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Showing posts from December, 2014

Put a polarizer on the front of your lens

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You've experienced the enhanced view of the world about you when you pop on your good quality sunglasses on brighter days. The extra contrast, definition, and colour resolution that keeps everything you see looking clear and three dimensional. The effect that a polarizing filter adds to your photos is one that isn't easily, if at all, achievable using post processing software. Because what your polarizer is doing for you is filtering out the effect of light reflecting back from the surfaces it hits. In turn you get more saturated colours and if required, bluer skies. I'm using a Circular Polarizing Filter (CPL) on my DSLR for these examples. In this example above, the sun is behind me and slightly to my right. Without making any colour tweaks to my files this is what I got using the same settings. The only difference is that I overexposed by 2 stops for the polarized shot to take into account the darkness of my filter. Most of the dark reflections in the water hav

Take control converting your photos to black and white

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There are a few ways to convert your colour photos to black and white in Photoshop. For some people, the simplest thing to do is to use the Convert to Grayscale drop down menu. The results are often quite flat and dull looking. I used the Convert to Grayscale function for the image above left. I have also used levels to increase the contrast and mid tones in an attempt to make the end result more appealing to look at. If you're happy with this image then no need to go further. In the image on the right, I used a Black and white adjustment layer to do the conversion. Here it's shown side by side with the colour image for reference.  Let's take another closer look at the results from the 2 methods I've mentioned for converting colour images to black and white. In this closer view you can clearly see that I have been able to control the different colour tones of the image while making the conversion resulting in more detail in the shadow areas and clear