Category Archives: Digital Technique

Post production technique, photo processing, and other technique for working with digital files

Split Grad NDs & Dynamic Range

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...

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Lightroom and an Evolving Workflow

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...

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Lightroom Local Adjustments

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...

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Click reduction: Lightroom shortcut keys

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...

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My Favorite IPhone Apps for Photography Field Work

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...

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Polar bear, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska

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...

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Panorama stitching

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...

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No more split-graduated ND filters

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...

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Lightroom 2.0: localized corrections

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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Digital Composites

Nowadays, digital composites are everywhere. While editorial images should be honest and unmodified, there seems to be no limit with advertising and promotional works. We received a recent example of this when we got our copy of a Russian calendar featuring some of our polar bear photos. Our photo as it appears in a Russian...

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