Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Frequency separation is typically seen as a technique for retouching skin – albeit often quite badly these days. But that’s not its only use. Separating colour from detail offers a lot of other potential benefits for working on your images.
In this particular example, from travel & landscape photographer Michael Breitung, it’s chromatic aberration and colour fringing that get the frequency separation treatment.
VSCO has announced that the much loved VSCO Film Presets for Desktop are coming to an end. The company says they’re moving completely away from the desktop to focus solely on their mobile app.
The Presets for Desktop have been rather popular over the years, although that’ll all come to an end on March 1st, 2019. VSCO hasn’t really said why they’re killing them off, except to say that they are “always moving forward” and focusing on mobile.
It’s something we’ve been hearing in the worlds of both photography and video for years. Ever since digital became a thing, so did “Oh, we’ll fix it in post”. But most of the things that we often choose to fix in post can more easily be fixed in-camera on the day. Sure, it might take an extra 5 or 10 minutes of your time, but it could shave hours off your post production.
In this video from the guys at Aputure, we see five reasons why you should definitely fix things in-camera, and not rely on post for.
Skylum has today announced a major performance update to its Aurora HDR 2018 software. As well as adding in some new tools and improving performance and stability for both Windows and Mac, it also adds support for the new Loupedeck+ console.
With the new version, users will see a boost in performance on MacOS computers of up to 180% while Windows users see a speed improvement of up to 500%. Skylum also says that Aurora HDR now makes better use of memory with intelligent management and improved stability. But what’s really cool is that it now has Loupedeck support.
A graphics tablet is one of the most essential pieces of kit one can own as a photographer or retoucher. Sure, you can edit with a mouse, but a tablet makes life so much easier, and faster, and more accurate. While you’re often good with pretty much anything that has the Wacom name stamped on it, the really good ones have traditionally been rather expensive.
The Intuos is the low budget entry into the world of Wacom tablets, but they’re quite basic. And small. Now, though, with the new 2018 range of Intuos tablets, they’ve seen some pretty significant upgrades in size, sensitivity and capability.
Dodging and burning has become as commonplace to Photoshop as it was in the darkroom with film. But in Photoshop it can be a tedious process (even more so than it was in the darkroom). This quick technique from Anti Karppinen shows a very fast way to achieve a similar result in Photoshop.
With drone cameras improving on an almost weekly basis, shooting photos with drones has become very popular. Possibly even more so than shooting video with drones. They allow us to reach vantage points that are otherwise impossible to attain. In this video, photographer Michael Shainblum goes through his process for processing photos from his DJI Phantom 4.
Affinity Photo for iPad has rapidly become the hot favourite for editing images on the go. It’s a fantastic piece of software that’s extremely powerful. It contains the same processing engine as the popular Mac and Windows versions, but it’s optimised for the iPad hardware. Now, Affinity Photo for iPad has been updated for the new iOS11 release.
One of the new capabilities Apple added to iOS 11 is the new Files app. The new Affinity Photo update allows you to drag and drop files from the Files app into the app itself. It means that multiple files can be dragged at once for focus stacking, HDR or making panoramas. And you can drag files straight in from emails, including PSDs, with all layers intact.
This whole “computational photography” thing always felt a little bit weird. But it also intrigued me. The idea that a computer can realistically create things that weren’t actually shown in the original shot is pretty amazing. Maybe it was seeing this scene in Blade Runner as a kid that did it for me. It was pure fantasy back then, but we’re getting there.
A new “computational zoom” technology developed by researchers at Nvidia and UCSB brings us a step closer to Deckard’s reality. Essentially it allows the photographer to change the focal length and perspective of an image in post, but this description barely does it justice. It actually allows you to simulate multiple focal lengths simultaneously. Here, watch this video, and it’ll all make sense.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
Find my work on My website or follow me on Facebook or My page
