How To Avoid Over Sharpening

Antarctica CLXXI
Identifying and developing a sensitivity for the artifacts digital sharpening produces will help you choose a sharpening method and what settings to use during any stage of your sharpening workflow. You can easily see the artifacts digital sharpening produces by overdoing it. Apply a filter like Unsharp Mask at maximum strength and look closely at what happens.
Following are the seven most common digital sharpening artifacts.
1. Noise
2. Exaggerated Texture
3. Visible Light Halos

4. Visible Dark Lines
5. Loss of Highlight Detail
6. Loss of Shadow Detail
7. Increased Saturation
These artifacts can be reduced in one or more ways.
Read more on Digital Photo Pro.
If you know what to look for, you’ll know what path to choose and how far down it to go. Training your eye for what to look for and understanding the upper limits of what other people find to be naturalistic, or at least not distracting, is the first step to developing your unique sharpening style. The second step is learning how to produce certain effects and avoid others with the tools at your disposal. Once you’ve taken these steps, you can take the third and final step, knowledgeably putting craft in the service of your vision to make compelling visual statements. Enhancing detail is one area of expertise that’s well worth mastering for all photographers.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

28 Great Quotes On Open-Mindedness

Quotes_OpenMindedness
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Open-Mindedness.
“We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode.” — John Cleese
“Minds are like parachutes — they only function when open.” — Thomas Dewar
“Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.” — Charles F. Kettering
“One change always leaves the door open for the establishment of others.” — Niccolo Machiavelli
“When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so regretfully upon the closed door that we don’t see the one which has opened for us.” — Alexander Graham Bell
“Creative experiences can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily in people’s lives. It requires enormous personal security and openness and a spirit of adventure.” — Steven Covey
“One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“It’s amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.” — Charles F. Kettering
“Without an open-minded mind, you can never be a great success.” – Martha Stewart
“I’m looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” — Henry Ford
“I consider it my job to nurture the creativity of the people I work with because at Sony we know that a terrific idea is more likely to happen in an open, free and trusting atmosphere than when everything is calculated, every action analyzed and every responsibility assigned by an organization chart.” — Akio Morita
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” — Aristotle
“I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem in as much as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.” — Henry Bessemer
“Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.” – Rupert Sheldrake
“At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes–an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.” – Carl Sagan
“Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.” — Margaret Mead
“Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” — Thomas Huxley
“I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem in as much as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.” — Henry Bessemer
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.” – Niels Bohr
“If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that – then that will take you are far as you can go. And then you’ll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.” – Pema Chodron
“If we open our hearts, we will also find open hearts – it is always mutual.” – Abbot Leo von Rudloff
“Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film.” – Ansel Adams
“An artist’s duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany.” – Nick Cave
“The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.” – Herbie Hancock
“I’m someone who is open-minded to new experiences because they teach you new things.” – Marilyn Manson
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” — Terry Pratchett
“Now there’s a man with an open mind — you can feel the breeze from here!” — Groucho Marx
“By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” – Richard Dawkins
Read more in The Essential Collection Of Creativity Quotes

9 Great Books On Haiku Poetry

Haiku_Recommended
Looking for books on great haiku poetry?
Here’s a list of books on haiku that I recommend.

Six on writing and enjoying haiku.

1   Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide by Jane Reichhold
2   Haiku: A Poet’s Guide by Lee Gurga
3   The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku by William J. Higginson
4   The Haiku Seasons by William J. Higginson
5   How to Haiku: A Writer’s Guide to Haiku and Related Forms by Bruce Ross
6   The Heart of Haiku by Jane Hirshfield

Three outstanding collections of haiku; two historic and one contemporary.

7   The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets translated by Sam Hamill
8   The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology by Faubion Bowers
9   The Haiku Anthology edited by Cor van den Heuvel

 

Listen to my conversation with Natalie Goldberg here.

Find my haiku here.

