Gimp 2.8 – the latest version of the popular, free and open source software that also serves as an alternative to Photoshop has come a long way since its earliest days. The interface, the tools and the user experience have evolved to come close to the user’s expectations. This post takes a look at what its latest version has to offer.
For quite a few years now, high dynamic range photography, or simply HDR, has been an important trend in photography as it allows the photographer to create an image beyond the limits of the camera’s sensor in order to recover lost details in shadows and in highlights. This post explains how to create an HDR image from a single Raw file.
Today’s article is aimed at the newcomers amongst you, both to Lightstalking and to photography itself. Today we are going to take a look at getting to know your DSLR, understanding what some of those knobs, buttons and dials do, and which ones you need to master first to get to grips with your new tool.
Iphones, Android, Tablets – the rise of the smart device has been both surprising and seemingly unstoppable, not least in the field of photography. They are potentially fantastic devices to aid photographers in their day to day shooting and beyond. Today we will look at potential uses of smart devices to aid you in your photography.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing or so the saying goes. Of course, generally in photographic circles, a little knowledge is not so much dangerous as potentially embarrassing. One way to combat this is to arm yourself with some entirely useless, but undeniably interesting facts about our chosen pastime. Do take a look at these conversation enhancing tidbits.
To be a real photographer you can only shoot in manual modes. It is of course a daft statement, a good photographer will use whatever modes he needs to get the shot efficiently and creatively. However, the original comment is often bandied around to suggest it is not possible to do creative photography in automatic modes, today we are going to debunk that myth.
These days, we often hear about the benefits of full frame cameras over APS-C, we are told about four thirds sensors and micro four thirds sensors but what does all this mean to us in relation to the way we take pictures. The biggest difference is in what we call the crop factor of the sensor and to begin to understand that we are going to go back in time a little to the days of film. Crop factor determines the 35mm equivalent focal length of the lens which in turn affects the field of view of the lens.
When it comes to image management programs, the undisputed kings are of course Lightroom and Aperture. Both of these programs have been around for some years and are slick, efficient and fast. They do however cost money. There is however an extremely powerful open source image management program available to Linux and Mac OSX users, Darktable.
Adobe’s Lightroom is an incredibly powerful tool incorporating perhaps 80-90% of all the tools that we photographers generally need. There are however times, when we need to do some post production work in Photoshop, perhaps working in layers, maybe for the content aware move tool, whatever the reason, we need to be able to move […]
Over the last few years, RAW files have become the norm in digital photography, giving the photographer a significant increase of the control of their images as well as improved image quality. This wasn’t always the case, in the early days of digital photography, which in fact was only the first few years of the new millennium, RAWs were unwieldy, large files that were difficult to post process.
