Archive for the 'Photo & Graphics' category

… the day dream of all photographers. Instead of spending your nights playing with the setups, knobs and buttons of Photoshop (are any other similar software package), why not simply go through a process full automated, effortless, questionless, and with a nice little result?

ImproveYourImages.com

To be tested right now.

A guide published by Canon to help you better manage colour with photo cameras and photo printers from this brand.

Canon color management guide (2MB PDF file)

ArsTechnica has a very interesting article showing how nVidia and AMD-ATI show different performance while decoding High-Def video.

There is no clear winner. It all depends on the type of video applied.

I find that it is possible to improve yourself by looking at your own pictures like any outside critic would. For this, because it is often hard to make this schizophrenic move, I developped a number of questions I ask myself when I look at my own photos.

While some questions can (and should) be asked when shooting a picture, some others cannot be corrected at this late stage and must be asked just before pressing the shutter button on the camera:

1. Am I close enough? Too many photos are hopelessly bad just because the photographer chose to include too many things and moving closer would have brought attention to the important items. Do not think that this can be corrected later (using Photoshop). It’s not only a matter of pixels, but a question of diving into the subject.
2. Where is the light coming from? Photoshop will not help correct gross lighting errors like I do on a daily basis. We must check that the interesting parts of the model are correctly lit, that dark shadows are not cast without elegance, that hard light does not crush all details or force the model to blink. Often, it’s only a matter of waiting more a better light or moving around the model (moving the light or moving yourself).
3. What about the background? So many photos are lost because of ugly backgrounds. Using the lens aperture of your bridge or SLR to either bring background in (closing the diaphragm - large aperture values) or to smooth it out (opening the diaphragm - small aperture values) is the thing to do.
4. What about the foreground? You’d think this is the opposite, but not completely. In some case, the foreground is bringing depth of perception to your photo. This is particularly true of landscapes. Nearly all great landscape photos (including panoramic ones) take into account the need to have elegant and complementary foreground elements. If you’re in landscapes, it’s probably the most important issue to keep in mind while shooting.
5. Would a change of perspective improve the photo? Quite often, just moving around will make the photo different (and better). Move up or down. Move right or left. Move forward or backward. Your model will look different. For wildlife digital photographers, I would suggest to shoot one image from where you are, just before moving (most animals will not tell before leaving completely the scene; Be sure to have one medium-quality image before reaching for the day’s shot - I often take 10 or 20 progressively better images of the same animal model before complete satisfaction and I keep one of the last 2 or 3).
6. Should I hold the camera differently? Don’t overdo it, but with the LiveView feature of this year SLR cameras and nearly every point’n-shot cameras, you can easily move your camera around (above the croud or under your knees). However, you should always ask yourself about turning your camera to get a portrait/vertical image rather than the usual landscape/horizontal format. This goes hand-in-hand with correct framing. And it could save a just decent image at sleection time on your PC.
7. Where is the focus? What are the in-focus parts? out-of-focus parts? Choose wisely. For wild life and many model portrait photographers, the best is to put the eyes in full focus. For many landscape photographers, the focus should not be at the infinite end of the range, but a little in front taking advantage of a closed aperture to have a lot of crisp in as many parts as possible. At selection time (on the PC), I find that this is impossible to usefully correct, and this is the number one reason for dumping one of my shots (not crisp enough, out-of-focus, wrongly focused, etc.)
8. Are the colours right? As far as the forms of the subjects can go, the colours should be right: Either complementing themselves or strongly opposing themselves to help story-telling.
9. Are the surfaces right? It may come from my black & white background, but even in colour photography you should always look at the surfaces. Their structure has a lot to offer: stripes, angles, dots, lines, etc. A wood plank will only be meaningful if its surface is rich in forms and lines, be it in B&W or in colour.
10. What story is the photo telling? The people, the houses, the plants, the mountains in the photo must be building together a single coherent story that will pop to the eyes of the viewer. For wildlife photo, I often find that this question leads to waiting a couple of minutes before snapping the photo to allow another animal to move in or change its posture.
11. Where is the focal point? The eye will be attracted to strong/active locations in the image. Think about positionning interesting elements into one of the focal points according to “the rule of the thirds“. The eye will easily go from one focal point to the next and see (or not) the most striking elements of your photo.
12. Is the framing strong enough? This is something that can often be improve at the last stage taking advantage of the plentifulpixels of today’s cameras. A little re-framing is often good to remove unwanted elements, to emphasize focal points, to make the model the real hero of the snapshot.

Later, when developing the picture (on your PC) or even when selecting what pictures to keep, you can ask the same questions. But it may be too late. I try to keep these in mind and I observed that it increased a lot the quality of my photos.

Would you know what colour cerulean is? Or peach? Or spruce? Or watermelon? Or plum? Or rust?

The HP online color thesaurus is a great way to identify these and to get the precise formal definition of such colours. You type in a name, and it will give you the color, similar ones and anonyms.

Sometimes, on a digital camera, there are small defect on the sensor. They translate into a pixel or two which seem to be either black, colored (hot) or white (stuck). This is ususally not much of a problem, but it can be very annoying.

