2021 In Review – The World’s Best Photographs
Enjoy viewing 2021’s top photography collections!
History
National Geographic 10 Memorable
Washington Post The Year Of Endurance
Nature
Enjoy viewing 2021’s top photography collections!
History
National Geographic 10 Memorable
Washington Post The Year Of Endurance
Nature
“Turn a Scene with a Dull Boring Daylight to Dramatic Moonlit Night with Photoshop! Learn how to use simple adjustment layers to create advanced lighting effects, and take complete control of light.’
Find more of Unmesh Dinda’s content here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Artist Carl Chiarenza (born 1935) known for his abstract photographs, speaks about his 70-year long engagement with photography and collage work, including his motivations, his methods and his studio practices.
Colin Smith shows you how to use gradient maps to add stunning color effects to your photos instantly and where to find the hidden treasure of gradients that ship with Photoshop.
0:00 Using the Gradient Map
1:22 What a Gradient Map does
2:03 How to make the Gradient Map look great
2:56 Accessing Photoshop’s Gradients
4:34 Creating photographic effects
Find out more from Colin Smith at Photoshop Cafe.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe and Jesus Ramirez of Photoshop Training Channel both show how to enhance or create rim light in Photoshop.
Find out more from Colin Smith’s Photoshop Cafe.
Find more from Jesus Ramirez’s Photoshop Training Channel.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
What makes your images yours is your point of view. To find your voice tell your story.
Storytelling Free to Members
Every picture tells a story.
Make Plans Free to Members
Increase your productivity and fulfillment by making a plan.
Define a Project Free to Members
Focus your creative efforts and create an action list to achieve your goals.
Developing Personal Projects
Defining a project is one of the single best ways to develop your body of work.
Keep Your Current Projects Visible
What kinds of visual reminders would be helpful to you?
Perform An Annual Creative Review
At the beginning of every year I review the accomplishments of the past year.
The Benefits Of Performing An Annual Image Review
You’ll learn a great deal about your vision when you perform an annual image review.
The Benefits Of Selecting Your Top Images
Find your current best works and compare them to your past.
Variation Free to Members
Learn key strategies for expanding your work.
Combination Free to Members
Create synergy between existing elements in your images.
Reversal Free to Members
Use reversal to open new doors in your creative process.
Photoessay Free to Members
Expand your storytelling process.
Storyboarding Free to Members
Create a guiding structure to help focus and strengthen your work.
Continuity Free to Members
Continuity lies at the heart of the art of storytelling.
Arranging Free to Members
Sequence your work for impact and clarity.
Transitions Free to Members
Use transitions successfully to move from one image/idea to another.
Your Next Story | Coming
“Daniel Milnor is a professional photographer who specializes in documentaries and creates visual stories. He shares his insights on how to become a better photographer.”
View more photographers videos here.
Read more about Visual Storytelling here.
Learn more in my digital printing and digital photography workshops.
With over 30 books to his name, Waite’s distinctive images are recognized around the world and his work has received wide critical acclaim over many years.
Learn more about Charlie Waite here.
View more Photographer’s Videos here.
“Excerpts from the film, Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life. The film was produced and directed by Meg Partridge,(1994).This film is an engaging and penetrating look at a life devoted to photography, profiling the life and work of an artist who recorded some of the most evocative photographic images of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange’s artistic achievements and untiring investigations into the diversity of American life and culture are presented through interviews with her sons and assistants.”
View 12 Great Photographs collections here.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
Photoshop offers several filters designed to reduce noise – Despeckle, Dust and Scratches, Median, and Reduce Noise. They’re all useful for modest amounts of noise. They may be all you need for an extra pass of noise reduction after Raw conversion.
Build yourself a safety net when using these filters. Don’t apply them to the Background layer. Apply them to a duplicate of the Background layer. Then you’ll be able to redo noise reduction at any time in the future. Noise reduction tools will surely improve as time passes. You’ll also be able to mask the effect to affect only selected portions of an image, use Layer Styles Blend If sliders to restrict an effect to shadows, midtones, or highlights, and use Blend Modes to target luminosity, hue, or saturation.
