Dptips :. Digital Photography Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Web Photo Gallery - Adobe Photoshop

May 13th, 2006 by TakeGreatPictures - Digital Photography
Create a webpage quickly and easily in Adobe Photoshop with the 'Web Photo Gallery' automated function.
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File Formats for Digital Images

May 10th, 2006 by TakeGreatPictures - Digital Photography
This article will explain the uses for common digital formats and how to use them.
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April Showers Bring the Need for Camera Rain ...

April 30th, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
Rain can surprise you most any time of year of course, but when the seasons are changing your odds of being caught by a passing shower are all too real. Precipitation during the winter months is a given, and summers here in the northwest can be gorgeous, but spring and fall can be a bit iffy. Not only do you need to keep yourself dry, but your camera gear will thank you for keeping it dry as well....
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Adding or Replacing a Tripod Quick Release Cl...

April 23rd, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
Last week, we looked at how to remove the quick release clamp from a ball head to allow you to customize your tripod to best meet your needs. I'm assuming you have either already removed the clamp from yours or have bought a head without the clamp attached. If your ball head still has a clamp, stop now and read part one of this article, published lasts week. If you do now have a ball head without a clamp, it's time to find out how to add a new one....
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Dark Frame Subtraction using Adobe Photoshop&...

April 22nd, 2006 by TakeGreatPictures - Digital Photography
If you shoot long exposures digitally, you should get into the habit of shooting with the lens cap on. That's right, shoot a dark frame at the beginning or end of every day you shoot so that you can easily remove any hotpixels that might show up on your images.
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Adding or Replacing a Tripod Quick Release Cl...

April 16th, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
More than likely, if you own a Markins, Arca Swiss, Kirk Enterprises or compatible tripod ball head, it came with a quick release clamp fastened on top. These days though, several companies sell replacement clamps in various styles, and Markins even sells ball heads with no clamp at all for the do-it-yourselfer. If this gets you thinking about customizing your setup, you may find some helpful tips in this, the first of a two-part article on adding or replacing your quick release clamp. This week, I'll look at how to get your old clamp off, and next week I'll discuss how to attach the new one....
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Diffraction: When Smaller Apertures No Longer...

April 9th, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
Conventional wisdom is that one can achieve a sharper image by stopping down to a smaller aperture, but this misses the mark in two fundamental ways. First, the image will always be sharp at the point of focus. What a smaller aperture gives you is an apparent sense of greater sharpness by extending depth of field over a wider range of distances in front of and behind that focus point. Second, a phenomenon known as diffraction can cause you to actually get progressively less sharp images beyond a certain aperture, even at your focus distance. And it is this second point that is the subject of this week's PhotoTip article....
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Leading Photoshop Elements 4.0 available for ...

April 8th, 2006 by TakeGreatPictures - Digital Photography
Adobe Systems recently upgraded and expanded its premier photo-imaging program for home users. Based upon professional Photoshop software, the easy-to-use Photoshop Elements 4.0 is now available for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X (OS 10.4 or OS 10.3) computers.
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Mailer feedback: Low-light Photography <br...

April 8th, 2006 by TakeGreatPictures - Digital Photography
Getting good shots in low-light situations can be very difficult if you don't have a flash handy. Here are a few tricks you can use to your advantage.
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SpinRite Saves the Day (and my Hard Drive)

April 2nd, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
I hoped it was just a bad April Fools joke, but it wasn't. While down in Portland, Oregon yesterday for a meeting of the Nature Photographers of the Pacific Northwest, my laptop flaked out. It didn't die completely, but the hard drive turned out to have a bad block, and that block turned out to be used by the System Registry. On the scale of important parts on a Windows system, this is right up near the top. I was pretty well out of commission. But rather than being forced to reinstall everything, the problem was fixed in just over an hour, thanks to a remarkable program known as SpinRite....
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Using Photoshop to Edit Batches of Digital Ph...

April 1st, 2006 by TakeGreatPictures - Digital Photography
This week we are going to look at batch processing using actions and the droplet function in Adobe Photoshop. You’ve probably taken your camera to a party, a wedding, or on vacation, and you’ve got hundreds of photos to sift through and send to all your friends. (No, Adobe Photoshop can’t pick out the good ones for you.) But it can make them all nice and snappy by correcting colors and fixing the contrast of all of them at once. If a lot of your shots have a faded, or discolored look, this will vastly improve them.
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Using Photoshop to Edit Batches of Digital Ph...

April 1st, 2006 by TakeGreatPictures - Digital Photography
This week we are going to look at batch processing using actions and the droplet function in Adobe Photoshop. You’ve probably taken your camera to a party, a wedding, or on vacation, and you’ve got hundreds of photos to sift through and send to all your friends. (No, Adobe Photoshop can’t pick out the good ones for you.) But it can make them all nice and snappy by correcting colors and fixing the contrast of all of them at once. If a lot of your shots have a faded, or discolored look, this will vastly improve them.
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Tips & Tricks 03/06

March 27th, 2006 by Popular Photography Magazine: How-To

Readers share their secrets

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Curvemeister 2 is Curves on Steroids

March 26th, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
When I introduced the Earthbound Light Solution for Curves (and other goodies) in Photoshop Elements just over a year ago, I also wrote briefly about a nice plug-in known as Curvemeister that I've been meaning to take a more detailed look at ever since. By now, Curvemeister is up to version 2.1. Mike Russell, the program's author has indeed been busy, and the thoughtful features found throughout the program are the obvious result....
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Dust and Scratch Removal in Photoshop <br&...

March 22nd, 2006 by TakeGreatPictures - Digital Photography
So you want to take your collection of photographs from decades past and be able to send them through email? Just scan them on a flatbed scanner or take the film to a lab and have them scanned. It sounds too easy, but this is the best way to get your film into your computer. The only problem with scanning old film and photographs is the degradation in quality: dust, scratches, and fading color. Thankfully, we have Adobe Photoshop on our side.
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More on Factoring In the Crop Factor: Hand Ho...

March 19th, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
The generic rule of thumb is that you can expect to successfully hand hold your camera down to a shutter speed of one over the focal length. For example, if you are shooting with a 200mm lens, hand held shots should generally be sharp if your shutter speed is at least 1/200 second. The rule was devised back in the film days though, so it's worth taking a look at whether digital has changed things �� especially after spending the past two weeks looking at other effects of the digital crop factor....
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More on Factoring In the Crop Factor: Depth o...

March 12th, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
Continuing with our exploration of the effects of sensor size and digital crop factor, it's time to consider depth of field. Normally, DOF changes when focal length does, but since digital doesn't really alter focal length, it might be tempting to think that sensor size won't affect depth of field. In reality though, it does, but by how much, and even whether it decreases or increases, depends on how we compare things....
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More on Factoring In the Crop Factor: Depth o...

March 12th, 2006 by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
Continuing with our exploration of the effects of sensor size and digital crop factor, it's time to consider depth of field. Normally, DOF changes when focal length does, but since digital doesn't really alter focal length, it might be tempting to think that sensor size won't affect depth of field. In reality though, it does, but by how much, and even whether it decreases or increases, depends on how we compare things....
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