Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I believe you’ve heard of those fraudsters who live abroad but still try to claim welfare from their home countries. But did you know what they submit as “proof” that they’re still living at home? Badly photoshopped photos. I’m talking “Oprah’s third hand” bad, and even worse.
The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has reported an increase in fraud involving photoshopped images. But some of them are so hilariously bad that it would be a shame not to share them for some laughs.
Have you ever come back from a day out photographing, downloaded your images excitedly, but then been absolutely stumped about which way to take your post-processing? If you don’t have a preconceived notion at the time of taking the image, or the images are simply a little flat and lifeless, then it can be a common problem.
In this excellent video, Christian Möhrle reached out to 7 different professional photographers and asked them to each edit his landscape photograph in their own distinct style. Some were definitely more distinct than others!
The thing I love and hate about Photoshop is that it has countless editing tools and options. Like most photographers, I find it extremely helpful. At most times, I found learning how to use it really fun and rewarding. But being self-taught, learning Photoshop was sometimes pretty frustrating.
If you’re both enjoying and struggling to use Photoshop, Colin Smith of photoshopCAFE shares five great tips. They’ll help you to accelerate your Photoshop learning and significantly boost your editing skills. This will lead to not only better images, but also editing faster and with more confidence.
The ISO capabilities in DSLRs and mirrorless cameras today is pretty amazing. But it’s not perfect. You’re still going to see an increase in noise as you ramp up the ISO, even if it’s not quite as bad as it used to be. But we all love clean, noiseless images, don’t we? Along with the improvements in ISO performance, we’ve also seen big leaps in noise reduction technology. But many of them still aren’t perfect, often eliminating noise at the expense of detail.
For some images, you really do need to keep that detail and in this video from Scott Walker at Walks on the Wild Side, we learn three different methods of noise reduction. These methods include simple Lightroom Edits, Topaz Denoise AI and a pretty complex method that’s very involved but “fixes everything”. He also covers a “Pre-noise reduction” process you can do before you bring your photo into 3rd party software.
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are all around us. I firmly believe the future of photography is computational, and we currently have a whole range of companies fighting to make the best progress in AI. Here at DIYPhotography, we’re putting various elements of AI head-to-head to determine the best software on the market. We recently covered AI Noise Reduction, and today we move on to Sharpening.
Matching colors in Photoshop is fun, but getting the selections and the hue exactly right can also be frustrating. Thankfully, some newer Adobe Photoshop tools have made it easier than before. While there are several ways of transferring colors from one image to another, in this video, you’ll learn a simple one that takes around two minutes. Let Colin Smith of photoshopCAFE will show you how.
For months now I’ve been obsessed with emulating the film look into my digital photos. It all started with me exploring the panoramic aspect ratio of 65×24 and other wide aspect ratios and trying to understand what makes a photo cinematic. As part of this journey I’ve also started to research grain, how is it formed, and how it looks on different film stocks and, truth be told, I was not ready for how deep this rabbit hole is.
In order to recreate grain well in our digital photos we first have to understand what grain is. On film, the images are composed of grain. Be it silver halides or dye granules, they are organic shapes that are distributed unevenly in an emulsion and when exposed to light they create the image you finally see.
If you open up a PSD file and find areas of the image filled with black, your immediate reaction is probably to panic. But not to worry, if this happens there’s probably a very simple (yet costly) explanation. From now on, Adobe is no longer licensed to use Pantone’s colors.
So what does this mean exactly? Adobe has begun to phase out all the Pantone Color Books from its software which includes Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. If you have any Pantone colors in your work, even in old files from 20 years ago, you will get a message telling you that areas that have those colors will be rendered in black.
It seems like you can’t go a day without hearing about AI lately. It’s well and truly becoming a regular part of our lives, and of course, features in several Photoshop and Lightroom features and plug-ins now. So of course, it wasn’t going to be long before other companies started developing AI to help with the retouching workload.
Retouch4Me is the latest software that uses the power of AI to help you with your image retouching. It’s primarily touting itself as great for portraits and weddings, but ultimately could be used for a range of photography genres.
Infinite Tools have just released a powerful update to one of their most versatile Photoshop plugins. Infinite Unify 2.0 is the latest update from the innovative company that provides creative solutions for photographers and retouchers looking to streamline and speed up their Photoshop workflow.
Infinite Unify gives photographers the power to tackle variations in skin tone, colour casts from mixed lighting, or other distracting elements in a fast and easy way.
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