Secrets For Black And White Shots

One of the biggest benefits of digital photography over regular film picture taking is the fact these little devices actually give a photographer instant access to many different special effects. One of the most spectacular of these effects is the ability digital photography gives to switch instantly from color to black and white exposures. Rather than having to change out film types or drain color from a shot on a computer screen, digital photography does this on the spot.

The truth is black and white photography tends to be under-rated. When it’s used to create an impact with a shot, the resulting image can be amazing. Landscapes, portraits and even still life type shots can all benefit from an occasional switch over to black and white. Learning how to take full advantage of this digital photography technique, however, will take a little time.

This type of digital photography can be a little tricky to master, but since the cameras generally come equipped with monitors to instantly see results, the risk factor of walking away with a bad shot is minimized. Since pictures can be reviewed on the spot, anyone trying this digital photography technique will find they can see their pictures and make adjustments instantly if the shot isn’t quite what they’d hoped for.

To make the most of black and white pictures taken on a digital camera, there are several tips beginners can try. These tips do translate to regular film photography, as well.

See the shot

This is a very important technique for black and white digital photography and even color. It’s important to really pay attention to what the camera sees and shows before snapping the shot. In black and white digital photography, the monitor will likely switch over to black and white mode, which makes this even easier. Practice paying attention to the images as they are presented and make sure the image presented is the one you want before you shoot. If you learn to rely on the monitor or the view finder, you’ll know when more light is needed, when subjects need to be moved or even when it’s best if you move yourself.

Contrast is everything

Since black and white digital photography doesn’t rely on color to tell the story, the contrast of shades will need to be relied upon. This is one of the most important black and white shooting tips to learn. It is important to make sure subjects stand out even more so in black and white than in color. While a dark blue shirt might look awesome against a dark green setting in color, it will likely get lost in the shuffle in black and white.

Play with lighting

While that dark shirt and dark background can present problems in contrast, lighting can help fix the issue. The best way to master lighting for this type of digital photography is to play around and be willing to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. Try using the black and white settings in all kinds of situations to really master what needs to be done under different circumstances to effectively light up a shot.

Learning to master the black and white setting on a digital camera can be a fun pursuit. Offering drama and impact, black and white imaging is a different way to record the world around you. For more tips on digital photography, Digital Camera Wiz.com is the site to visit. Source : http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Idan_Lavi

Retouching And Improving Your Photographs - Photoshop Makes It Possible By David Peters

Digital imaging and more specifically Adobe Photoshop as well as other image editing software have revolutionized photography. The advances in digital image manipulation now allow for unlimited possibilities in the area of improving photographs through retouching and restoration.

What types of improvements are possible by retouching photographs with Photoshop?

Blemishes

Embarrassing skin blemishes like acne or scars can easily be removed using the retouching tools available in Adobe Photoshop. You can learn these Photoshop techniques in minutes.

Damage to Prints

The benefits of digital imaging for restoring old damaged or worn out photographs are one of the best reasons to learn Photoshop. Once an old photograph is scanned it can be retouched to remove tears in the paper or water marks. You can also restore colors that have faded over time. Once you have retouched your image and it is like new again it will last forward because digital images do not deteriorate over time like prints.

Closed Eyes

This is one of the most common problems with group photographs. You finally got the entire family together for a family photograph including Aunt Martha only to find that she closed her eyes. Closed eyes are not a problem for a skilled user of Photoshop. You can easily open her eyes and no one will ever know.

Removing unwanted Subjects

Not only can you remove blemishes in Adobe Photoshop but another common use of Photoshop’s retouching capabilities involves removing unwanted people or objects. Old boyfriends can be forever removed from photographs quickly and easily if you know what you are doing.

Retouching photographs has never been easier than it is today. Photoshop and other photographic editing software applications have made it a breeze to open closes eyes, remove blemishes and scars, change colors, restore old damaged photographs and remove unwanted objects.

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The Big Six Filters for Photography

One - The Polarizer

This is so obvious I shouldn't need to get into "why" you need it, but I'm me, and that means I'm going to talk about it anyway. Any time light moves from air to a transparent substance, some of the light doesn't penetrate into the transparent substance and is reflected away. Whether the light hits water on a lake, the natural oil on human skin, clear cellulose and wax on plant leaves and flowers, lacquer on a car or a guitar, or glass on a building, there are reflections. The reflections are "white light"; they "fill in" the color and reduce saturation. They reduce the detail visible under the clear substance. The blue of the sky is also polarized, and a polarizer can deepen the blue, and keep it from blowing out and rendering your sky a cloudless white or a drab gray.

