Photography Bay

Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips

Lightroom Tip: How to Add Images to a Collection on Import

By

Lightroom-Tip-Collections-on-Import

Collections are a powerful organizing tool inside of Adobe Lightroom, which lets you group photos together that may or may not be found in the same folder of your overall file organization. You can create Collections for portraits, landscapes, specific individuals and infinite other selection criteria.

One of the newer features in Lightroom is that you now have the ability to add images to a Collection during import. It is a simple and straightforward process that might save you quite a bit of time in organization that you would otherwise do later. [Read more…]

 

Watch Thomas Heaton Pick His Shots in Iceland with a Midnight Sun

By

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkdLmrQzhsc&w=700&showinfo=0&rel=0]

In this video, photographer Thomas Heaton travels around Iceland looking for just the right shot at a variety of locations. One of the unique aspects of Heaton’s video is that you feel like you are walking through the process with him as he tries to find just the right shot in just the right location.

You hear him say throughout the video that it’s worth the time to walk around and see what is there rather than just arrive and start shooting. Of course, the slow fading light in Iceland helps with that process too. As he points out, you might have 10 minutes to set up and get a sunset show in England (or the US) but Iceland gives you three hours of similar sunset light so you can wait for just the right moment.

Clocking in at over 16 minutes, it is longer than most YouTube tutorial videos; however, it is well shot and edited for those interested in the photographic process.

[via Reddit]

Need Some Pointers for Shooting Fireworks This Weekend?

By

Camera Settings for Shooting Fireworks

There are plenty of creative ways to shoot fireworks but if you’ve never got good shots before, I’ve got some good pointers to help you get it right this year. I wrote a post a couple years ago with some basic settings for shooting fireworks.

Check it out here: Camera Settings for Shooting Fireworks

Hope this helps you get some great shots this weekend during your Fourth of July celebration…

Common After Effects Problems and Mistakes

By

After Effects Startup Splash

After Effects is a powerful video compositing, effects and motion graphics program that’s part of Adobe Creative Cloud. The problem for those coming from a video editing application like Final Cut or Premiere Pro is that the learning curve is steep.

Once you’ve spent some time in the program, you learn some of its nuances and start wrapping your mind around the different workflow that it presents. Then, you change a setting or apply an effect and nothing works the way you expect it to. [Read more…]

What is Lens Flare and How Can You Avoid It?

By

Lens flare commonly occurs when shooting in the general direction bright light sources, whether they are a part of the image or not. The bright light creates internal reflections and scattering of light inside the lens, which results in artifacts or haze in the final image. A common scenario for producing lens flare is shooting into the sun.

In the above video, Karl Taylor shows us examples of lens flare and how to use a lens hood to avoid it. The lens hood serves the dual purpose of protecting the end of the lens in the field.

How to Remove Warping from Warp Stabilizer

By

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KALsx-HDJjE&w=700]

Warp Stabilizer is a powerful tool inside Adobe’s Premiere Pro and After Effects. However, it is not perfect.

Some shots with moving subjects (in addition to camera movement) can add a warble to the image, which creates an ugly jello effect on elements within the shot. The key to getting rid of the additional warbling is to remove tracking data from moving objects within the frame and only using static objects for tracking.

The video above from Cal Thomson shows you how to move from Premiere Pro to After Effects to remove non-essential tracking data. It’s a simple process even though it can be a rather long and mundane task.

Advanced Sharpening Technique Using Photoshop & Topaz Denoise

By

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2aln2dLKdw&w=700]

Here’s a new sharpening technique that I had not seen before but works very well, particularly with low light images. It uses a combination of Photoshop with Unsharp Mask, Topaz DeNoise and then back to Photoshop for another pass with Smart Sharpen before using blend modes to apply the sharpened layer with the original color layer.

There are several examples of the technique in the video walk-through above.

[via Topaz Labs]