A Brief Summary of Raw Ideas
A brief overview of various aspects of raw file implementations.
Calculating the Angle of View: When Theory Meets Practice
A brief look at how the theoretical calculations for angle of view differs from how a real lens will actually preform.
Sharpening and Noise Reduction in Lightroom
A methodical approach to optimizing noise reduction and sharpening can go a long way to creating better baseline defaults for use in Lightroom and CameraRAW.
Building a Hyperbolic Resolution Wedge in Illustrator
In another article I described and made available my camera acclimation target. In the process of building that I ended up having to sit down and build from scratch what I’ve frequently seen described as a hyperbolic resolution test wedge. If you’ve ever used an ISO 12233 resolution chart, or looked at the resolution charts […]
The Lightroom Catalog and Develop History States
An in depth exploration of the internal structure of Lightroom’s catalog file focusing on the storage of develop settings and history states.
Performance Aspects of Exporting Video with Premiere Pro CS6
The question has come up a couple of times in my article on enabling CUDA support in Premiere Pro regarding why exports still take so long even with the GPU enabled. The reality is that while Premiere Pro does use the GPU for rendering exports, the process is slightly different and the results can be dominated […]
Reflex Lenses and Doughnut Bokeh
Reflex lenses, or more properly catadioptric lenses, have long posed photographers with the possibility of a long telephoto lens at a fraction of the cost of the standard refractive lenses. A 500mm f/8 reflex lens for $200 or less compared to the $10,000 for a 500mm f/4 refractive lens. They’re simpler, manual focus, no iris, […]
The Hand Holding Rule of Thumb for Digital Cameras
The hand holding rule worked fine for film. However, digital cameras with new formats and much higher resolving sensors demand rethinking that old go to.
DIY Autofocus Calibration Target
As much as I swore off AF testing and calibrating, I’m back at it again. This time I’ve decided to forgo the sheet paper targets and build a target similar to the Lens Align. Now obviously, if you don’t want to spend the time building a target, a Lens Align is, to my knowledge, the […]
Background Brightness: Not black or white, but dark or light.
When it comes to background papers, it’s not whether it’s black or white that matters but how you light it relative to the subject. A black paper can be painted white, and a white paper can be shadowed into blackness with only light.