Here's something that both photographers and the typical millennial have to look forward to in old age: Your memory is going to suck because of all the photos you took when you should have been paying attention to what was happening around you.
That's the upshot of a new psychological study that finds you can have a good photographic record of an event or a good memory, but not both.
The ability to pull photos out of your camera and onto your computer wirelessly is an incredibly useful tool that many photographers use, but what if you could pull those photos instantly into Lightroom right there on-location? Well, it turns out you can, and it's not all that complicated either.
Here's a new way to be violated in the social media era: Post a photo of yourself on Instagram, then wait for somebody you don't know and didn't authorize to repost an edited version that looks vaguely like you, except shinier and with a lot more makeup.
After experiencing one too many embarrassing, high-profile Photoshop disasters, China is turning its research focus on image-editing software, although not in the way you might think.
When engineers Calvin and Ashish got in touch with us to tell us about their upcoming Palette interface, we immediately got excited. That's because a lot of people have thought up ways to speed up your post-processing workflow with everything from video game controllers to MIDI controllers, but none of them hold a candle to Palette's potential.
When Adobe officially announced its special Creative Cloud plan/bundle for photographers, there was a catch: you had to own Photoshop CS3 or above in order to qualify for the special $10/month pricing. Well, no more. For a limited time, Adobe is lifting that restriction and making the special bundle available for everyone.
UK motion graphics artist and Make Productions founder Joe Fellows specializes in bringing stills to life. Using a series of steps in Photoshop and then After Effects, Fellows is able to transform photos into '2.5D' animated sequences that look like slow motion footage shot with a video camera.
Victoria's Secret model, mother, and wife to Hollywood star Orlando Bloom (for now... I'm still hopeful) Miranda Kerr landed in some seriously hot water with the Internet-at-large recently after posting a clearly Photoshopped photograph of herself to her Instagram account.
When Nokia announced that the new Lumia 1520 and the current Lumia 1020 would both soon have DNG Raw capabilities, the response was polarized -- half of the smartphone photo community was excited, the other half skeptical. Would these files really give you the latitude that RAW is known for? Or would they just be a massive waste of hard drive space.
Android 4.4 KitKat was officially announced a few days ago, but one of the coolest features (especially for us camera folk) wasn't mentioned in the announcement at all: an impressive new non-destructive photo editor is built right in.
If you're looking to make an argument for the inherent superiority of Western-style capitalism, consider how difficult it apparently is to find a competent Photoshop jockey in the Communist world.
The latest example comes from the Eastern provinces of China, where what was supposed to be a heartwarming record of regional officials honoring the elderly turned into an internationally recognized example of how not to doctor a photograph.
No doubt feeling pressure from certain other social media sites raking in the dough, Google announced Wednesday a slew of new features for Google+ intended to enhance the way users share, organize and tweak photos.
Without a makeup artist at your disposal, even a great portrait can be ruined by shiny skin. So if you're looking through the results of your most recent portrait shoot and there's a lot of shine there, here's a fantastic tutorial that shows you how to get rid of it without making the photo look like it's been doctored.
The image above, which was published by Pyongyang's official news agency KCNA, seems to show Kim Jung-un and some of his underlings touring the site of a children's hospital. However, like so many of the photos released by KCNA in the past, its authenticity is being called into question.
Well, here's one for the Trekkies... yes, I'm looking at you Cheri. Reddit user and Star Trek enthusiast Pedro Berg Johnsen (better known as ThatNordicGuy) took it upon himself to blend the faces of the Star Trek: The Original Series stars with their modern-day counterparts.
The resulting images have sparked some interesting conversation about how good a job the casting directors of the new Star Trek films did. Many of the actors blend together incredibly well.
Adobe users who have purchased a product or signed up for Creative Cloud recently beware. According to Adobe's website, the company's servers were hacked "very recently," and the attackers made away with customer information from 2.9 million Adobe accounts, as well as source code for a few Adobe products.
In light of the heated debate over post-processing sparked by the winner of World Press Photo of the Year 2012 award, the Amsterdam-based organization has chosen to implement some rule changes before it asks for this year's entries in a couple of months time.
There are many reason high-quality lenses cost as much as they do (and in some cases that is quite a lot), and one of them is that high-end lenses use many specially-designed elements that are perfectly-positioned to counteract aberrations and distortions.
But what if you could correct for all of that in post? Automatically? With just the click of a button? You could theoretically use a crappy lens and generate high-end results. Well, that's what researchers at the University of British Columbia are working on, and so far their results are very promising.
It's hardly news that Google+ is doing its damnedest to secure itself as the social network of choice for the photographic community. And the network's ability to handle full-size RAW uploads, in addition to the easy-to-manage system and powerful new in-browser editing tools, in many ways already makes it a shoo-in for that title.
