Understanding Composition | Blender Guru Discover How To: Why composition is one of the most important things you’ll learn The most common mistake artists make Simple rules to create more engaging artwork Great video on how composition works. Made for to CGI but is equally applicable to photography. http://youtu.be/O8i7OKbWmRM As a fun counterpoint, here’s an article about why the golden ratio is bullshit.
Fujifilm X100S My New walkabout camera I used to try to bring my Canon 5D Mark II with me wherever I went. But with the best walkabout lens, the old 24–70 f2.8L mounted on the camera; it became a pain just to carry the beast around. Only the glass weights 1.1 kilos, and with a battery grip with dual batteries, it’s a complete monster. I still use it because of the great optics and the quality when shooting with it, but I no longer use it for street photography. ...
JPEGMini What if you could reduce the size of all the jpeg pictures on your hard disk? Do you have problems sending full resolution jpeg images via email because of size restraints? Is your iPhoto library too large? Let’s face it; pictures is one of the things that sucks up space on your drives. It’s even more annoying if you are using a newer Mac with an SSD disk where cost is premium. Upload speed when sending emails or uploading images to the web can be slow and annoying. An application called JPEGMini claims to help you with reducing your pictures with up to five times while retaining all the quality. I got a bit curious if the team at JPEGMini and their patented image compressor really could reduce large JPEG photos without losing quality. I’ve tried the application before when I wrote my article about comparing the best jpeg compressor applications for web use. But even though JPEGMini is geared more towards large megapixel pictures, not small images usually used on web pages, my test shows that it stacks up well against the competition even on more modest photographs. Many web pages now use pictures optimized for high-resolution images like for Retina display and high-resolution mobile devices, so the use of an image compressor is getting even more useful for web use. But how well does JPEGMini retain quality on megapixel images in JPEG format? How much do you lose in quality by using compressing? ...
Trying to display color corrected images on an iPad A couple of weeks ago i bought the Spyder4Elite so I could color calibrate my Retina MacBook Pro 15“ and my Asus PA246 24” monitor. And the calibration works really well. There is no way of color calibrate your iPad, because Apple has not given developers the ability to create or change the calibration of the screen. But Datacolor, the makers of the Spyder4 line of calibrators has solved the problem by making an app that connects to your Mac via your network and use the calibrator to calibrate their app called SpyderGallery. This enables you to see calibrated versions of your pictures inside the viewer. But the calibrated data only works in the SpyderGallery app. ...
MacBook Pro 15" Retina Mid2014 Calibrated compared to sRGB and Adobe RGB 1998 A couple of days ago I got my new Spyder4 Elite Color Calibrator for color calibrating monitors. After doing a calibration on both on the latest MacBook Pro 15" retina and my factory calibrated Asus PA246, I saved the comparison charts for the two displays to see how they stack up. ...
GeoTagr To be able to tag your DSLR pictures with GPS information is both fun and practical. But to date, most DSLR cameras don’t have GPS built-in or is an expensive hardware add-on option. That includes the Wi-Fi iPad you might own. The last couple of years I’ve used a lot of different solutions to track GPS data while I’m out taking photographs. My first way was to use a Garmin GPS unit and then transfer the information to my Mac, but now, with mobile phones like iPhone and Android, there’s no reason to tug along yet another device. My weapon of choice now is an app for iPhone and iPad called GeoTagr, a universal app for logging GPS tracks while you photograph, and then tag images with location data. For me, the pictures I want to tag are the RAW images that I import into Adobe Lightroom 4. And with this app, it’s straightforward to accomplish. ...
Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor – Made for photographers As a photographer you need to be able to really get the most out of your images, you need a color accurate monitor. You usually have to pay a lot of money to get a good monitor that’s factory calibrated and uses a IPS panel, a panel type that is better at showing correct colors than the more common (and cheaper) TN panels. But there are some reasonably priced monitors. One of them is the Asus PA246Q ProArt monitor. It’s factory calibrated and even ships with a printout of the calibration result from the factory. You can set the monitor to sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998 color space directly on the front controls of the monitor. It’s also has fairly high resolution with 24" size 1920x1200 pixels. ...
Read a newer article on how to do this using an iPhone instead. I just love gadgets. That’s why it’s nice to find that I bought a Garmin eTrex a long time ago. Haven’t used it in years, but then when Apple released the latest version of iLife 09 with the map function in iPhoto I realized that it is very cool to have all the images geo tagged. So I found a program called GPSPhotoLinker, a program that downloads GPS data and pictures and by the date/time on the pictures manages to add longitude and latitude information in the picture info. When you import pictures with this information iPhoto can use that to show it on maps and make it searchable. And when you upload pictures to Flickr, it also uses the location information place your picture on a map. Very cool. ...
If your interested in learning how to color correct images in Photoshop and learn how color management works, this is the book. Photoshop Color Correction by Michael Kieran is an excellent book about all these subjects. It includes an example cd, and he goes through several examples on how to create exceptional looking images without color casts and other problems. He also shows how to set the black and white points of an image, how to make all adjustments using curves and a lot of tricks on how to fix a seemingly impossible image with modified profiles. ...