Luminous Landscape and photographer Glenn E. Mitchell have teamed up to bring you a easy-to-follow guide to adding a diffuse glow to your images.

“Giving your images a diffuse glow with Photoshop is a combination of blurs, layer blend modes, and blending techniques. Rather than blurring the entire image, we instead add a halo to a desired range of tones. We can add richness and shape the tones in an image in this way without sacrificing a lot of image details.”

Website: Luminous Landscape - Giving Your Photos A Glow

Digital Outback Photo and Glenn E. Mitchell II have teamed up to write an excellent sereis of articles about how to get the best out of your shots. Part 3 looks at using levels and curves to adjust tonal range, contrast, and brightness.

“In the previous tutorial, we took a brief look at the features in Adobe Camera Raw II (ACR II) for adjusting tonal range, contrast, and brightness. For some images, all you need are a few adjustments with ACR II and your global adjustments are complete. You can even do capture sharpening and noise reduction in ACR II.

Some images present greater challenges. The Gerber Daisy in Figure 1 is an example. I took the shot in bright sunlight. I was afraid of burning out the saturated yellows, so I underexposed the image: rather severely, it turned out. I should have paid more attention to the histogram and less to the image on my Canon 10D.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Developing Photos That “Pop” Part 3

Luminous Landscape and Glenn E. Mitchell have teamed up again to publish a new Photoshop tutorial on using tone-based masks:

“Ever take a photograph on a rainy, dreary day? Something like Figure 1 is typical. You end up with lots of contrast but not much information in the middle tones. The result is a flat, boring image.

One solution in this case is to use a tripod and bracket the shots. Take one photograph to hold the sky detail and another to emphasize the shadow detail. Then you can composite the shots later in Adobe Photoshop. That solution takes care of images with wide dynamic range, but there are other instances where we might want to adjust just the middle tones or just the quarter tones. What then?

Figure 2 shows the results of careful adjustments using a set of tone masks for the shadows, three-quarter tones, and middle tones. The image has a lot more ?pop? than the raw image in Figure 1. It is a much more pleasing image.”

Website: Luminous Landscape - Masking by the Numbers

The latest workflow article over on Digital Outback Photo explains how to create a custom brush in Photoshop and use it to sign your photo prints.

“It used to be I’d matte, mount and frame a print for sale and then authenticate the print by signing the matte in pencil. If I was selling the print unframed, I would simply sign the lower right-hand border with a Sharpie permanent marker. Now in the digital age, we have a few more creative options…

My current preferred method is to add my signature digitally in Photoshop. To do this is relatively simple and I can control the size, color and effect tailoring the result specifically to the print I am placing it on and from the responses I’ve received, my clients like it too!”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Making a “Signature” brush for use in Photoshop

Microsoft have published a new article which is a lot more interesting than the title, “Creating an Optimized Windows XP Digital Imaging System”, first suggests. And when you notice that it’s written by acclaimed author Tim Grey, you know that it’s definitely worth reading if you currently run Windows XP as your operating system.

“Of course, many photographers utilize medium format film to maximize the detail they are able to capture. The size of the file grows with the film. Scanning a 6x4.5 transparency at 4000 dpi yields a file of nearly 200MB in 8-bit, or 400MB in 16-bit.

When these files are optimized with photo-editing software, values for millions of individual pixels must be recalculated. This requires not only storage space for all those pixel values, but computing power to actually crunch the numbers. When dealing with such a significant amount of data, small details affecting overall performance issues can have a significant impact on the time required to perform various tasks. These gains are especially notable for tasks that place a particularly high demand on the system. For example, complicated filters are processor and memory intensive, while file read and write operations call for improved data transfer performance.”

Website: Microsoft - Pixel Performance: Creating an Optimized Windows XP Digital Imaging System

Finnish photographer Petteri Sulonen has just published a new article about landscape photography, in his usual eloquent and out-spoken style. Here’s a great quote:

“Since most people have pretty bad taste, they easily mistake the cutesy postcards for good photography, especially if they’re displayed as large, impeccably sharp prints. Hence the success of photographers like Alain Briot, Michael Reichmann, and Ken Rockwell. Their photography is pure Socialist Realism, only not as honest about its program—relentlessly upbeat, eager to please, depicting the world not as it is, but as it surely should be? and utterly devoid of power to evoke anything but the most trite and saccharine-sweet of emotions.”

