Sleeklens Archives - DIY Photography

How to create a mock-up of a framed photograph in Photoshop to help you sell more prints

September 13, 2021 by John Aldred 1 Comment

Many of us might not ever need to create a mock-up of how a photograph might look in a frame on the wall. If we’re only shooting for ourselves, we’d just print it, put it in the frame and hang it. Then we’d just know what it looks like. But for family, wedding and portrait photographers looking to sell prints to clients, it can be a very valuable tool to have in your arsenal.

Being able to shoot an image of a client’s home and present them with an image that shows their images hanging on their own walls can be a great way to show them the best sizes to get and what images might look good in a set. It’s a popular technique and there are even smartphone apps to help automate the process. But in this video, Sleeklens shows us how to do it the old fashioned way. In Photoshop.

[Read More…]

Manually fixing distortion in Photoshop is easier than you think

December 30, 2016 by John Aldred 1 Comment

When you’re photographing interiors or tall buildings, perspective distortion is often inevitable. There’s ways around it with tilt shift lenses or large format film cameras, but for most of us that’s not an option. These days, Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop and other tools provide a number of fancy automated ways to help correct for this. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t quite hit the mark, and we need to step in and do it manually.

This particular type of perspective distortion is commonly known as “converging verticals”. It’s caused by things getting smaller as they get further away from the camera. It’s essentially the same thing you see when looking down a straight set of train tracks that seem to eventually arrive at a point. Only, this happens vertically when shooting up or down on objects oriented vertically. Fixing it manually is fairly simple and straightforward. This video from the folks at Sleeklens shows us how.

[Read More…]

How to eliminate sensor dust in Adobe Lightroom

November 15, 2016 by John Aldred Leave a Comment

The transition from film to digital eliminated problems that plagued many photographers. Things like reciprocity failure were now a thing of the past. But, it presented a few new challenges, too. The biggest of those is dust. Things have gotten better over the years. We’ve made the shift from CCD to CMOS sensors, which seem to attract less dust. We’ve got automatic dust cleaning features in most DSLRs now, too.

These days, I’ve found the majority of dust can be gotten rid of with a good blast or two from a rocket blower. It’s rare I have to take a swab to a sensor any more. Sometimes, though, you get those stubborn bits that just don’t seem to shift, and you don’t have time to send it off or clean it properly. They’re fairly easy to fix in post, though. This video from Sleeklens shows you how to quickly and easily remove sensor dust in Lightroom.

[Read More…]