“Do I need to buy both Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS4?” Digital photographers ask me this question whenever I give lectures or lead workshops on either program. It’s a good question and one that deserves more than just a simple yes or no answer.
Report: Evaluation Meeting 13th Jan.2010
At least 50 people turned up for our first meeting of the year … it was great to see old friends, and to meet new ones! Several folk have applied and paid for membership – we welcome you all and hope you will enjoy being part of this vibrant group of photographers! Susan and Harry are back here again from France, and Nicole is back after her ‘Artist in Residence’ sojourn in Paris. Bernard, as our new Chairman, started off with a number of notices, and Paddy and Irmel informed us of projected plans for outings and audio-visual workshops. A number of prints came up for Evaluation – Nicole and Ken Woods doing the honours. There were many digital images submitted -the quality of work was excellent, and we hope to see this standard following through into this new year. Members seem to be experimenting more and gaining good results – keep it up!
After tea Steve Crane gave a short talk on two aspects of Photoshop – changing digital images into Black and White; and changing a particular part of a B&W image into colour. Links to these techniques can be found here.
Details of the outings on 23rd January (US ‘Jool’) and 30th January (Full Moon) will be sent to members by e-mail.
Next month’s set subject is ‘Candy/Sweets’ – give it a try – you’ll be amazed at how creative you can be!
Evaluation Meeting Wed. 13th Jan.2010
Prompt start at 7.30pm. Digital images must be sent to helderbergphoto+entries@gmail.com before 6pm on Tuesday 12th (today).
Prints should be brought in time for them to be hung.
A committee member will gladly receive your yearly subs of R200. Special rates for country members and students (R100 per person)
See you there!
60 Second Post-Processing Technique
The technique outlined here really just applies to a first round of processing — this might be acceptable for posting to Flickr, but a fine art print would require much more time and effort on your part. Also, I’m not talking about doing black and white conversions, crazy artistic interpretations, creative cropping, etc. We just want to make the photo look more natural at this point.
60 seconds may sound fast to some people, but it may sound like an eternity to others. Sure, it’s way too short for print preparation and it’s way too long for working through hundreds of stock submissions that might have basically the same white balance, exposure, and/or subject matter. But this method is intended to use your time effectively while giving each photo individual attention.
The steps below are for Lightroom or ACR users working with raw digital files.
10 Little Known Facts from the World of Photography
The word “Photography” was coined in 1839 by British mathematician and astronomer Sir John Frederick William Herschel (son of Sir Frederick William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus). Hershel also coined the terms “negative” and “positive” as they apply to Photography.
50 MUST-READ PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS
Change to image submission rules
It has been decided to increase the file size permitted for images being submitted to competition and evaluation evenings. The previous limit of 350KB has been increased to 500KB per image. Note however that there will no longer be any leeway allowed and submitted images over 500KB in size will be rejected.
As always, refer to the How To section of this site for more information on resizing and submitting your images, as well as other helpful information. Please read these pages again to be sure you are familiar with all the rules. So far two people have submitted images for the January evaluation. All the images submitted were in excess of even the new file size limit and one of the submissions was made to the wrong address.
Lightroom: What is it and When Should You Consider it?
There have been questions posted as comments recently asking about the role of Lightroom in a photographer’s workflow. Many posters who are not currently using Lightroom aren’t sure whether Lightroom it is an alternative to Photoshop or where it fits if you have Photoshop too. I thought it was a good time to look at where Lightroom fits in the Adobe line up and to explain why Lightroom isn’t a Photoshop alternative.
How to Use Textures to Enhance Your Photographs
Images with textures applied are not something we’ve seen much of in club competitions and I submitted this image Ancient Eyes in November as an experiment to see how it would be received. I was surprised at how well it fared, getting the highest score and winning the open section.
Given this interest I thought that more of you might like to try adding textures to your photographs and have found this Digital Photography School article in which Patrick Dean from NeutralDay.com explores how to use textures to enhance an image.
Tips on Early Morning Photography
Tips on Early Morning Photography
A Digital Photography School guest post by Simon Davidson who is from Stellenbosch. Nice to see local people featuring on prominent blogs. The photograph above comes from Simon’s own web site at www.simondavo.com.
As all photographers know, there are two times of day when the light is most ideal for capturing breathtaking images, sunrise and sunset. The reason being is because at these times the angle between the sun and the earth’s surface is small which allows for the sunlight to flow over the landscape in a way that intensifies the colours of nature and also creates spectacular shadows. All in all, it is a photographers dream land!
Helderberg Photographic Society 