Photoshop Smart Object Stacking for Noise Reduction
Stacking images to improve the single to noise ratio is a tried and true technique in astrophotography. The typical noise reduction most photographers are used to uses sophisticated algorithms to attempt to smooth noise out without smoothing out fine details in a single frame. Stacking exploits the randomness of noise and the consistency of actual […]
Editing with the Lightroom Import Dialog
If there’s one thing that digital photography has changed, for better or worse, it’s our ability to shoot and to manage much larger numbers of images. Fortunately, the photographic software industry has responded to that need and turned out programs like Lightroom and Aperture that act half as a Digital Image management programs and half […]
Keywording In Lightroom
Though this post is specifically about Lightroom, at least in so far as the details on how to do something are Lightroom specific, much, if not all, of the overall thought process and intent can be applied to any similar software. Before going any farther, I want to spend a moment talking about the point […]
How I manage Lightroom’s Catalog Backups
I don’t usually do the whole computer tips thing, maybe I should do some more of it. The impetus for this post was a friend of mine who had close to 100GB of Lightroom catalog backups—and that was less than a year of weekly backups—sitting on his computer taking up precious space on yet another […]
Adding a Graphic Watermark in Lightroom
Lightroom 4 has two kinds of watermarks, graphical and text. While text watermarks can do the job, they are simplistic and lack the polish and control a graphical watermark offers—even if the graphic is only text. Creation of a graphic watermark and a preset to easily use it, is simple enough, though there are a […]
How do I Enable CUDA in Premier Pro CS6 without a Quadro?
Find out which GPUs Premier Pro can use to speed up rendering, and how to enable the ones that aren’t available by default.
Profiling Photoshop Scratch Disk Performance: Stitching a 45MP Panorama
I’m taking a quick break from the strictly photographic stuff for a moment to look at a computer issue that’s near and dear to our hearts, Photoshop performance. One “optimization” I see trotted out a lot when people ask about Photoshop performance is to move the scratch disk to another drive; worse yet, make a […]
Focus Stacking in Photoshop and Lightroom
Photoshop since CS4 has had focus stacking built in? Who knew? Apparently, not me, that’s for sure. That’s not to say that I didn’t know about focus stacking. I’ve played with the product Helicon Focus, and while I didn’t ultimately find it worth the money based on my needs, it does have some nifty features. […]
Salvaging a Bland Sunset
Not every sunset is going to produce spectacular images, however, with a little care added in post production even a mediocre sunset can turn into something a little better.
Printing and Resolution
There are many rules of thumb for print resolutions and the DPI you should print at, but where do they come from? We’ll take a quick look at the science behind those rules and how to calculate the real requirements for any given situation.