55 Great Quotes On Poetry

Quotes_Poetry
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Poetry.
“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.” – Christopher Fry
“Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.” – Carl Sandburg
“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” – Samuel Johnson
“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” – Plato
“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” – John F. Kennedy
“The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse… the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” – Aristotle
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” – Aristotle
“Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature.” – Augustus William Hare
“Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.” – Georges Brague
“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.” – Muriel Rukeyser
“Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.” – James Branch Cabell
“I don’t create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.” – Edith Södergran
“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” – Salvatore Quasimodo
“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.” – Edmund Burke
“Poetry is life distilled.” – Gwendolyn Brooks
“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” – Thomas Gray
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” – Robert Frost
“Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.” – Robinson Jeffers
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.” – Wallace Stevens
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” – Novalis
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” – Khalil Gibran
“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” – Jim Morrison
“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” – Salman Rushdie
“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.” – Socrates
“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” — Wallace Stevens
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” – Percy Shelley
“Poetry is an act of peace.” – Pablo Neruda
“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“There is often as much poetry between the lines of a poem as in those lines.” – Alexandre Vinet
“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” – Stephen Mallarme
“The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” – Jean Cocteau
“If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.” – Derek Walcott
“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” – Robert Frost
“I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.” – Carl Sandburg
“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.” – Randall Jarrell
“The poet illuminates us by the flames in which his being passes away.” – Alexandre Vinet
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – Leonard Cohen
“The poem… is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.” – Robert Penn Warren
“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” – Robert Frost
“In poetry and in eloquence the beautiful and grand must spring from the commonplace…. All that remains for us is to be new while repeating the old, and to be ourselves in becoming the echo of the whole world.” – Alexandre Vinet
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.” – John Keats
“Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.” – James Tate
“I write poetry in order to live more fully.” – Judith Rodriguez
“If you’ve got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow.” – Terri Guillemets
“Always be a poet, even in prose.” – Charles Baudelaire
“If you can’t be a poet, be the poem.” – David Carradine
“Every single soul is a poem.” – Michael Franti
“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” – Muriel Rukeyser
“I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don’t have to write anymore.” – Tukaram
“God is the perfect poet.” – Robert Browning
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” – Paul Valéry
“Poetry is not always words.” – Terri Guillemets
Read more in The Essential Collection Of Quotes On Creativity.

How To Evaluate All Photoshop Color Adjustment Tools

PS_Curves_Full
1_LuminosityGraph
2_HueGraph
3_SaturationGraph

.

The Photoshop Color Adjustment Tool Survey – The Go To, The Exotic, And The Redundant

.

You can evaluate any color adjustment tool, in any software ­– past, current, or future –based on the control it offers over one or more of the three elements of color – Luminosity, Hue, and Saturation.
Use this as a strategy for quickly mastering the intricacies of color adjustment in Photoshop: own the six go to tools; familiarize yourself with the eight exotic tools; forget about the eleven redundant tools.

.

Go To Color Adjustments

.

There are a six color adjustment tools I shudder to think of living without; Curves, Hue/Saturation, Vibrance, Selective Color, Photo Filter, and Black & White

.

5a_Curves

.

Curves offers the ultimate control over luminosity; no other adjustment offers such precision over the relative darkness and lightness of shadows and highlights. Using the separate channels, Curves offers the same kind of precision when adjusting hue.

.

5b_HueSaturation
5c_Vibrance

.

Hue/Saturation and Vibrance are the two essential tools for adjusting saturation.

.
What’s the difference? Vibrance saturates less saturated colors more and prevents clipping in very saturated values, producing a heavier appearance. Hue/Saturation produces a lighter more intense effect, so use it cautiously; you can quickly clip values, producing an overly smooth, overly saturated synthetic appearance if used aggressively. Similarly, handle its Hue slider with care; it’s really more useful for color transformation than it is color enhancement. Unlike Vibrance, Hue/Saturation offers the ability to adjust individual hues without the need for masking. Neither has the ability to selectively adjust the saturation of highlights, midtones, and shadows; for this you’ll need a luminosity mask. Vibrance provides only a very limited ability to selectively adjust colors with different levels of saturation while Hue/Saturation provides none. (For a way to do this read my article Saturation Masking on DigitalPhotoPro.com.)

.

5d_PhotoFilter

.

Photo Filter offers the ability to adjust the hue and to a more limited degree saturation of an image much like an analog lens filter would do, only much more precisely and flexibly. Though less intense, it preserves hue variety better that a Color Fill layer set to a blend mode of Color.

.

5e_SelectiveColor

.

Selective Color trades in subtlety, referencing CMYK adjustments without leaving RGB working spaces. Its ability to adjust the hue of whites, neutrals, and blacks and its ability to mix white and black into other hues, producing reduced saturation tints and shades, makes it unique.

