No matter what editing software you use today, it will likely include layers, masking and blend modes (also known as blending modes). Everybody’s doing it now – Photoshop and Lightroom, of course, but also ON1, Luminar, Topaz, etc.
And the more software that includes blend modes, the more frustrated I get at their lack of ability to explain in plain English exactly what they are. I’ve read countless blogs, gone to workshops partly to understand them, watched countless YouTube videos looking to make sense of them, and more often than not, the recommendation of the instructor is simply to try them and see what happens. My brain needs more. I want to be able to explain them. This post will try to do that.
Before you run screaming from the room, I’m not going to give you the item by item breakdown of all of the blend modes available in any software. My intent is to help you understand what a blend mode does generally and how to make a choice among the ones you have available in your software. Continue reading “Blend Modes – Learning to Love Them”
Skylum announced the upcoming release of Luminar 4, scheduled for sometime in the fall. Originally released in 2017, the company and the product have gone through some interesting evolutions.
My colleague then said: “I’m bringing this flash back. It doesn’t fire consistently.” He demonstrated the problem, with the unit set first on TTL mode and then on manual mode while attached to the hotshoe on his mirrorless camera. He was right. Without changing camera settings, sometimes the speedlite would fire and sometimes it wouldn’t. He returned the unit. But it got me to thinking about how the speedlite and camera work together and how to make sure they always work when needed. 
Travelling on assignment or for personal interest is typically a big part of most photographer’s lives. The challenge of managing gear – taking enough, but not too much – is always top of mind. But what about managing your images while you are on the road?
Although I use cloud storage as my primary storage option, most of these services “sync” at least some of that content to a local hard drive. Until today, that hard drive was my computer hard drive. But I’ve now run out of room on the local drive, and had to make a choice about where to put the local copies. Here’s what I came up with. 
oldgirlphotography.ca 