Quentin Decaillet is a beauty and wedding photographer based in Switzerland. He is an ambassador of Capture One.
DaVinci Resolve is a fantastic tool and has everything most videographers need to create perfect looking videos. However, the playback can be a bit slow and thus make the whole workflow a pain. But there is a one-click solution that will make your life much better. When I found out about it, my editing process became much faster.
Sharing your content is probably one of the best and fastest way to grow a community and a base of potential customers. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media platforms are some of the most common places to start pushing out pictures to the largest amount of people possible. However, when you get into video, you soon realize that sometimes things get a bit trickier. One of the issues I recently encountered was when sharing a YouTube video on Facebook, the thumbnail simply wouldn’t appear. In this article, I’ll show you how to solve this problem and what to do to avoid it in the future.
Uploading videos to Instagram is quite easy, but retaining the image quality is another story. In this video, Daniel Schiffer shows you a couple of tricks to help you out and avoid getting your footage overly compressed.
Getting into medium format is quite costly. It’s difficult to know if the investment is going to be worth it and if it’s going to match your current workflow. Medium format has a tendency to slow you down, kind of like film. When I tried my first Phase One, I couldn’t afford one. So I went with the cheapest alternative I could find, the Mamiya RB67 Pro-S. Here’s why I’m glad I made that move but also why it doesn’t replace a digital medium-format system.
Shooting with an iPhone is an excellent alternative in places where a DSLR is overkill, but in its default configuration, it lacks quite a few features. The company Moment offers solutions to most of my issues, starting with their superb wide angle lens.
Whether you are shooting film or have a large collection of negatives, chances are you will want to scan them one day. The process to digitize your analog pictures can be expensive and sometimes even disappointing regarding image quality. When I started playing with my Mamiya RB67, I wished there was a cheap and quick scanning method that would offer me a good amount of detail and decent colors. I found it using gear I already owned and that most of you actually also have at home. It even surpassed my expectations to the point that I decided to share the technique with you in this article.
When working with models, photographers often expect someone with perfect skin and a great physique. In reality, this is not always the case. Some models have no idea how to get ready for a shoot, and that can be really annoying -- especially in post production, as it might add a lot of retouching time!
In recent articles here on Fstoppers, you may have noticed the name DaVinci Resolve coming up on a regular basis. It’s a fantastic software for color grading video footage, and it’s evolving towards becoming a one-stop video editing solution. Some of the tools it offers are envied by photographers as they differ quite a bit from what’s available in Photoshop, Lightroom, or even Capture One. Many have been wondering if it’s possible to edit pictures with it and Ted Forbes from The Art of Photography has the answer for you: Yes. More than that, he shows you how to do it.
Color correction and grading are probably amongst the most difficult parts of a retouching workflow. What seems to make it difficult in Photoshop is usually the understanding of the different tools available, such as curves and levels. However, there are a couple of tricks that can make it much easier, color palettes and fill layers being some of them.
Color management is probably amongst the hardest things there is to understand and learn when it comes to retouching and photography. So many elements are to be taken into account to create the perfect final print that it can be extremely complicated and time-consuming. Part of that process is to have a raw converter software able to match your vision and your needs. Capture One is known for its modularity and customizable features. Let’s see how we can use it to help us get the colors we want out of all our raw files.
White balancing video footage is crucial to make it consistent between sequences of edits you are putting together. However, adjusting it by hand using color wheels can be quite cumbersome especially for those who don’t see colors all that well. Using DaVinci Resolve 14 beta you can, however, make this adjustment incredibly fast and easily. Let’s see how with Dave Andrade from The Post Color Blog.
Luminosity masks are a powerful trick available in Photoshop. However, the way Adobe implemented them is not so great. It's a combination of playing around with the channels layers and keyboard shortcuts to get the mask you wish. Greg Benz has come up with something awesome called Lumenzia and it fixes almost everything that made using luminosity masks a pain to use.
Getting perfect skin tones can be quite time consuming and difficult. Because everyone's skin complexion is different, the corrections needed will be different every time. Even so, there are some recurring problems such as over-saturated reds in darker tones. A great makeup goes a long way in helping with redness, but sometimes it is not enough. The best example is the red seen in the ears when the model is backlit. Because of the nature of skin and the human body, the ears are going to turn red and no makeup will totally solve that. So let’s see how we can correct that very effectively and quickly using Photoshop.
When retouching, it is not rare to come across color problems on a model’s skin. Whether it is from a sun tan, dodge & burn, spots or skin discoloration issues, it can be really painful to treat it in post. Despite being all about having it right in camera and doing as little as possible in post, there is an easy way to correct this in Photoshop -- a method that is going to make your makeup artist want to stop correcting redness, yellowness or under-eye bags. It is so easy to use you are going to wonder why you did not think of it earlier!
Apple MacBook Pro is without a doubt the laptop of choice for most photographers on the go. However, I've heard of many encountering heat issues when working on it for a prolonged period of time. After recently experiencing this problem myself and having my computer shutting down on its own, I started looking for a solution. It turns out that it's not complicated to control the heat. If you retouch or edit videos quite often on your Apple laptop, you should definitely read the following article.
