye for detail that will carry over into all of your photographic efforts.
Photography challenges come in many different flavors, but the best ones exist to make you a better photographer by strengthening the skills you already possess and paving the way for you to develop new skills.
It’s serious business as far as the craft of photography is concerned, but there’s no reason why all of this shouldn’t be fun.
So, challenge yourself and enjoy!
We mentioned creating an assignment for yourself which focuses on creating Black and White photographs through “seeing in black and white” and this is where you can truly master the art that is “Black and White Photography.”
Sourced by Time Trap Photography sharing the best photography tips, news and tricks throughout the industry. Time Trap Photography is dedicated to freezing those special moments in life that can be revisited and admired for generations to come. - Shannon Bourque
Please visit our main site for booking availability and rates.
Receive valuable industry knowledge delivered free to your email each day.
Sourced by Time Trap Photography sharing the best photography tips, news and tricks throughout the industry. Time Trap Photography is dedicated to freezing those special moments in life that can be revisited and admired for generations to come. - Shannon Bourque
Please visit our main site for booking availability and rates.
Receive valuable industry knowledge delivered free to your email each day.
Out of the thousands of photography stories that have been published in the last 24 hours, we have picked out some of the more popular ones so you can stay up to date with the photo world.
Sourced by Time Trap Photography sharing the best photography tips, news and tricks throughout the industry. Time Trap Photography is dedicated to freezing those special moments in life that can be revisited and admired for generations to come. - Shannon Bourque
Please visit our main site for booking availability and rates.
Receive valuable industry knowledge delivered free to your email each day.
The landscape made me feel like I was on another planet. _ I've never seen such incredible rock formations in my life. What an experienc...
