Digital Darkroom

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Digital DarkroomPortraiture
Backgrounds & Montages
Create A Unique, Custom Image For Your Portrait Clients
Woody Walters  |  Apr 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, Woody Walters, All Rights Reserved

Ansel Adams once told me that it is the background that makes or breaks the image. The background is what will tie all the key elements of a photograph together. I learned very early in my career that it's true whether you're shooting large format landscapes or even if you're shooting digital senior...

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Digital Darkroom
Home-Grown Special Effects; Edges And Borders
Howard Millard  |  Mar 01, 2005

Sometimes all it takes to lift your photo from the ordinary to the extraordinary is a striking edge or border. Would a soft-edged vignette or a unique pattern border take your image to the next level of dramatic impact? While there are myriad software programs and plug-ins designed to add special effect edges, borders and frames, you probably already have quite an array of...

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Digital Darkroom
Getting It Right; Using Hue And Saturation To Correct Skin Tones
Jon Canfield  |  Mar 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, Jon Canfield, All Rights Reserved

Accurate skin tones can be one of the most vexing problems facing the digital portrait photographer. The human eye sees skin tones as memory colors--we know what to expect, and when we see something different, our brain registers the fact, making everything else in the image seem off color. The reverse is also...

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Digital Darkroom
F/8 And Be There… Or Not Film + Digital = Photograph
Joe Farace  |  Mar 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, Joe Farace, All Rights Reserved

The biggest challenge when photographing cars at auto shows--indoors or out--is dealing with cluttered backgrounds. In the past I've used low angles, high angles and postproduction techniques to blur the setting and add some zoom-zoom. That approach shifted my focus from the subject to its surroundings...

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Digital Darkroom
Sky Swapping Your Way To A Beautiful Landscape
How To Mix And Match Skies To Banish The Blah-Sky Syndrome
Jeff Wignall  |  Mar 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, Jeff Wignall, All Rights Reserved

I'd be a rich man if I had a buck for every time I've stumbled upon a great landscape scene only to mutter to myself (and anyone else within earshot), "What a horrible sky." There's something entirely deflating about finding an interesting foreground scene with a sky the color of aged...

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Digital Darkroom
Blur Your Backgrounds For Better Candid Portraits
George Schaub  |  Mar 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, George Schaub, All Rights Reserved

Software Used: Photoshop Elements 2

Time: 3 Minutes

Degree Of Difficulty: Moderate

When you make candid portraits you don't always have the time or the disposition to use aperture settings for a shallow depth of field (where the subject...

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Digital Darkroom
The Digital Darkroom
Contrast Control Masking; (Using Adobe’s Photoshop)
Darryl C. Nicholas  |  Mar 01, 2005

Years ago in the old-fashioned wet darkrooms we used to constantly fight the problem of originals that were too high in contrast to print well onto paper. Typically, slides and other chromes simply gave us fits. At that time, if you wanted to print slides onto Cibachrome (later called Ilfochrome), you just about had to perform some sort of contrast control masking in order to have...

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Digital Darkroom
Digital In Black And White
The Status Of Ink Jet B&W Printing In 2005
David B. Brooks  |  Feb 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, David B. Brooks, All Rights Reserved

The December 2001 issue of Shutterbug I reported on my trials and experiments with different methods of printing black and white photographs with ink jet printers. Today the challenge to a photographer using a digital darkroom who wants to do black and white prints remains similar to what it was three years ago.

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Digital Darkroom
Shoot Like You're In A Pro Studio By... Making Your Own Digital Backdrops
Howard Millard  |  Jan 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, Howard Millard, All Rights Reserved

In the real world, as often as not, there'll be a problem with your background. In the precise spot where the light is right on your subject, the background might be too light, too dark, too cluttered, or you might even see the proverbial telephone pole sprouting from your subject's head. You needn't...

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Digital Darkroom
Let It Snow, Let It Snow!; Digitally, That Is
Howard Millard  |  Jan 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, Howard Millard, All Rights Reserved

Did you miss photographing the last heavy snow? Or perhaps you are not too fond of shooting outdoors in cold weather. Now you need a photo with snow falling. Don't despair. It's rather easy to add snow digitally to any photo, color or black and white, with programs like Adobe Photoshop (CS and earlier)...

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Digital Darkroom
Using Flat-Bed Scanners For Film; Can They Replace Dedicated Film Scanners?
Paul Mozell  |  Jan 01, 2005

All Photos © 2004, Paul Mozell, All Rights Reserved

Film is not dead especially for photographers who began shooting before the sun rose on the digital age. Unlike my nostalgic collection of worn, long-playing record albums that I seldom play, the thousands of transparencies and negatives in my files still have value as commercial, fine art, or personal images. Until...

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Digital Darkroom
Output Options; Hitting The Big Screen
Jon Canfield  |  Jan 01, 2005

One of the most popular software areas recently has been DVD slide show creation programs. With the increased number of DVD writers it's becoming easier than ever to put your images on DVD for playback on computers and televisions. This is especially popular for sharing images with family members who may not have a computer or just don't want to deal with e-mailing...

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Digital Darkroom
How To Make A Digital Montage; Combining Images To Create New Visions
Ellen Anon  |  Dec 01, 2004

All Photos © 2004, Ellen Anon, All Rights Reserved

It has long been my goal to create photographic images that capture not only what I saw, but what I felt at the moment I made the picture. It was at a workshop with Freeman Patterson and Andre Gallant that my creative spirit truly began to soar. Patterson and Gallant are two extraordinarily talented photographers...

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Digital Darkroom
Digital Diary; Manic Monday Or How I Learned To Stop Worring And Love Noise
Joe Farace  |  Dec 01, 2004

Photos © 2004, Joe Farace, All Rights Reserved

"C'mon Honey, let's go make some noise."--The Bangles

Dear Diary: All digital cameras add noise to images. Like film grain, it's worse at high ISOs and is more noticeable in areas of uniform color, such as skies and shadows. Since noise can be objectionable...

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Digital Darkroom
Output Options; Improving Your Prints And Saving Your Sanity
Jon Canfield  |  Dec 01, 2004

Based on e-mails I've received from the first Output Options column (ColorPlus: Affordable And Easy Color Management, September/October eDigitalPhoto), many of you are struggling with the quality of prints--even after calibrating your monitor. So, just in time for the holiday season and the increase in family photos that many people have, I'd like to talk about...

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