Brad Haynes / Blog

I took the plunge and coughed up £200 for Apple’s Aperture application because the combination of iPhoto and Photoshop really just isn’t a useable option for a keen amateur photographer like myself who shoots more than a handful of images at a time.

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I’m really impressed with this website — and it’s free. Basically, it’s a bunch of templates for paper lens hoods. Download the PDF for your lens, print it out, tape and attach.

Creates great images and is better for managing sets of Raw digital images than Photoshop™, but totally lacks a useable user interface. I don’t think I’ve found a more unintuitive piece of software on OS X before, and yes that even include the rather dire Microsoft Office suite of applications.

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I’m not sure how this differs from how most people create digital black and white images, but I’m pretty happy with the results from this method. It’s pretty easy and fast and gives you plenty of flexibility along the way. This method does assume you have photoshop and a colour image. I’m not sure if Photoshop Elements has all the bits needed.

1. Take a look at the red green and blue channels to work out which holds the most and nicest information.
2. Create a channel mixer adjustment layer and mix the channels into monochrome remembering which channel had the most information from step 1.
3. Add a curves layer and make the curve into an ‘S’ shape so that there is plenty of contrast in the midtones.
4. The image will be looking pretty stark at this point, so fade the Curves layer until the image looks good and you are getting the most detail.
5. Apply an unsharp mask to the image layer, I find that setting the threshold to 0 or 1, and the radius to between 0.8 and 1 works well. Adjust the percentage until the image is as sharp as you can make it before it starts to look too rugged.

Not the New Power Generation, but the National Portrait Gallery. Went to see an exhibition called The World’s Most Photographed. Muhammad Ali, James Dean, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Queen Victoria, Mahatma Ghandi, Adolf Hitler, and John F Kennedy are the subjects. I really enjoyed seeing these high quality images of legendary people, where it would usually be fuzzy images on TV or only average quality versions in books. I actually found the Hitler display to be the most interesting and in some ways, the most revealing. He looks truly awkward in front of a camera and was clearly having photographs taken because he needed to rather than wanted to. I’ve never seen him look so real before, it was quite chilling seeing such an evil man looking so vulnerable and in the candid shots, so totally normal.