Do you know what the histogram is and are you using it in-camera when you shoot and in Lightroom as you edit images? The histogram is a graph that gives you lots of information about your exposure and tones in your image, and I recommend learning about it and using it both in-camera and in [...]
Many of you know that I urge everyone to back up their photo library - photos and catalog - and all your other documents to one or more external hard drives and also to a cloud backup service. I have worked with two clients in the past week who were running Backblaze and Carbonite cloud backup [...]
More and more photographers are aware these days that raw files provide higher quality information and more flexibility in processing than JPEGs do. For those of you convinced to shoot raw files, your camera most likely gives you a choice to save just a raw file, or to save both a raw file and a JPEG [...]
You may have read my two posts about the value of exposing to the right in digital photography (also known as ETTR), What Lurks in the Shadows: The Case of the Black Cat and The Perfect Exposure, Or, When Things Don’t Look So Good. In the second one, I show you an example of where I nail my exposure [...]
I wrote this post in early 2009, so I am sure that many of my readers haven’t seen it. I decided to repost it because it is an important concept for digital photographers to understand. As you may have heard, with digital, unlike film, your goal should be to expose your image as brightly as possible, [...]
You may be photographing in raw rather than jpeg because you know that raw files contain more information and because they are unprocessed, giving you more flexibility. But how do they contain more information? Among other things, digital photography raw files are captured at a higher bit depth — depending on the camera, 12, 14 or [...]
I wrote about the importance of exposing as brightly as possible, short of blowing out important highlights in my post “What Lurks in the Shadows: The Case of the Black Cat”. I encourage you to read it if you haven’t. I thought I would show you an example of a perfect exposure that in fact looks [...]
In my last post I showed you how to remove spots using the spot removal tool in Lightroom and Camera Raw. After I made the video, it occurred to me that I didn't show you my most horrifying example of dust on the camera sensor. I took this image in 2004 shortly after I got my [...]
When you are working on an image for print, or any application where it will be viewed full size, it is important that you zoom in to 100%, and inspect the entire image for issues that you can’t see when it is smaller. I was working on this image today and when I zoomed [...]
