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September 21, 2019 | Leave a Comment |
“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.
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: advancing your photography, Daniel Milnor, marc silber, Photography, storytelling
August 16, 2019 | Leave a Comment |
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.
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: charlie waite, england, landscape, photographer, Video
May 5, 2018 | Leave a Comment |
“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.
Category: Uncategorized
December 10, 2017 | Leave a Comment |
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.)
Read more on Noise here.
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November 6, 2017 | Leave a Comment |
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: adobe, insights, newsletter, Printing
August 24, 2017 | Leave a Comment |
Do you want to efficiently take effective action to protect our environment?
NRDC can help you with their new initiative – All In.
How does it work?
You choose how you’d like to be contacted (email, text, phone), the frequency of the alerts you’d like to receive, and the amount of time you’d like to commit – 1 minute, 10 minute, 1 hour, and deep dive.
They provide clear resources for taking action; some are as simple as signing a petition (I signed 3 today in less than 3 minutes) or calling your representatives at the right times and others are as ambitious as hosting an activist meet up. You choose your level of commitment. They help you be more efficient and effective.
NRDC’s All In is simply the best environmental grass roots initiative I’ve ever seen; it’s what I’ve hoped for decades … and it’s coming from the organization at the top of my list to support (and Robert Redford’s). (The Natural Resources Defense Council is historically the most effective independent American environmental organization that helps safe guard old and support new good legislation while shutting down bad legislation.)
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Category: Environment - Organization, Uncategorized Tags: action, all in, Environment - Causes, green, Green Action, natural resources defense council, NRDC
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