There was a bit of a Facebook exchange recently in our camera club about how best to achieve a fill-the-frame image when your lens can’t provide enough reach. This wouldn’t even have been a discussion a few years ago – the only two ways to do it would have been to zoom with your feet (get closer) or to crop in post production. DSLRs offered no other options.
But today’s higher end DSLRs and all (most?) mirrorless cameras offer another option where you can isolate how much of the sensor read-out is captured in the RAW data for a particular image. When converted, that reduced RAW data then “fills the frame” appearing to create a zoom or magnified effect and brings you in “closer” to your intended subject.
The exchange on Facebook fell into two camps: those who called the result magnification and those who said that was misleading. Well, in fact, they are both right.
Continue reading “Crop Mode in Camera or Crop in Post”
It seems that everyone is weighing in on the move toward more and more machine-powered editing choices, also known as artificial intelligence or AI-based editing. What surprises me most is the number of commentaries where the writer admits to never having seen the capabilities being criticized, but the mere thought of machine-powered functionality must invariably mean both loss of control for the artist and cookie-cutter results. 
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.
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.
What does that have to do with photography? As it turns out, every part of a digital image is a set of values – for size, dimensions, camera settings, colour space, etc. We’ve long had the ability to manipulate any one value to our liking through the sliders we see in modern editing software. Now it seems we also have the ability to redefine broad swaths of data at once. Find out how. 
What are filters and why are they separate from adjustments? And what the heck is rasterizing anyway? Or the difference between “rasters” and “vectors”? And what is “rendering”? And of course, the single most important concept – non-destructive vs. destructive editing.
This leaves me wondering. If photography must be art to be successful, is there a point where a photograph is no longer a photograph? And where is that line? The answer isn’t obvious. Here’s why…
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