A deeper look at these four filters will benefit every Photoshop user.
Despeckle. It’s a bare bones simple filter. There’s one strength and setting. There’s no dialog box. You can apply it multiple times for stronger applications. You can apply it to individual channels (i.e. if the blue channel has more noise than the others) or selectively (to low frequency smooth areas) to make it more targeted. That’s it. It’s that simple. How well does it work? Well enough to become familiar with it. It does a reasonable job for modest amounts of noise. It never performs miracles. But it can be a final touch worth applying to many images. It’s also useful for reducing noise in masks and effects layers.
Median. It’s simple. There’s only one slider Radius. Radius controls the amount of blurring. The blurring is Median provides is substantially more aggressive than Despeckle. Only very low settings are useful for photorealistic images. Be very careful with this filter. With even modest applications it can subdue important textural detail. With moderate applications, it can even smooth and reshape contours. Apply it aggressively to see just how far it can go. You’ll see it quickly goes too far.
Dust and Scratches. It’s classically used to reduce the amount of retouching needed by images as it removes small artifacts, like dust and scratches, but it can also be useful for modest amounts of noise reduction. There are two sliders. Radius controls the amount of blurring; with higher Radius settings subdue more noise and may compromise detail. Threshold restricts the number of tone levels the filter is applied to, making the filter selective with respect to luminosity values; very high Threshold settings may introduce sharp transitions in texture between blurred and unblurred areas. Used aggressively, this filter will subdue small textural detail and compromise image sharpness. Used carefully, this filter can effectively reduce modest amounts of noise.
Reduce Noise. It offers the most control of the Photoshop filters. It can deal with moderate amounts of noise relatively well. Strength controls the intensity of the filter. It’s the blurring effect. Preserve Details reduces the effect of the filter initially targeting contours and later by targeting higher and higher detail frequencies or image texture. The settings you use are entirely dependent on Strength settings and image content. Higher frequency detail merits higher settings. It’s not a panacea. High Strength and Preserve Detail settings can make some areas of an image look synthetically smooth and yet still fail to remove small artifacts, especially near contours. Reduce Color Noise blurs color without affecting luminosity. You can be relatively aggressive with this slider, but if you use it this way, guard against reduced saturation especially along dramatic contours. Sharpen Details attempts to restore image sharpness after blurring. Use it conservatively. More sophisticated sharpening can be performed with other filters in Photoshop. Remove JPEG Artifact is somewhat effective for reducing JPEG compression artifacts, such as blocky color and jagged edges. Use this check box only on JPEGs that contain artifacts. (Don’t use it on TIFFs from Raw files.) If you can’t remove all of the JPEG artifacting in a file without compromising image quality, turn to third-party plugins. While it’s the most advanced Photoshop filter for noise reduction, like all the others, when used for major noise reduction, it may compromise image sharpness.
The best tool in Photoshop’s arsenal for noise reduction is Adobe Camera Raw. While the best place to use this tool is during Raw conversion, you can also apply it after Raw conversion as a filter. Try it first; consider these other tools as offering different blurring methods that are useful in specific situations, like Dust & Scratches. I cover this Adobe Camera Raw’s Noise reduction features in great detail in a separate article.
None of these tools are up to the task of industrial-strength noise reduction. Applied too frequently or too aggressively they will compromise image sharpness unnecessarily. For aggressive noise reduction, turn to third-party software, like Imagenomic’s Noiseware. (I cover this plug-in in a separate article here.)
Let me offer you a final word of caution. Whenever you blur an image to reduce noise, don’t overdo it. Blur enough to reduce noise but no more. If you go too far with blurring effects you’ll spend a lot more time trying to restore image sharpness and may never achieve optimum results. Just as there are limits to how much apparent sharpness you can restore to a poorly focused image, there are limits to how much more apparent sharpness you can reintroduce after blurring. Use a light touch. Sometimes the noise is more desirable than reduced sharpness. Sometimes the presence of noise is even desirable; it can keep images from seeming synthetic and even make some images appear slightly sharper. (I cover this in a separate article here.)