Software How To

There’s no question that do-it-yourself photo books have captured the imagination of photographers, from pros to those who simply want to create a remembrance of a journey or to gather family photos. While just about every imaging software and online picture service, from iPhoto to Shutterfly, offers quick and easy bookmaking, there are some companies dedicated to serving the higher-end market, generally pros but also including every photographer who wants a stylish, custom-designed book. Software to help design the book is a key ingredient, as are options for book materials and binding. And in the end, the quality of the images reproduced, and the facility of ordering and making images ready, is what makes the bookmaking process a creative, fun project that will result in a book that will be cherished for many years.

Do you fully understand the difference between the Saturation and Vibrance tools that are common to most image-editing programs? Many photographers use both when processing images, and while they are quite similar, there are also important differences.

Los Angeles-based boudoir photographer Michael Sasser is here to dispel a myth. While it's certainly not ideal, you can shoot flattering portraits in harsh sunlight.

French photographer Serge Ramelli is known for spectacular landscape images. Yet, despite his mad skills, every so often Mother Nature needs some help because of poor light, pale skies, or weak colors. In this tutorial, Ramelli provides 27 free Photoshop presets, and demonstrates how to use them, so you can turn good photos into great ones.

The question is—does anybody really know what a given image would look like if they shot it on Kodachrome 25, or Fuji Acros, or some obscure color negative film that even in film’s heyday was little used or appreciated? Perhaps the more pertinent question is—how many people have made photographs using film? But film references are what a number of so-called film emulation software programs use for describing presets that can be applied to a digital image. Half academic and half nostalgic, the programs use film brand names to describe saturation, contrast, color nuance, and grain structure variations that are then applied to an image. Perhaps using film names is better than poetic fantasy terms, like “misty blue dawn,” but then again entirely subjective descriptors, rather than supposedly clinical ones used in these software programs, might be just as handy for today’s photography crowd. In any case, I recently tested one such program, DxO’s FilmPack 3.1, to see if it offered up creative variations that could be used as is or as foundation images when interpreting subjects and scenes.

I’ve worked with DxO's OpticsPro imaging software for several years and have watched this program evolve and make great strides as a Raw image converter. What the new DxO OpticsPro 10 version of the software brings to the table is a cadre of new features and improvements. But are these enough to catapult this software into the top tier, or is it still playing catch-up?

Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 13 and Premiere Elements 13. Both have cool new features. If you’re a user of version 12, should you upgrade? The answer is: it all depends. Here’s the advice I give my friends.