But get ready, because Google isn't done yet. Another update has been pushed Google+'s way, and this time it concerns your RAW photos. Or, more specifically, how good they look when they're automatically converted to JPEGs for viewing.
In addition to the Project Mighty and Napoleon announcement we told you about earlier, Adobe had a few more things up its sleeve yesterday. Key among them was the official release of the exciting $10/month photographer bundle along with some statistics that show how fast Creative Cloud is growing.
Adobe made several announcements yesterday, and one of the most talked about revolved around projects Napoleon and Mighty, the digital ruler and pressure sensitive stylus the company debuted in early May.
Back then, both pieces of hardware were basically prototypes in the "technology exploration" phase, but now Adobe has announced that Mighty and Napoleon will be hitting store shelves in the first half of 2014, and they won't be alone. Two accompanying iOS apps -- Parallel and Contour -- are being designed as well.
For you and me, RGB color spaces may just be an obscure but important mechanism towards achieving properly color-balanced photos. For a certain group of image nerds, however, it's the whole enchilada.
Snapseed's team has been hard at work since their company was acquired by Google last September. They've already put new photo filters in the Google+ app and some auto-enhance tools in Google+, and now they're working on something even grander: turning Google+ into a full-fledged, browser-based photo editing tool.
If you were wanting to have your mind blown today, the video above might do it. It's a demonstration of a piece of 3D object extraction and manipulation software that made its debut at SIGGRAPH 2013, and it may just offer a glimpse into the future of photo manipulation.
Swedish photographer and retouch artist Erik Johansson creates amazing photo manipulations -- in fact, we've actually featured his work before. This, however, is the first time we've had the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how these manipulations come together.
In the video above he gives us a glimpse at how he created the manipulation Drifting Away, all the way from the first sketch to the final 123-layer manipulation.
Need to send someone some RAW photographs but hate the fact that they weigh tens of megabytes each? You can actually resize the files to smaller sizes quite easily in Lightroom, making sending small copies back and forth a snap.
As post-production software continues to become more and more powerful, researchers are doing their best to keep up by developing new methods of spotting digital photo fakes. In the past, we've seen that noise patterns and even Twitter trends can help spot fakes, but a new method out of UC Berkeley is taking a look at something else entirely: the shadows.
Back in mid-June, Yahoo! purchased Ghostbird and pulled the company's popular advanced mobile editing app PhotoForge off of the app store. If you weren't one of the lucky ones who purchased the app before it got pulled and you've been looking for a suitable alternative, look no further: Leonardo has you covered.
Check out this portrait of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse by photographer Paul Mobley and digital artist Mike Campau. Can you tell how it was created?
Alien Skin Software's Exposure 5 is a starting point for building stylish and creative photos that will impress even the harshest of critics. With hundreds of ideas to pick, layer and build upon there's really no limit to what you can make. Opening an image for the first time in Exposure 5 may prove a little overwhelming with the vast array of filters there are to tinker with. Everything from a subtle film look still available at your local shop to the original daguerreotype feel. It is impressive to say the least.
I had the opportunity to photograph the newest dormitory on the Florida International University campus a couple of nights ago and I thought I would share a little insight on the process of lighting such a large structure.
Photography purists might want to look away on this one. The above video is a 9 minute time-lapse that speeds up 7+ hours worth of Photoshop CC work. That work was spent creating an intense composite that wound up consisting of 284 layers before it was all said and done.
Photographers are intimately familiar with the myriad filters available to them through Photoshop. Nothing like the Instagram-style "filters" we've come to hear about more and more often, these have names like Grain, Diffuse, Ocean Ripple and Pinch.
And although Adobe has had to deal with some negative reactions to its business model as of late, Barcelona based audiovisual studio Device decided to pay tribute to the company's filtering abilities by putting together this short animated tribute to all of Photoshop CS5's filters.
Digital image editing technology -- culturally controversial uses aside -- has enabled us to do some pretty amazing things. In the past, we shared a video that showed how the Internet came together to restore a WWII veteran's Navy photo to its former glory.
This time, we get to see the process in action, as Redditor thehatersalad shows us the impressive restoration and colorization work he did on an old photo of user f2ISO100's grandmother -- time-lapse style.
One of the great workflow possibilities that was opened up by the advent of digital photography is the ability to easily create panoramic images. It's become trivially easy to generate panorama images, so much so that it's even become an integrated feature into smartphones.
What many photographers may not realize is that there are a number of other interesting results that can be created using panorama creation software, if you just keep in mind what the software is actually doing (and what you are actually telling it to do).
You know those computers in Minority Report and Iron Man that are completely controlled through hand gestures? One day soon, we may all be using Photoshop in the same way.
