Digital Darkroom

It seems to me that if a photo enthusiast spends $1000 for a digital camera it is a serious investment that carries an expectation of getting high-quality photographic print results. However, all digital cameras, even the more expensive digital SLRs, come out of the box set to the maker's default mode to save images in JPEG format. This, however, only reproduces a fraction...

"There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept." --Ansel Adams

It could be that the sainted Adams meant a fuzzy image of a brilliant concept, but we'll never know. This month's column looks at using imaging software to blur an image and was inspired by a letter from reader Carol Baker. As a movie buff you gotta know...

Stymied by all the buzz about megapixels, dpis, ppis, and what-have-you? Should you use a digital camera? Or shoot film? And which is really better? Well, yes, it's a veritable jungle of competing facts, pseudo-facts, and ideologies out there. Then there is the obsolescence factor. As someone who bought a Nikon F Photomic in 1968, a Linhof 4x5 in '70 and proceeded to...

Mysterious, evocative, otherworldly--these are all terms that describe the powerful emotional and visual responses to black and white infrared (IR) photography. For landscapes, this approach yields striking, contrasty images where healthy green foliage, which strongly reflects IR radiation, appears to glow in snowy white tones, while blue skies and water darken dramatically.

As more and more images are made digitally, whether directly from a camera or via scans, photographers, educators, and lecturers of all sorts are creating and displaying digital slide shows using a host of different projectors. It's even becoming difficult to find slide projectors at some venues. Yet, many digital photographers are horrified the first time they project their...

There are many different ways to make selections, each making life easier depending on the image and areas you want to define. Here's how I make selections that involve a lot of straight lines:

This picture, taken indoors looking out through large windows is a prime example of backlighting causing underexposure (#1). The fix for it is to select the well-lit outdoor...

In the old days we all used to keep tons of different colored matte board in stock to matte our photos. Or, we used the guy down the street who charged us plenty for those fancy mattes that we loved so much. Well, today you can do it all in Adobe's Photoshop. This article will give you the basics of creating an oval double matte in Photoshop.

...