.

5f_BlackWhite

.

Black & White is the simplest and most powerful tool for converting color to black and white, first reducing saturation to zero and then adjusting luminosity based on original hues. It shines brightest when used in combination with Hue/Saturation and when applied selectively with masks in multiple passes.

.

Exotic Color Adjustments

.

You’ll see and think about color differently once you use Photoshop’s three most exotic color adjustment tools; Color Lookup Tables, Gradient Map, and Match Color. (For more detail on each of these adjustments read my previous articles on DigitalPhotoPro.com.) They affect luminosity, hue, and saturation in complex non-uniform ways.

.

6a_ColorLookUp

.

Color Lookup Tables combines multiple color routines or recipes into a single adjustment, making it easy to create consistent effects across multiple images; it’s most frequently but not exclusively used for color grading the many stills in a video.

.

6b_GradientMap

.

Gradient Map uses the luminosity values of an original to selectively distribute new colors into an image.

.

6c_MatchColor

.

Match Color applies the color values of one image to another, based on a complex statistical analysis of the color relationships in both; it has an added benefit of being able to neutralize strong color casts, such as those found in underwater exposures, without the use of a second image.

.

Five other exotic color adjustment tools are worth noting.

.

While preserving shadow and highlight detail is best done during exposure and Raw conversion, and while you can mask a Curves adjustment to the shadows or highlight, both the adjustment Shadows/Highlights and HDR Toning offer occasionally useful sharpening options that Curves doesn’t, in the form of Radius sliders, which potentially makes them more related to detail enhancement than color adjustment.
Cast Equalize (resets dynamic range), Posterize (reduces gradation), and Threshold (reduces all values to pure black or white) into the really exotic category. They have real uses for very graphic images and for analysis but offer little that is useful for photorealistic images.

.

Redundant Color Adjustments

.

Part of mastering a tool is learning what not to use. Many of Photoshop’s color adjustment tools are redundant, offering similar control over the same elements of color – with less power and precision. You can simplify your toolset by eliminating these eleven adjustment types from your workflow. Instead, use the tools that give you more control.

.

Brightness/Contrast (Use Curves instead.), Exposure (Use Curves instead.) Levels (Use Curves instead.), Color Balance, (Use Curves instead.), Invert (Use Curves instead.), Equalize (Use Curves instead.), Desaturate (Use Hue/Saturation instead.), Replace Color (Instead, use Select By Color Range and then Hue/Saturation.), and Channel Mixer, Apply Image, and Calculations (Instead, use Layer Styles to blend channels, with or without a mask. (For more on this technique see my previous article Blending Channels on DigitalPhotoPro.com.)

.

See the pattern(s)? Two adjustments, Curves and Hue/Saturation, and one layer technique can outperform all of these eleven adjustments.

.

Blend Modes

.

You can make any color adjustment in Photoshop more precisely target an element of color by using one of four Blend Modes – Luminosity, Hue, Saturation, and Color (a combination of Hue and Saturation). Simply change an adjustment layer’s blend mode from its default Normal. If, instead, you apply an adjustment directly to an image, immediately after applying it, select Edit: Fade (Command / Shift / F) to change the Mode. As a general guideline for all color adjustments, I recommend you make a standard practice of using the blend mode of the element of color you are adjusting, making exceptions when desired.

.

Lightroom & Camera Raw

.

Can the separate but related programs Lightroom and Camera Raw do things that Photoshop can’t? Yes. While the majority of these two interfaces, which differ in appearance but not in function, provide controls that are quite similar to but sometimes more limited than what you find in Photoshop, they can do three things that can’t be done in the same way in Photoshop: first, White Balance (Curves and Photo Filter are similar but different.); second, Clarity (High Pass filtration is similar but different); and third, the HSL panel is able to produce luminosity adjustments of individual hues without adverse side-effects on dynamic range.
While the precision of the adjustments provided in Lightroom and Camera Raw is often more limited, it’s usually best to do the basic heavy lifting during Raw conversion – it’s less destructive – and then either dramatic transformations and/or fine-tuning in Photoshop.

.