You can fight this with post processing, but you won't win. When you boost saturation, you fix the things that were "robbed" of contrast, but you also oversaturate the things that weren't suffering from contrast robbing reflections. And you can't replace the lost detail.

Two - The 80A "Color Balancing"

Most cameras have sensors that are "daylight balanced". They have nice, balanced red, green, and blue channel responses in neutral colored scenes lit by daylight. They achieve their incandescent white balance by amplifying the blue channel over two full stops relative to the red channel. That adds a great deal of noise to the blue channel, so you see some pretty ugly shadows. It also makes it very easy to blow the red channel, especially when shooting red dominated subjects (human skin, cosmetics, and fall colors near dusk and dawn when the light is warm).

Using an 80A will often let you get an interior architecture image in a single shot that would have taken multiple shots and HDR to do otherwise. It also makes it much easier to shoot incandescent or candlelit scenes without blowing the red channel.

Three - The Neodymium Enhancing

Sensor manufacturers (like film manufacturers before them) spend a lot of effort trying to get the red, green, and blue filters in the camera to do a tolerable job of seeing colors the same way a human eye sees them. Normally, this is a "good thing", it reduces an annoying phenomena we techno-geeks call a "failure in observer metamerism", where colors that look identical to one "observer" (a human) look different to another observer (a camera, for example). The neodymium filter disrupts the nice "mimic the eye" characteristics of a sensor, and causes large-scale failures of observer metamerism. Neodymium (sometimes called "didymium") does it in a way that is very pleasing in a landscape or fall color photograph: browns that would be identical in the picture (or to the eye) suddenly separate, with one turning red, another going yellow.

Again, this cannot be done in post processing, because without the filter, the camera sees all those browns as identical in hue. There's no way Photoshop can know to turn one brown into red, while another, apparently identical brown should be colored yellow, and a third identical brown should be left as "brown". Same thing happens in other colors, seemingly identical oranges separate into deeper oranges, reds, ambers, etc.

Four - The "Soft Focus"

Using a Gaussian blur can only make a good-looking soft focus effect on things that are not overexposed. For my own soft focus work (and the majority that I see from other photographers) the "prettiest" soft focusing is the glow surrounding blown highlights: candle flames, sparkling dew on flowers, the catch-lights in a woman's eyes, the glint of jewelry. You can't get that right in PhotoShop.

A soft focus filter in front of the lens gives you a glow with size and density that are proportional to how "blown" the blown area really is. So the glow around candles, specular reflections, water drops, etc varies with the brightness and the size of the blown area. And the transition from blown to not-blown on skin is much more natural with a filter or lens than with a PS blur. You can get this same effect with the "soft focus" lenses offered by Nikon, Canon, and Sony, but that's an expensive route taken only by serious soft focus aficionados. The Tiffen soft focus or "center spot" (a personal favorite) or Zeiss Softar are much less expensive than a soft focus lens, and you can use them at a variety of focal lenths.

Five - The Neutral Density

Many people like the look of a stream, waterfall, fountain, or brook with the water blurred into a soft "cotton candy" substance, flowing over rocks and plants. To do this, you have to shoot with a long exposure (anywhere from a second or two to a minute or two). In daylight, there's just too much light to do that, even at ISO 100 and f22, the longest exposure you can use is 1/50 sec. The "neutral density" lets you shoot much longer exposures. You can also use this technique to "blur away" all the moving people and vehicles in a street or architectural scene. Architectural photographers have been doing this for decades.

One "digital way" to emulate the neutral density long exposure technique is to shoot a whole bunch of those 1/50 sec exposures, then blend them together so that they "average out" to a much longer exposure. But that means taking 20 shots just to get one view of a waterfall. Recompose, and that's another 20 shots. It gets boring after a while...

Six - The "Split Grad"

OK, the big "buzz" these days is HDR, "High Dynamic Range" techniques of taking multiple exposures, and combining ones that get the highlights right with others that get the shadow detail. But light that "scatters" in a lens (our old enemy "veiling flare") can cause the highlights of a sunset to "fill in" and destroy the shadow details. The filter that is part clear and part neutral density can "hold back" the highlights so that they can't damage our shadows.

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