Photos and stories about digital photography in Alaska by professional photographer Patrick Endres
Category Archives: Digital Technique My digital workflow always moves towards simplification whenever possible. Taking thousands of photos a year, and needing to move them from a flat, RAW state, to a processed version ready for a stock photography sale takes time. If there is one lesson universal to age, it is that time takes on a more premium value….  Male King Eider duck Earlier in the week I posted a photo of a male king eider duck that I took at midnight in Alaska ‘s arctic, under cloudy skies. In contrast, I wanted to share a photo of the same species, but under completely different lighting conditions. I took this picture at 12 noon,… With my rather large 30″ monitors, and the seeming tiny fonts in Lightroom, I was frustrated with not being able to see my caption and keywords well enough to mitigate a multitude of typos. Not to exclusively blame my poor typing on small fonts, but it makes a notable difference. So I thought I’d share…  Through the process of converting from film to digital, there was a slow development of programs that handled the processing of RAW files. As software developed, the potential for extracting the maximum quality from a RAW file became more easily, and more quickly achieved. I remember dragging the temperature slider in the early version of…  In the previous post I briefly discussed the general workspace and method I use to edit a folder of images in Lightroom. I began with 3,700 pictures from a shoot in Denali park, and after my first round of edits, followed by a second pass, I narrowed it down to 368 keepers. That’s about 10%,…  Based on my last post and some interest in the process of applying split grads in LR3, I decided to show a simple illustration of that process with this landscape photo that I took in Polychrome Pass, late one night in August. A video might be better to explain all this, but there is some…  Sky control is fundamental to landscape photography. The term refers to ways in which a photographer manages the disparity in exposure values between the sky (which is often bright) and the foreground (which is often dark). The “balancing” is necessary because film can’t record the full range of tonal value (dynamic range) that the human… If you have been tracking the development of RAW image processing programs, then it should be getting increasingly more clear that the need to generate derivative .tiff or .psd files of your master RAW files is getting increasingly less necessary. In the beginning days of processing RAW files, it was cumbersome, slow, and in general…  Some hate sitting at a computer working on images, which is a dislike I can understand in the context of time, and the value of time. However, it is this very aspect that completes the circle for me, and affords an additional layer of artistic expression to any given image. Do you think Ansel Adams…  Adobe introduced a digital photo workflow program a while back called Lightroom. Since v1.0, it has improved considerably and although v2.6 has room for improvements, it remains my software of choice for grading digital imagery (FYI, a beta version of Lightroom 3 is available for download. I’ve been experimenting with it a little and look…  The day the cell phone became more than a phone, is the day I started to desire one. The phone itself, is my least favorite part of the device. In a nutshell, the IPhone is a movement toward a micro computer, and as such, is host to an abundance of software applications spawned in our…  A few comments about photographing white subjects in white environments; in particular the issue of exposure and post production adjustments in Lightroom 2.5. Let me first state that I’ve always utilized an expose-to-the-right shooting style (you can explore that concept on luminous-landscape if you are unfamiliar with it). To summarize that briefly, it is a…  This image of a brown bear catching a red salmon at Brooks falls in Katmai National Park is comprised of three independent images, stitched together to generate a panorama or 3:1 format image. This offers a high resolution file that embodies a wider format more suitable for some reproduction uses, for example, a billboard. In… For a landscape photographer, one must learn how to deal with the great variations in exposure value between the sky and the foreground. In the film industry, it has been called “sky control”, although one may want to control the foreground as well. Generally, the sky ends up being much brighter than the foreground, and… Lightroom 2.0 was released three days ago on July 28. The upgrade is $99, and it has paid for itself already. There are a number of improvements, but the most important to me is the localized correction feature. These are non-destructive adjustments, meaning they do not modify the original RAW image data, and they add… 
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