The Zone System was invented by legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams. He hit upon the idea of splitting the full range of tones in a black and white image into eleven distinct brightness zones, which he then went on to define very carefully. I’m paraphrasing this from the Wikipedia entry: Ansel Adams’ approach was two-fold….
Export sharpening is a setting that’s often overlooked when you generate images for online or on-screen viewing, but it makes a big difference to how sharp your pictures look. Every time you resample an image, you introduce a degree of blur because the software has to interpolate new pixel values – and this applies when…
If you use Aperture or Lightroom, it’s so easy to export pictures at specific sizes for web use or emailing that you probably don’t give the settings a second thought. But in order to reduce your pictures to the required size, your software has to carry out a resampling process that can leave fine details…
Analog Efex Pro is one of the plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection. It comes with a selection of preset camera and film effects to reproduce the look of traditional analog photography, but I’ve been spending some time trying them out and using the Analog Efex Pro Camera Kit (see part 2 of this Analog…
Analog Efex Pro is part of the DxO Nik Collection, the set of plug-ins for Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom Classic that DxO took over from Google. I rate this as the best set of plug-ins ever made, and practically a must-have for digital image-editing fans. It’s a tool for simulating the look of old films…
Many photographers are worried that the moment they post their photographs online they’ll be copied and passed off as someone else’s, or used by others without the photographer’s knowledge and permission. I’m sure that does happen, but I also see things from a slightly different perspective. I work on a magazine where we find lots…
Lightroom doesn’t directly edit your original photos, so even though your pictures look different in Lightroom when you edit them, these adjustments exist only within Lightroom. If you want to send an edited version to someone else or for use on a website, for example, you need to ‘Export’ a new version of the picture…
Sometimes your shots don’t quite have the lighting you wanted, even when you had the time to set up the lighting carefully, such as when you’re shooting a still life, for example. The scene looked OK when you assembled it and pressed the shutter button, but later on you look at it more carefully on…
Levels are one of the most basic image adjustments in any image-editor. They’re your first chance to act on the information you get from the image histogram and use adjustments to maximise the tonal range of your picture. In fact, although the Levels dialog may not offer the advanced image control of curves or other…
Split toning is a more advanced variation on the old technique of toning. It applies a different coloured tone to the shadows and the highlights in the picture, producing an interesting graded colour effect. It’s often used to give images a subtle, ‘fine art’ look, but it’s not always easy to get right. Split toning…