In the future, if we discover a single interface that allows us to precisely and without side-effects control the luminosity, hue and saturation of any range of brightness (L), colors (H), and intensities (S), then we’ll have found the Holy Grail of color adjustment. For now, the Photoshop interface, a product of more than 25 years of continual expansion, is more complicated than it needs to be, but it’s capable of producing magic – so much magic. When you clarify your thinking about color, you’ll find it becomes much easier to navigate interfaces and master color adjustment. Keep it simple. Remember, color only has three elements – Luminosity, Hue, and Saturation – so color adjustment is all about controlling the relationships between them … nothing more and nothing less.

.

Read more color theory resources here.

Read more color adjustment resources here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

42 Great Quotes On Style

Quotes_Style
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Style.
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” ― Gore Vidal
“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated.” – Jean-Luc Godard
“Style is the answer to everything. / A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing / To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it / To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.” – Charles Bukowski
“Style is the most valuable asset of the modern artist. That’s probably why so many styles are reported lost or stolen each year.” – Brad Holland
“Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.” – Orson Welles
“Don’t look for gimmicks to give your work style. You might be stuck with them for life. Or, worse yet, you might have to change your ‘style’ every few years.” – Irwin Greenberg
“Every age has its style, motifs, tunes and rhythms – its special sense of space and time.” – Vladimir Gusev
“Don’t be into trends. Don’t make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way you live.” – Gianni Versace
“Fashions fade, style is eternal.” – Yves Saint Laurent
“Good new art may not look like art. Inspiration doesn’t follow style, it creates it.” – Darby Bannard
“Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with ‘style’ because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their work arose rather in defiance of their times.” – Franz Marc
“Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality. The summation of this indefinable net of your feeling, knowledge and experience.” – Ernst Haas
“A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias… it is the Self escaping into the open.” – E. B. White
“Personal style, be it that of Michelangelo, or that of Tintoretto… has always been that peculiar personal rapport which has developed between an artist and his medium.” – Ben Shahn
“Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.” – Wallace Stevens
“We don’t need to impose a style, we just have to show up and be present to catch its unfolding.” – Linda Saccoccio
“When doodling, you are not trying to emulate anyone else but subconsciously developing a vocabulary of shapes and hand movements that are simply and wonderfully your own. Doodling seems to be one way to develop a personal style …” – John Stuart Pryce
“What influenced my style was the feeling that I was a lousy artist… I was like the ugly duckling, not knowing what I was, style-wise, and thinking I was all on my own… I evolved into a style that couldn’t be compared to anyone else.” – Jim Rowe
“Many a fine style has evolved from a decent handicap.” – Robert Genn
“The unity in any painter’s work arises from the fact that a person, brought to a desperate situation, will behave in a certain way… style.” – Frank Auerbach
“Style is something that should come in spite of itself… Because you’ve worked, you’ve looked.” – Mark Adams
“After years of painting, drawing, sculpting or whatever, your style becomes you. You are your style. Inseparable, one and the same, no matter what you choose to create.” – Sonja Donnelly
“One of the characteristics of great drawings is the artist’s whole-hearted acceptance of his own style and character. It is as if the drawing says for the artist, ‘Here I am.” – Nathan Goldstein
“The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle… and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it.” – John Leonard
“After the spirit and the thoughts are concentrated, the ideas may be developed in accordance with the style; and then it may be said, that what is grasped by the mind is expressed by the hand.” – Anonymous Chinese painter
“A man’s style is his mind’s voice.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The style is the man himself.” – George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
“Style is the image of character.” – Edward Gibbon
“Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.” – Rachel Zoe
“He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.” – Paul Klee
“Self-plagiarism is style.” – Alfred Hitchcock
“Why change? Everyone has his own style. When you have found it, you should stick to it.” ― Audrey Hepburn
“As you grow older, it dawns on you that you are yourself – that your job is not to force yourself into a style but to do what you want.” – Beth van Hoesen
“Once you’ve built your reputation on a particular signature style, it can be hard to wriggle your way out of the straitjacket of your own brand identity. After all, where does distinctively recognizable end and stalely repetitious begin?” – Judith Palmer
“One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization.” – Georges Braque
“An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.” – Henri Matisse
“The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.” – Pablo Picasso
“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” – Matthew Arnold
“Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.” – Victor Hugo
“To achieve style, begin by affecting none.” – E. B. White
“Only great minds can afford a simple style.” – Stendhal
“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It’s the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.” – Chuck Close
Read more in The Essential Collection of Creativity Quotes.