Your precious image captures are only as safe as the data that describes them. Here’s how to come up with a plan for ensuring their longevity.
written by: Mark Rochkind, Uwe & Bettina SteinmuellerThere is an irony about digital photos: they can last forever without degrading (even get better through improved imaging software) and yet they are very volatile, many bits on storage media that can easily get lost or damaged. A backup is a copy of data that is sufficiently independent of the original so that destructive events can’t affect both at the same time. A backup doesn’t prevent destruction of data; it only allows you to recover the data once the destruction has occurred. A simple example of backup is copying files from a laptop to a CD (the act of Read more »
written by: Uwe & Bettina SteinmuellerLenses are not ideal. Most of us have ended up with images in which the corners of the frame look too soft. This is not important for all pictures, but matters when the main subject covers the full frame and focus falloff is obvious. In such cases, post-capture fixes present an opportunity to save the picture. Of course using more appropriate lenses in the first place is the best solution, but it’s too late once you have taken the photo and cannot go back. I’ll show my technique for improving a photo with lens falloff in the context of a full Read more »
Photographic Workflow and Tool Improvements
written by: Uwe & Bettina SteinmuellerAbout every 18 months Adobe releases a new version of Photoshop—now it’s Photoshop CS4’s turn. This article covers what I find most interesting for photographers in this new version. In mid-2007, I gave a talk at Google called “Non-Destructive, Selective, and Non-modal Editing of Photographs.” At that time Photoshop supported a way to edit photos non-destructively (meaning the settings can be changed later) and selectively by using masks in combination with adjustment layers. Unfortunately, all the adjustment-layer dialogs were modal, meaning that you had to close the current dialog to access different adjustment-layer tools (or anything else). I found that Read more »
Photography Beyond Realism
written by: Uwe & Bettina SteinmuellerAdding textures to paintings and photographs is as old as these art forms. This article focuses on artistic aspects of Texture Blending, starting with a brief overview. Texture Blending Overview With film, photographers created texture blended images by exposing multiple times with different textures and the main images. It could also be done by creating sandwiches of different negatives or blending in camera. Today the process is much easier to control by using Photoshop. The idea is to blend a picture with one or more textures and let the result become more than the sum of the photos used. For Read more »
written by: Uwe & Bettina SteinmuellerThe above photo was one of the first pictures we took at Fort Point in 2004. The interesting part is that we did not get any usable version until about two years later. While the image looks like it was made in a reasonably lit space, it is not. Why did it take two years to get this version? If you take just a single image, it is quite challenging (at least in 2004 and even today) to master the dynamic range from the bright windows to the darker shadows. This is why we took three exposures then, hoping to Read more »
