Global HSL adjustments aren’t very useful. If you shift the global hue of an image it quickly looks wrong. The real strength of the HSL system is the way it lets you separate and edit individual colors.
What is the best way to organise your images in cataloguing software? You can use folders, albums, keywords, ratings, color labels, flags… but you should use just what you need. You don’t have to use them ALL.
If you are anything like me and you don’t cull your images, you risk drowning in a sea of duplicates, RAW+JPEG pairs, half-finished experiments, virtual copies and images that were probably not worth shooting but you never got rid of. It’s only when you get rid of all the images that AREN’T contributing anything that you can really start to work on those that ARE.
Culling your photos after a shoot is the only way isolate your best shots and get rid of the clutter. But does culling anxiety get in the way? If you can’t bring yourself to delete any photo, JUST IN CASE, here’s what you can do about it.
Non-destructive editing sounds like a no-brainer. This is where your software stores your edits as processing instructions which can be updated, changed or removed at any time. But is it really that easy?
Masking complex outlines can be a slow and fiddly business, but there are tools to help, and once you’ve got your mask, there’s a lot you can do with it.
Noise is the digital equivalent of grain in film. It’s random electrical signals captured by the photosites on the camera sensor, and usually this background noise level is so low compared to the brightness of the captured picture itself that you just don’t notice it.
White balance is an adjustment to correct and neutralise colors captured with different light sources. The color of light can vary considerably depending on the time of day and whether you’re shooting in natural light or under artificial light.
Video jargon can quickly get complicated. But the basics of video are comparatively simple and easily learned, and the rest can follow from that.
Dynamic range is the camera sensor’s ability to capture detail in very bright and very dark parts of a scene. Cameras (or sensors) with a low dynamic range record dark shadows as a solid black or bright highlights as a featureless white.