As photographers, one thing we’re always interested in is improving our photography. Today we’ll discuss something that is often overlooked and can make dramatic improvement in all of the photos we show, as well as increase our perceived skill in the art.
Top photographers know only their top 1% or less of photos taken will ever see the light of day. They know the first step to having interesting work is culling out that which is not. This isn’t something that should be limited to the professionals or those with professional editors… It’s something we can all use! Read more…
After posting a before-and-after of a concert photo she had taken and edited in Lightroom, photographer Kohl Murdock received several requests to post a tutorial on how exactly she edited it.
The photograph was taken at a Shiny Toy Guns concert and is a great straight on portrait of lead singer Carah Faye Charnow with the exception of the massive amount of red fill light plaguing the snap. This is a common problem with concert photos, and so we’re as glad as everyone else that Murdoch obliged and created the tutorial. Read more…
If you’ve been thinking about buying a copy of Apple’s Aperture 3 for your post-processing work, you might want to hold off for a bit. A replacement may be on the near horizon — at least according to a new book listing that has popped up over on Amazon Canada. Read more…
Recently, a friend and photographer Ben Jacobsen of Ben Jacobsen Photo got his work into a third gallery. One of the gallery owners asked him “Is your work Photoshopped?” This is also a popular question often asked at Art Fairs and Photography exhibits. Why is this question relevant to some viewers? If you are asking this, do you know what Photoshopping means? Better yet, What does that word mean to you, and what is it that you are asking? Read more…
When Adobe unleashed Photoshop CS5 back in April 2010, one of the big features that had photographers buzzing was Content Aware Fill. With a simple selection and a few keystrokes, the tool could magically delete a portion of a photograph and replace the void with details from the surrounding area. The tool was so revolutionary that when a sneak peek demo went viral, viewers began calling the video fake and too good to be true. It wasn’t. Read more…
GIMP, the image editing program that’s a popular open-source alternative to Photoshop, is now easier than ever for Mac users to start using. Though it was completely free, installing it has long required that X11 also be installed — a major pain in the butt. That changes with the latest version of GIMP: the app is now a self-contained native app that’s a breeze to install. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping. Read more…
The New York Times has an interesting article examining how retouching has spread beyond fashion and advertising photos into editorial photography, conditioning the public to accept images that are “heightened versions of the truth”. One reason is pressure from celebrity subjects:
The demands of celebrities also drive this broader trend toward perfection. Mr. Granger said that he found more photographers are being pressured to produce shots that the actors or actresses like because celebrities then will request the photographer in the future for other magazine covers or for advertising work. That can be critical because editorial work alone is not enough to sustain a career in photography.
Ms. Greenberg said that in 2002 she shot Tom Cruise when he was wearing braces. She used Photoshop to remove the braces before submitting the photographs but the magazine asked her to put the braces back in.
“I was sad because I was like ‘now Tom Cruise is going to hate me,’ ” she said. Ms. Greenberg has not shot Mr. Cruise since then.
Creating cinemagraphs — still photos in which one or another section is moves repetitively — can be a pretty tricky process, but a new technique developed by Adobe researcher Aseem Agarwala and his UC Berkley colleagues may make it quite a bit easier. Their technique involves “de-animating” a video by “drawing” two sets of “strokes” over the video: one set over the parts you want to move and another over the parts you’d like standing still.
Of course there are tutorials and even Microsoft’s Cliplets app if you’re really interested in making some cinemagraphs right away, but this new technique and the control it offers may just turn into a sought after feature in the next iteration of Photoshop or a future mobile app. Check out the project’s website for all of the detail-y details.
The GNU Image Manipulation Project, more popularly known as GIMP, has just released version 2.8; the first complete GIMP overhaul since 2008. For those who don’t know (and there probably aren’t many) GIMP is famous for being a slightly more complicated (and a lot more free) alternative to Photoshop with fewer features. And it seems that, right on cue with the Adobe CS6 release, GIMP is trying to close the gap between the two products that’s been widening these last 4 years. Read more…
Afghan photographer Massoud Hossaini won the Putlizer Prize yesterday for his Breaking News photo showing a 12-year-old girl screaming after a suicide bombing in Kabul. His images of the mosque attack were so powerful that the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal all published them on their front pages on December 7, 2011. However, each one ran a different image captured at the scene, and only the New York Times ran the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot that showed the full extent of the carnage. Shortly afterward, The Washington Post interviewed the photo editors at each paper to discuss why they chose the images (and the crops) they did.