Website: Petteri’s Pontifications: Why Most Landscapes Suck

Don’t ask me - I have no idea! It’s a good thing then that About Photography editor Peter Marshall has decided to publish a 5 page guide to deciding if a photo cuts the mustard, or whether it should be thrown in the waste-paper / recycle bin.

“Within the overall intention, I like to explore how they (and I and others) feel this particular image matches the intention. Why did they chose that particular subject, position, moment and point of view? It really does surprise me how often I find that when pressed, people often start to make excuses. The picture presented is not quite what they would have liked to take, but they were just too late, or couldn’t get any closer or ... Excuses don’t make for good pictures!”

Website: About Photography - What Makes a Picture Good ?

Roger Cavanagh has published a informative tutorial about combining 2 different versions of a RAW file to produce one image with greater dynamic range. He’s even created a Photoshop action to help automate the process.

“One of the advantages of shooting raw is that it is possible to convert the same image more than once using different conversion settings. Put another way, one conversion can be made for the highlights and another for the shadows. These conversions can then be combined to produce an image which has more overall detail and greater dynamic range.”

Website: Roger Cavanagh - Creating Composites

Digital Outback Photo has published another excellent article by Glenn E. Mitchell II which looks at using the Lens Blur filter in Adobe Photoshop CS.

“I do a lot of botanical and nature photography, so I constantly wrestle with getting just enough DOF to blur the background without losing sharpness at the tips of flower petals or on stamens projecting out towards the camera on long antlers. Sometimes I get the shot. Sometimes I wind up with less DOF that I would have preferred. I usually hedge my bet by bracketing my shots.

The Lens Blur filter changes all that. I can shoot for wider DOF to make sure I get all of the flower details in focus and then narrow the DOF once I get the image loaded into Photoshop CS.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Taking Control Over Depth Of Field

An interesting series of new articles has just started over on the website PIXIPORT, called “The Eye Within”. As the name suggests, the articles by Simon Maxwell will focus on the creative aspect of photography, rather than the technology behind it. The first article is called “Standing still to start the dance”:

“What’s the difference that makes the difference?

What makes some photographs examples of creative art and others simply competent records? Why do some images have soul to them and others, while technically perfect, leave us feeling cold?

I believe that part of the answer lies in the state of mind of the photographer during both the capturing of the image and the post-shooting work that makes that subject expressive. That state of mind is the result of being able to spend time with the image.”

Website: PIXIPORT - The Eye Within

The second article in the “Tech Corner” monthly column, by Mike Chaney, over on Steves Digicams is a great look at the potentially thorny subject of colour management:

“It seems that the longer you stick with a particular hobby or profession, the more complicated things get. In digital photography, once you get past that initial thrill of being able to view, edit, and print your own photos, you start to become aware of subtleties like the fact that certain colors on your monitor don’t match what is printed. You do some research and it seems that there is something called “color management” or “ICC profiles” that can fix your problem, but the whole concept seems almost like snake oil, or worse… some foreign language only spoken by rocket scientists.”

Website: Steves Digicams - “Over the Gamut and Through the Woods “

Digital Outback Photo and Glenn E. Mitchell II have teamed up to write an excellent sereis of articles about how to get the best out of your shots. Part 2 looks at using Adobe Camera Raw to adjust tonal range, contrast, and brightness.

“ACR II is without question one of the very best tools available for restoring highlights. Most RAW converters treat pixels where any channel clips to 255 as a white pixel (RGB = 255, 255, 255). ACR II does not. With negative values for the Exposure slider, ACR II will try to recover highlight details for any pixels that clipped. If only one or two channels were clipped, ACR II may be able to restore the highlights.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Developing Photos That “Pop” Part 2

Michael Reichmann explains the thinking and execution behind two of his most recent images in a new article entitled “Abstracting The Landscape”.

“Each of the above photographs are straightforward photographic records of a particular situation. Neither has been enhanced using Photoshop or any other techniques. The only controls applied were those of traditional darkroom work, including brightness, contrast and saturation. Taken with a square format digital back on a 645 format camera, both frames have been cropped only slightly from what was photographed.

What elevates them from being snapshots or postcards? In both cases it is emotion. These scenes spoke to me, and because of what they said caused me to want to record them and share them with others. Each is an abstraction of the reality in which they were found. A wider view would have shown the context in which they were situated, but would have also included much that wasn’t relevant to the story being told.”