The video above is a short demo showing a Photoshop plugin that introduces some introductory gesture controls to the image editing program.
I did my first surreal photoshoot with a model this past weekend. Here's a breakdown of the process from start to finish.
Photographers still irked about about Adobe's decision to make Photoshop rental-only have a new alternative with the re-release of the pioneering LightZone application as a free, open-source program for Windows, Linux and (eventually) Mac OS.
Full disclosure: I've never done commercial photography and don't exactly know what goes into making a picture for an advertisement. The only knowledge I have on this subject is the hours of behind the scenes work I’ve watched, the hundreds of magazines, blogs and tutorials I’ve read and, obviously, the billions of ads that have bombarded my field of view since the first moment I began to comprehend visual information.
When you’re in the process of building a photographic portfolio, you think long and hard about what type of photographer you'd like to be. I’ve read over and over that it's important to choose a specific area of the business in order to obtain the type of clients you're looking for. Before I began this research, I was under the impression that I wanted to be a commercial photographer.
The know-how to properly shoot day-to-night or night-to-day when you're capturing a time-lapse can add a special something to your final product, but the task may seem daunting at first. That's why photographer Preston Kanak has put together this comprehensive and easy-to-follow tutorial that discusses three approaches to shooting the perfect day-to-night time-lapse.
Mystery solved: Beyonce is so riled up about restricting photographer access because she's hell-bent on projecting an image somewhere between "Photoshopped" and "impossible."
That's the impression from the the pop star's latest ad campaign, in which she sports body proportions that make her look like she stepped straight from a U.N. refugee camp into a Paris couture salon.
There are two types of clipping you probably try to avoid introducing into your images during post-production: luminosity clipping (when the brightest areas of an image become white, or when the darkest areas become black), and channel clipping (when the data within an individual channel becomes compromised). Both forms – unless you've made a deliberate decision to clip your data – are something to avoid.
Photographer Jeff Cable has come a long way from his first few gigs shooting Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in San Francisco. Mostly sports-related, his résumé now includes images from the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, a stint as the official Team USA Hockey photographer during the 2010 games in Vancouver and the Team USA Water Polo photographer during the 2012 games in London.
In this B&H Event Space seminar, however, he's not going to just scroll through a bunch of pictures and talk about how he composed or shot them. Instead, he's sharing some thoughts on post-processing: specifically, the 15 features in Photoshop that he believes every photographer should know.
The California government health agency First 5 was created to help "nurture and protect our most precious resource -- our children." As such, one of their programs aims to stop childhood obesity by reaching out to parents and educating them about proper nutrition.
The agency's recent poster meant to show the dangers of sugary drinks, however, seems to have gone a bit too far, using Photoshop to make a healthy child look obese and drawing the ire of the public in the process.
When it comes to viewing and editing RAW photos, many photographers turn to editing software such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple's Aperture. But one developer hopes to harness the power behind web browsers to view -- and potentially edit -- RAW image files.
Self-taught Photoshop hobbyist Patrick Thorendahl has an interesting pastime that has gotten him a lot of media attention as of late: he likes to 'shop himself into photos of A-list celebrities. The resulting shots have gone viral and earned him some 50,000+ followers on Instagram.
Traditionally, a photographer's post-processing workflow does not include a web browser, but rather, tools like Lightroom and Aperture. Pics.io is hoping to change that, and is working to bring serious RAW picture editing and collaborating to the web browser.
The start-up, founded by three Ukranian entrepreneurs, uses WebGL technology (which, in short, allows web browsers to harness the power of a computer's graphics card) to make the online tools they offer a reality. The mission? Get more people to dabble into RAW photography by offering easy access to editing tools.
Between a recent post here on PetaPixel about the Beauty of Space Photography, and my own experiments on blending series of images using averaging techniques, I noticed some rather interesting alignments in technique.
Here's a tool you may not have heard about but may useful at some time in the future. It's called Clipping Magic, and it's designed to remove backgrounds from user-uploaded pictures.
The concept is rather simple, you upload an image, mark the areas in the background you don't want in red, and mark the areas in the foreground you do want in green. The website's algorithm takes over and (hopefully) produces a background-free picture. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But how does it fare when used for an image with a background you actually want to remove?
Redditor Steven Withey's grandfather Derek is an 87-year-old WWII veteran who served in the Royal Navy, and a little while back he showed his grandson a badly damaged Navy photo (of a photo) of himself as a 20-year-old.
He had showed him the photo in the hopes that his technologically savvy grandson could maybe touch it up a bit, but given the massive creases and tears he didn't have much hope. It turns out he needn't have worried, because in this particular case, Reddit came to the rescue.