photonovice.net » tools & techniques

New Hungarian Photography Portal

photonovice — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:53:20 +0000

After weeks of secret discussions and work I proudly announce now that Fenyertek.hu, our Hungarian photography tutorial portal has just started to operate.
We are aiming to fill in the itching lack of freely available photography related information in Hungarian. We are going to share videos, podcasts and written material about lighting in studio and on location, portrait, landscape and macro photography, retouching and whatever else comes up as a matter of interest from our readers.

If you speak Hungarian come and visit us. But even if you don’t, you might enjoy some of our videos.

The Online Lighting Diagram Creator

photonovice — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:40:58 +0000

Have you ever seen this online tool? It was new to me when I read about it in David Hobby’s tweets. It is what it looks like: an online Lighting Diagram Creator and it is free to use.

Snow Leopard

photonovice — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:59:49 +0000

Just a quick note that Snow Leopard is available for pre-order now.

Still Images and the Red One Camera

photonovice — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:01:37 +0000

This is about something Chase Jarvis mentioned some time ago: the convergence of still photography and video.
Alexx Henry was lucky – or hard working – enough to get an assignment where he could use and leverage the features of an amazing Red One cinema camera for a project that combines still images and video. You’ll see some movie posters coming alive.

Living Movie Poster – Start to Finish from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

Joe McNally on Nikon D3 (video)

photonovice — Fri, 22 May 2009 09:49:28 +0000

Have you seen this?

Portrait Retouch in Lightroom 2

photonovice — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:11:33 +0000

Local adjustment brush is a great tool in Lightroom 2 that makes photographers use Photoshop less frequently. Earlier you could make only global changes on your photos that impacted the whole area of the picture. Now it got local.
The very same – any more – effects can be achieved with layer masks in Photoshop. However, this tool is so easy and intuitive to use in Lightroom that sometimes I have to resist using it.
I show below how it works.

Look at the pic on the right. The photo is dominated by the model’s eyes and smile and the eye really attracts the attention. However, we could be kind to our model just making her wrinkles just a bit less visible.

The tool is available in the Develop module as brush icon under the histogram on the right hand side panel. Clicking on it will reveal the adjustment options you can chose from.
They are: Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Clarity, Color.
We are going to be interested in the Clarity slider, but first lets select the area to be adjusted.

Set the size of your brush and give it some feather for the smooth transition between the adjusted and not adjusted areas and paint the “problematic”. See what I selected in my wrinkle hunting quest.

Clarity can help in showing more details if you push the slider to the positive direction. On the other hand you can soften edges nicely when using it negatively.
I pushed it completely down. Check the result.

You can use the same tool to emphasize the eyes (Clarity to positive, maybe Exposure and Contrast to positive), whiten the teeth (Brightness or Exposure to positive and in certain cases Saturation to negative) and many, many other things.