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.
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.
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.
About a year ago, Pratik Naik wrote an article about a video the guys at FX-Ray made regarding hair retouching. At the time I found the video very interesting and quite educative. The only problem I had with the technique described was recreating a realistic looking texture. Since then I have found a perfect solution with Aaron Blaise's custom brushes. Best of all they work with almost any hair texture you could possibly be up against.
Canon has always been known for its fabulous portraits lenses: the 85mm f/1.2 and the 135mm f/2. I used to own and love both of them, with a preference for the first. When I bought into the Nikon system, I was afraid I would miss these two optics. But truth be told, the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 is at least as good as its Canon equivalent if not better! Regarding the 135mm, that’s a whole different story as the Nikon’s is quite old now. However, they recently announced the 105mm f/1.4, and I had the chance to put my hands on it for a few weeks! Let’s see how it compares with other portrait lenses and if it could potentially replace a 135mm.
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.
In the retouching world, graphics tablets are pretty much a standard. I don’t know of many retouchers that only use their mouse to get the job done. Graphics tablets allow for a more precise, and thus refined, work. They also used to cost a fair amount of money, but that was until Huion came along.
I can’t be the only one who dreamt of knowing which image would perform best on Instagram before posting a set or simply what picture people like best amongst a selection. A great photographer should be able to pick his images on his own, but sometimes, when it comes to social networks, it’s more complicated than that. Being able to know what is going to work best to schedule the images accordingly is a huge advantage. Well, there might be a solution out there, and it’s called Cinnac.
Last week I showed you how you can use just a DSLR and a few accessories to digitize your negatives. However, that article wouldn’t have been complete without explaining how to convert the scanned analog picture to a positive image. The process is quite easy and only a few steps are required to achieve a great result. Let’s dive in!
The Elinchrom Indirect softboxes are quite well known amongst fashion and commercial photographers. Especially the 190 octabank. Recently Elinchrom revised its indirect lineup and renamed it Indirect Litemotiv. The Swiss brand offered me the chance to play around with the whole line of Indirect Litemotiv for a little over a month. I must admit, these are great light shapers, and I did not really want to give them back. Are they the ultimate softboxes? I would not go this far, but they are very close. Here is why.
Elinchrom has been the brand of choice for years many Europeans and Australians photographers alike. They are cheaper than Profoto or Broncolor, offer a good range of modifiers and – unlike Paul C. Buff – have service centers outside of the USA. To many photographers they also have been a great way to get into studio photography before moving up to Broncolor or Profoto. With the Elinchrom ELC Pro HD, it seems like the brand wants to change that and offer a higher-end light.
When working with a ton of footage, culling them down and selecting just the part of them that you need can take quite a while. There a few methods to make it faster and easier, and one of them is called Pancake timelines. In this video, Justin Odisho explains to us how it works. If you are video editor with working tight deadlines or one looking for a way to speed things up, this tutorial is definitely made for you.
Since Adobe adopted a subscription-based licensing system, many users have started looking at other alternatives. While ACDSee had attractive solutions until now, their latest creation, ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2018, seems to be a serious contender to Photoshop CC and Lightroom. Even better yet, you can process your raw files and then edit them within the very same software, no need for round trips.
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.
For most of us living in the Northern Hemisphere, the wedding season has begun, and the first images are being sent out to brides and grooms. Delivering pictures to clients is more important than most photographers would like to think, especially for weddings. It is an opportunity to surprise customers, get referrals, and sell more prints or albums. The smallest details will help you separate your business from the crowd.
