Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I’m not a fan of western superhero franchises.
Yes I fully appreciate that I’m in the minority here and it’s certainly not my intention to turn you away in the first sentence, but rather to solidify the fact that this exploration of colour in cinema does not come from a fanboy solely driven by vapid, one dimensional characters and napkin narratives, but rather pure adoration of a masterwork in cinematography.
This is an interesting look at the world in which we live. As Principle Digital Imaging Evangelist at Adobe, Julieanne Kost has travelled most of the known world. And during her travels, she’s shot many photographs of the places she’s had the opportunity to visit. While recently looking through the images, she started to notice a pattern in the images she’d chosen to shoot. That pattern was colour.
For most stills photographers, the only measure of exposure that many of us see (besides the camera’s built-in reflective meter) is the histogram; essentially a graph which covers the amount of each of the different brightness levels in your image. Although many photographers making the move to video might feel more comfortable shooting with a live histogram, they’re not the only ways to judge exposure. Nor necessarily even the best.
In this video, Casey Faris walks us through the three main scopes available in DaVinci Resolve. The waveform, the RGB parade, and the vectorscope. These scopes are also built into many video cameras and external monitors now, too. Once you learn how to read them, you’ll be able to get exactly the exposure & colour you want.
If you want to add both contrast and a punch of color to your photos Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect shows you a technique you might want to try out. In this video, he teaches you how to use Color Burn and Color Dodge blending modes together to quickly boost contrast and color at the same time.
The folks at FiLMiC Pro have released a new update that brings LogV2 to the app. It claims to offer up to 12 stops of dynamic range and provides footage bit rates as high as 140Mbps. Log first came to FiLMiC Pro in early 2017, but now it sees a pretty significant update.
According to the test video above from the iPhoneographers, LogV2 offers up to two and a half stops more dynamic range than the “natural” camera with the latest iPhone XS Max, and even the older iPhone SE and 6S see up to about a stop and a half increased dynamic range.
Colour science is a term often thrown around these days, but what does it actually mean? Well, in this context, and one very simplified explanation, it’s how your camera “sees” and processes the colour hitting the sensor, ultimately turning it into the final image it saves out to your memory card.
But what does that mean to the end user? And does it really even matter? In his usual non-stop info-packed way, Gerald Undone deep dives into the topic of colour science in this 13-minute video.
You can change the color of anything in Photoshop. In this short and simple video tutorial, Jesús Ramirez of Photoshop Training Channel will teach you how to change the color of the eyes. The method is simple, it doesn’t take much time, yet you can get very realistic results.
We all know that digital images are made up of red, green and blue “pixels”. Often, to capture this, sensors are in some kind of side-by-side pixel array, like with Bayer and X-Trans or layered, like Foveon. But that’s not the only way to create a full colour image. Many video cameras do it with the use of a prism splitter and three separate sensors capturing red, green and blue signals which are then merged together.
Mike and JohnBen at Clovehitch Productions wanted to try to replicate this last method using black and white film. They wanted to see if it was possible to capture just the red, green and blue parts of the spectrum on three separate shots, and then merge them back together to produce a full colour image.
There are plenty of ways to enhance colors in Photoshop. Nathaniel Dodson of Tutvid shares five tips that will help you make the colors more prominent, or in other words – make them “pop”. The tips are different and you can use them for various types of photos, no matter if you work on portraits, landscapes or some other kind of images.
I’m not the biggest fan of digital black and white conversions. They’re often just far too much work and effort to get the look that I want. There are a million different ways to make black & white conversions. Until you try a bunch of them, though, you usually don’t really know how quite they’re going to turn out. So, if I know I want black & white then I usually just shoot them on film.
But it is possible to make great black & whites digital conversions from colour shots, though. This video from Blake Rudis at f64 Academy talks us through his three-stage process to make his black & white images.
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