On my reliable but old and still alive-and-kicking Konica-Minolta Dynax 7D camera, I noticed on some of the 2500 photos I shot in Brazil last month that there were a couple of white pixels in the upper third of the image. This was not too annoying since white on the sky is usually barely visible and easy to correct by most of the smoothing algorithms. And they disappeared any time I cropped down the image for web usage. However, it was clearly visible on some of the best images that I wanted to keep in high-resolution.

Easy to correct did not mean that I wanted to keep that. So, I started to look for software solutions to correct the problem, but it appears that Minolta, Konica-Minolta and probably Sony digital cameras all share the same approach to hot pixels and stuck pixels. Apparently, once a month, when switching off, the camera will shot a black image and look for stuck pixels to update the dead pixel map of the camera. The swithcing off is longer when this happens (the red light will blink a little longer), but after this step the problem is automatically corrected.

It seems that if you want to correct it by yourself, the only thing that you have to do is to change the date in the camera menu, move it forward at least further than the next 1st day of the next month, switch off the camera (let it do its little game of red light), switch it on again, shoot one picture, go to the menu and change the date back, then switch off the camera.

After this, your Minolta/Sony camera updated its hot pixel mapping and knows where to expect them. It will magically remove them from the picture and just interpolate values from the neighbouring pixels. Instead of having an ugly white spot, you’ll get a microscopic and invisible loss of resolution (one-pixel resolution loss out of 6 to 12 millions, it should be acceptable, eh).

Pretty neat. It works with all cameras of this brand(s). No need for image software on your Mac or PC.

At least during the launch period and in the UK, Nikon will include a free CD-ROM of the Capture NX excellent imaging software in the box of the new Nikon D3 and Nikon D300 cameras. Some people having perceived the price of the Nikon D300 as too high, may be tempted by this offer.

We don’t know much about the future successor to the excellent digital single-lens reflex camera Canon EOS 5D (the first D-SLR with a nearly affordable full-frame sensor). It is still uncertain that it’s name will really be EOS 5D Mk II, but it’s now definitely possible since Phase One, editor of the high-end photo retouching software Capture One, let appear this name in its bug submission form (in the camera list).

Since the Canon EOS 40D name was also leaked in a similar way, we can easily conclude that, despite the lack of precise specifications, the name of the future full-frame sensor digital camera from Canon will be EOS 5D Mk II.

I had previously indicated that I successfully calmibrated a Hyundai Q17 LCD display for a better color management. Today, in order to work in the best possible conditions when handling digital photos on my main PC system using a Dell 2407WFP as my primary display and still the same Hyundai Q17 as secondary display, I did again a full color calibration of the screens under Windows XP using a Spyder Pro sensor and the Optical software from Pantone.

The result is as satisfactory as always and allows to come back to a fair color balance that is more precise than before (for the Hyundai display, since the Dell screen is so near to perfection that installing the color profile just built leads to only a really minor colorimetric change).

For those interested in the technical details, here are the characteristics I used:

• Gamma 2.5 for PC (it would be 1.8 for Mac)
• Brightness to 0 (LCD displays are generally much to bright for normal use - this makes them nicer on store shelves)
• Contrast to 50 for the Dell 2407WFP, to 100 for the old Hyundai Q17

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. That makes it a quite serious competitor to Adobe Photoshop, even if Adobe is still both much higher-priced and more powerful and flexible. This is the reason why it is interesting to notice the arrival of a new version (v2.4/v2.4.1).

Scripts have been moved to a more discreet menu, scalable brushes and improved selection options, easier alignment tools and better zoom. The digital photographer will appreciated even more the better color management, crop features and improved printing.

GIMP v2.4 new features.

Mashable published a list of Internet resources particularyl useful to photographers. The list is organised aroudn the following categories:

• Online photo Editors - Editeurs de photo en ligne
• Photo sharing - Partage de photographies
• Free photo hosting - Hébergement gratuit de photographies en ligne
• Photography blogs - Blogs photographiques
• Mashups - Combinaisons
• Mobile
• Photo mixing and slideshows - Mélange de photos et diaporamas
• Photo printing / Book creation - Impression photo / création de livres
• Photo search / Recherche de photographies
• Stock photos - Librairies de photos

The 27th of March should be launch day for the newest Adobe Photoshop graphics product line: Creative Suite 3 or CS3. Be prepared for more details from Adobe, but the products will not be shipping before the second trimester (and Q2 may mean just before Summer).

There will be new features and the important support of both Vista and PPC+Intel Apple Mac (Universal Binary). The news come with the information that CS2 (and quite a number of other Adobe products) will NOT be upgraded to support Vista. Either it seemed too complicated or not compelling enough for Adobe. You will have to pay full price to go to the new product.

Speaking of new, the official prices start to be known:

• Standard Design suite: 1269€ for InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat 8 pro
• Premium Design suite: 1999€ for InDesign, Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash professional and DreamWeaver
• Standard web suite: 999€ for Flash pro, DreamWeaver, FireWorks and Contribute
• Premium web suite: 1699€ for Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, FireWorks and Contribute
• Production Premium suite: 1999€ for Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, AfterEffects pro, Premiere Pro, SoundBooth and Encore
• Master Collection: 2799€ for ALL (InDesign, Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, AfterEffects pro, Premiere Pro, SoundBooth, Encore, FireWorks and Contribute