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Scooped by
Thomas Menk
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So as day 50 feels like an achievement I thought I would use a couple of photos I took today and discuss my process, from taking the photo to uploading it on my blog! I am by no means an accomplished street photographer having only done it since I started this blog, but I thought some people may like an insight into the way I work my images. I will start by posting today’s two images as they were SOOC (straight out of camera) with no adjustments at all. So here they are!
As you can see from the movement between the two images I saw my subject from across the street and approached. I snapped the first shot and incorrectly guessed my range, I could have been closer, the 18mm lens does give you a lot of space, I think sometimes the 35mm would yield me more shots as you can stay further away. As I rounded the corner I fired off another shot. Here I will highlight a mistake, I failed to change my shutter speed from my previous shots in my rush to capture this. This is why they are so dark, although I will say that this high speed shutter helped as I was walking and shooting from the hip. I now shoot all my street photography with the X-Pro1 set to manual focus, effectively setting a focus trap, its usually between 3-4ft. I have found this distance gives the greatest results, especially if I can get my f-stop around 5.6. Another bonus of the X-Pro1 great photos from the ISO range enabling faster shutters and better f-stops. After I was a safe distance from the subject I had a look at the spoils on my screen, I knew instantly i had some images for today’s post. At first glance they may not seem great, especially the first one, but i could see something in there I could pull out! This is where the Fuji X-Pro1 file quality really helps. You need the right tools for the job and I always use Capture One Pro, it has its frustrations and yes it does crash a lot but its worth your patience. The process engine is superior to that of Adobe Lightroom in my opinion. I have worked for the last 6/7 years retouching and assisting on the sets of huge advertising campaigns and have never seen or heard of anyone using LR, Capture One would appear to be the industry standard alongside Apple and Eizo products. So from here I get my RAW files into Capture One and begin to see where they want to go and how far I can push and pull them. I would usually process out a file really flat and neutrally balanced and I always disable sharpening too as find it damages the file quality. I will share with you the settings I applied to the shots, I took them in the direction I wanted to go, nothing complicated at all, just exposure adjustment, contrast and desaturation. Keeping it simple seems to work for me! ....
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Scooped by
Thomas Menk
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Finally here's part 1 of this new series of video tutorial on my B&W post production techniques. Part 1 is a general introduction to my B&W workflow applied on the easiest type of subjects: seascapes:) Part 2 will follow within a week and will go into detail how I apply these techniques to architectural subjects. Learn how to create those single spear like single clouds yourself and how to create rich silvery tones. Part 3 is all about complex Selective Gradient Masking techniques applied to complex subjects like automobiles. For now, here\s part 1. Unfortunately the sound isn't too good, I'll be using a new professional microphone for part 2, just so you know!
Note that this part 1 will be available to anyone but part 2 and further will only be available to people who have attended one of my workshops.
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Scooped by
Thomas Menk
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Great news for those of us that use Lightroom or Photoshop – Adobe has just released the final versions of Lightroom 4.2 and Camera RAW 7.2 that add support to a bunch of new cameras, including the Nikon D600 (preliminary suppport). A bunch of Lightroom bugs have been fixed and tethered support has been added to cameras like Nikon D4, D800, D800E and Canon 5D Mark III, 1D X. Many new lens profiles have also been added, including the Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 that we recently reviewed. This is primarily a bugfix and camera support release, which means that the final version of Lightroom 4.2 does not contain any new features compared to the last release candidate.
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Scooped by
Thomas Menk
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For photographers, the latest-generation Apple MacBook Pro notebooks are mighty appealing thanks to their extremely high-resolution displays. All those extra pixels let you see more of your images on-screen at once without discarding the fine detail. Even if you fit your image to the screen, you're still looking at a full five megapixels of detail, more than double that provided by even the best MacBook Pro models from 2011. There's a catch, though. Your software has to support Apple's Retina HiDPI displays to take full advantage of all those extra pixels, and until now a key tool in the photographer's arsenal hasn't done so. Today, that changes, with the announcement by Adobe of an update to Photoshop CS6 that brings support for Retina displays, fulfilling a promise made last August. Retina support in Photoshop puts an end to blurry interpolation of images displayed in Photoshop, not to mention the surrounding buttons and icons that make up the user interface. Instead of a 1,440 x 900 pixel display that's been scaled to fit a 2,880 x 1,800 pixel screen, your images will take advantage of every screen pixel, and the surrounding UI elements will be sharper and easier on the eyes as well.
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Scooped by
Thomas Menk
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Most people who have experimented in Photoshop, especially those who shoot in raw, will have some experience of trying to sharpen an image. Sharpening increases the contrast between neighbouring pixels resulting in the visual effect of a crisper image. It is typically the last processing step that should be performed on an image and is often used to enhance already well-focussed images or in desperation to try and rescue elements of a photograph that weren’t captured in-focus when the shutter was pressed. There are numerous ways to sharpen images in Photoshop, so much so that there is a whole sub-menu of filters dedicated to sharpening, each offering a different amount of control and different levels of success. However, one of the most overlooked filters that can help you achieve better results with more control isn’t found in the Sharpen sub-menu, but is in fact found in the, usefully named, Filter -> Other menu: the high pass filter. I’ll take you through a step-by-step guide to using high pass filter and hopefully show you how simple and effective image sharpening can be.....
The benefit of using this method to sharpen your images is that the sharpening effect is applied in a non-destructive fashion, on a duplicate layer, with a very simple to understand parameter (in the Radius value) that controls the magnitude of the sharpening, as well as giving you the ability to fine tune the final effect using the Opacity slider.
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Scooped by
Thomas Menk
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After the series of articles on color and B&W – and of course the M-Monochrom review – I got a huge number of emails asking about my workflow for B&W conversion. I originally tried to put this post into a conventional text and image format, but gave up shortly after I realized it would be impossible. Instead, have a video! I don’t claim to be any good at video production (forays into this are are another topic for another day), but I think this should give you a good idea of how it all comes together. Excuse the lousy sound, that bit I still haven’t quite gotten figured out yet. I suppose I need some collar mics or something – the equipment buying never ends… -------------------------------------------------------- This workflow works also great with the X-Pro1 :-)
Thx Ming for sharing and I like your great blog!
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