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John Watson is the original founder of Photodoto. If you're interested in what John has been up to, you can browse his personal blog.

Quick photo sharpening tip

Just about every digital photo can use a little bit of sharpening. You should definitely experiment with the sharpening tool in your photo editor of choice (preferably, your editor has unsharp mask). But you don’t want to overdo it or you’ll see sharpening “halos” around objects in your photo: bright and dark lines near areas of high contrast. Here’s a quick and simple tip to reduce halos in photos that have a combination of low and high contrast areas:

  • When you are ready to sharpen your photo (sharpening should be your very last step), flatten all layers.
  • Duplicate the remaining layer.
  • Sharpen the top layer to get the best result possible.
  • Now grab the eraser and simply brush away any problem areas that have been over-sharpened. The bottom, unsharpened layer will show through in those spots. If your photo editor supports it, you can even erase those areas with partial opacity to customize the amount of sharpening.

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Choosing the right white balance setting will change your life!

Well, not really. But it will make your photographs better. I know what you’re thinking. “White balance? Isn’t that technical? Eyes. Glazing. Over.” Don’t worry, it’s really simple to understand, just as easy to adjust, and it will make your photographs better.

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RAW vs. JPG: Correcting under/over-exposure

I was reading a discussion the other day about how shooting in RAW mode saved some under-exposed shots. Accepted wisdom seems to be that correcting under and over exposure is much easier/better with RAW than JPG. Without making any judgments, I decided to try it out and see if it was true.

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New LCD monitor

I finally entered the 21st century and bought an LCD monitor. There’s a lot of debate among photographers about color depth, gamut, and the like with LCD monitors. Most people agree that CRT monitors, properly calibrated, have better, more accurate color and uniform brightness than LCDs. These issues were on my mind as I shopped for an LCD. The trouble with CRTs, of course, is that they are ginormous, power-hungry beasts with color convergence and geometry issues—if you can even find a shop with a decent selection. My old 21″, 72 pound, 1998 vintage Cornerstone CRT was showing it’s age.

I ended up buying a 20.1″ Samsung SyncMaster 204B. It’s a 24-bit panel which means it’s only capable of showing 16.7 million colors (rather than 32-bit “true” color). It’s also true that brightness is not completely uniform across the entire panel and the brightness (and color) shifts slightly as you look at the screen from different positions.

But does it really matter? In my experience, practically, no. When you are seated in front of the monitor, those issues evaporate. If you sit on the floor looking up at your desk or you like to operate your computer from two feet to either side then you might have problems.

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Polling Place Photo Project

Here’s a neat photo project you can get involved in this Tuesday.

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America. — http://pollingplacephotoproject.org/

You’ll probably be there anyway (well, statistically, probably not, but… oh, nevermind), why not bring your camera along?

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Weekend assignment: Three shots

Imagine you were stranded with a camera but only enough film/battery/storage for three shots. Just three. What would you shoot? Would you be more careful with your composition? Pay extra special attention to your shutter speed, focus, and other settings? In short, will you focus more on what you are doing? Consider this an experiment. Let’s find out if being more thoughtful about what and how you are shooting (rather than using the machine-gun method) changes your photography in a significant way.

To participate you must make this vow to yourself: “On Saturday (or Sunday), on my honor, I will shoot only three photographs. And to help keep myself honest, I won’t look at them until the following day.”

 

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REVIEW: Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting

Digital Photography and Lighting book cover“A portrait is a likeness.” Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting by Catherine Jamieson and Sean McCormick (published by Wiley) starts with this simple definition and premise and goes on to declare that “the photographic portrait may well be one of the more important social tools we have.” It’s no secret that I love making portraits—it’s probably my favorite type of photograph. So I was excited to finally find some time to read this book.

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Adobe Lightroom Beta 4

So I’ve been using the Adobe Lightroom beta for a couple of weeks now and I really like it. It’s shaping up to be a very nice application and it’s clear that the designers have put a lot of thought into managing a workflow that involves a lot of photographs.

I was using Raw Shooter Premium (RSP) to process my RAW files but I’ve made the switch completely to Lightroom even though it is still in beta. For one, RSP isn’t being updated anymore. It was acquired by Adobe and they’ve promised RSP users a free upgrade to Lightroom 1.0 when it becomes available. Second, even now it provides a lot more fine-grained control over image adjustment than RSP does. The Develop panel looks like a 747 cockpit. But importantly, every one of those controls does something meaningful and there are no less than two basic adjustment panels you can use instead. Plus you can save as many presets as you like.

It’s certainly slower than RSP. You’ll need a semi-modern machine to run it properly. But if your computer has the horsepower, Lightroom is a lot of fun to use.

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REVIEW: Photostockplus.com

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to try out Photostockplus.com, a unique site that allows photographers to not only sell stock licensing rights to photos (like iStockPhoto) but also to sell event prints at prices you set through a turnkey, customizable e-commerce system. The combination makes it a one-stop solution for selling event photos and also the “left overs” from events that could be used as stock.

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REVIEW: Tokina 12-24mm f/4

I rented this little beauty from Ziplens.com and I’ve been shooting with it all week. It’s a fun lens if a bit of a specialty item. There are a lot of very technical and in-depth reviews of this lens on the internet (here’s a good one that compares all of the wide-angle offerings) so I’ll stick to my impressions rather than delving into charts and graphs.

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