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This is why you should post-process your photography

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I took the best photo of my life today. I came down from the mountain and loaded it up on my computer. When I brought the photos up on my screen, they were just trees. Bummer. But it felt so good; looked so good on my camera’s LCD. What’s the deal with that?

This is why processing is the key to a great image. This is why revision is the key to great writing. Polish your gemstones. A great thought, a great idea, a great RAW is only just the beginning of something better. It is a seed. Without nurturing and pruning, it really is nothing special.

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OK Go raises the bar again with The One Moment music video shot in just 4.2 seconds

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For American rock band OK Go, boundary pushing music videos have become the standard. They’ve done the long one-shot takes with crazy optical illusions, shot with a massively co-ordinated cast of dancers, and they’ve even levitated in zero G. Now, they’ve done it again with their latest music video for new song, The One Moment.

The entire video, again, is shot as a single take. The main action in the video took only took 4.2 seconds in real time. After that, it bounces back and forth between real time for a few seconds, and then back to super slow motion with people flying through the air over fountains of paint. It’s a ridiculous video, and the amount of planning that must’ve gone into it to get it right first time just doesn’t bear thinking about.

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Is connectivity more important than image quality?

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In this photokina we’ve seen most camera makers making it bigger and better. But not necessarily faster. The new Fuji GFX medium format may be the prime example of that. Both camera makers and lens makers are putting full focus on developing features that relate to photos hard qualities: dynamic range, more megapixels, low light performance. But is this what their customers want?

Haje Jan Kamps over at Techcrunch suggests that workflow speed may be more important to photography consumers than almost anything else. As an example he shows the image above taken by our own John Aldred. Rather than downloading the photo from the card, processing it and uploading, John just snapped an image of the LCD so he can get it out there fast enough.

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Quick tip: How to manage your memory cards on events

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Here is a sweet tip we got from Adam Frimer about managing your cards while on a shoot. You start with a bunch of clean formatted cards. Place them all in a hard case facing up. This way you can see the data on each card. (Those hard cases are about $10 on amazon)

After using the card and filling it up, return the card to the case with the text facing downwards. This will indicate that the card has been used and it is not empty.

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Plotagraph converts any JPEG into a mesmerizing cinematograph

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If you like Cinematographs, you are going to love Plotagraph. In a nutshell, Plotagraph can convert any single JPEG into a cinematograph. This is great news to anyone who likes Cinematographs because creating those is a tedious and cumbersome process while (at least judging by the tutorial) Plotagraph is fast and very intuitive. Actually it requires no premiere/photoshop/after effect know how. It is all based on moving arrows around.

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Photoshop’s hotkeys speed up your workflow and free up more time for shooting

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Most of us have a fairly solid order of priorities in our lives.  Family comes first, then photography, then everything else.  For some folks, those first two are the other way around, but whatever allows us to spend more time with our family or our camera is a good thing.

I don’t really consider sitting at a computer to be photography, and as such, I want to spend as little time doing it as possible.  So, I use shortcut keys.  In this video, photographer David Justice shows us how much time we can save by letting go of the mouse and using keyboard shortcuts.

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The BrushKnob USB dial wants to help you speed up your Photoshop workflow

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External dials and gizmos have been common in the movie industry for years.  Their sole purpose in live is to help speed up workflow and productivity, assisting with things like editing and colour grading.  Now, they’re starting to become more popular for the regular desktop and stills editing with Photoshop.

BrushKnob, developed by Japanese concept artist, Wataru Kami, is a very inexpensive attempt to bring this kind of capability to the masses, releasing the entire project as OpenSource; circuit, code & all.

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Edit your videos using a game controller

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If, like some, you spend the same amount of time playing Doom 4K as you are editing videos, you will absolutely like this hack for using a game controller to control premiere.

Editor Casey Faris has a pretty sweet setup using Logitech Gamepad controller (about $20). The secret sauce is the actual mapping of the buttons. Casey uses a free software called xPadder  (here is a link to the free version)

Of course, using the gamepad only makes sense if it actually expedites your workflow, if it makes you go slow, there is no point in using it. And the magic to making it fast is mapping the right buttons to the right shortcuts. And what do you know, Casey shares his layout on the video link.

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Delete Your Sh!t: Why You Should Trash Most of Your Photos

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This is one of those subjects in the photography world that is strangely controversial – like Nikon vs. Canon, DSLR vs. Smartphone and Prime vs. Zoom … the idea that you should delete your sh!t – or in other words – why you might want to permanently delete most of the photos that you’ve ever captured (on purpose)!

Lets start with a universal truth.

99% of the photos that I take, that you take or that any other photographer takes are junk that nobody will ever see, or ever want to see.

So in this article I am going to encourage you to trash everything except your best work – after hitting delete you’ll feel better, I promise.

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Create an entire new keyboard of shortcodes with this hack

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If you are editing a lot of videos, you know that shortcodes and hot-keys are essential for fast editing. We actually shared a tip on using gaming keyboards for editing becasue they have more keys that you can assign macros to.

But LinusTechTips just upped the game of adding shortcodes by creating a whole 87-shorcut keyboard form a cheap $15 keyboard. Of course, the video editor from LinusTechTips is kinda of an extreme-case in the sense that he already has his entire letter-set, numbers, shift, alt and control combos assigned to macros and he needed MORE macro buttons.[Read More…]

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