Website: Luminous Landscape - Abstracting The Landscape

If like me you tend to take several photos of the same subject, from slightly different angles and focal lengths, then you will know how difficult it can be to select the best from the rest. Alain Briot’s latest article in his “Aesthetics and Photography” series is essential reading.

“Keepers. A photographer’s term for photographs we like enough to keep them in our permanent files and print them.

But how do you decide which photographs are good enough to be kept around or good enough to be shown to others, printed or exhibited? I receive numerous emails asking me this very question. It seems that many who ask this question believe there is some sort of infallible test which allows photographers in the know to somehow ‘“weed out” the bad photographs and select the good ones, without faltering, without hesitating, knowing exactly how successful any given image will be with the public.

Well, let me start this article by saying that ?it ain?t so.? I wish it was but it is not that simple. Why? That is what this article not only aims to explain but also aims to help you with. Read on!”

Website: Luminous Landscape - How to Decide Which Photographs Are Keepers and Which Ones Are Not

Tellingly subtitled “Just Wait 32 Seconds”, the latest Luminous Landscape article looks at the effect of light on a landscape photograph.

“On my recent workshops in Iceland (July, 2004), I would often drive right past potentially interesting subjects, simply because the light wasn’t happening. People would say, why don’t we stop for a shot, and my reply would be - because the light sucks. Other times I would stop to take a photograph and people would say - what do you see? My answer would be - the light is great, so let’s look around for worthwhile subjects.”

Website: Luminous Landscape - It’s About Light

Digital Photography Blog have just published a helpful new article called Digital Sports Photography Tips:

“With the Olympics just around the corner I thought it might be fun to do a feature on Sports Photography to help those attending the games capture the best action sports shots, but also help the rest of us who will be watching along from home who will no doubt be inspired to improve our own sports photography.”

Website: Digital Photography Blog - Digital Sports Photography Tips

The new website Dynamic Artwork is writing and releasing an article about digital black and white photography, with a new installment published on a weekly basis with each part covering one of the options out there. After the series is done, it will be a one-stop source for BW Conversion techniques.

“It used to be (and still is for many) that a person would choose a BW film and perhaps a color filter to achieve a desired look. Digital cameras can only capture color images however, making filter and film choices no longer important. Instead of choosing the esthetic feel of the image long before pressing the shutter button, it is done so after the fact in post production software.

As with many things done on the computer, there are many options to go about doing something. That is what this tutorial series is here for. It will not only teach you the many techniques out there, but it will also will act as a catalogue for the many methods of BW conversion there are to choose from.”

Website: Dynamic Artwork - Digital Black and White

Digital Outback Photo and Glenn E. Mitchell II have teamed up to write an excellent article about how to get the best out of your overcast shots.

“When faced with a dull, muddy picture, you might be tempted to reach for the Brightness and Contrast control. Most pros advise against its use altogether. I tend to agree. The only time I can recall using them is the simple adjustments for this tutorial. They are not part of my digital workflow. The Levels and Curves tools give you more flexibility. Not only can you adjust brightness and contrast, you can also adjust the overall tonal range, middle tones, color balance, and even adjust the highlights separately from the shadows.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Developing Photos That “Pop”

WebAperture have posted an interesting article that documents one photographer’s digital workflow using Breezesys Downloader Pro and Breeze Browser software (found via Digicamera.net).

“Downloader Pro is a downloading utility that I use to copy off my CF cards at the end of each day. Working with a 1Gb and 512Mb CF meant that on some full days, I have quite a bit of download to do. What I like about Downloader Pro is that I can customize the way it copies the card. I have two digital cameras, a SLR and a Point and shoot so it’s important to copy them off into separate folders. Then I used a job name to title say a segment of a trip; for example, Fremantle or Kalbarri-Denham.”

Website: WebAperture - Digital Workflow Experience with Breezesys Downloader Pro and Breeze Browser

Australian photographer Jeremy Daalder has a great tutorial that dicsusses techniques for imitating classic photographic effects and film types in Photoshop.

“The Bleach Bypass is a film laboratory technique where, by skipping the bleach stage in the color processing sequence, silver is retained in the image along with the colour dyes. The result is effectively a black and white image superimposed on a color image. Bleach Bypass images have increased contrast, reduced saturation, often giving a pastel effect. This technique (combined with digital grading) is VERY popular on shows like CSI etc.”

Website: Jeremy Daalder - Simulating Classic Film Effects in Photoshop