Archives for 2014

It’s unusual for photographers to show you their bad images. I’m no exception; while I try to learn from my mistakes, I don’t advertise them. Maybe that’s a mistake itself. If I learn from them, maybe others can, too. While my photography is idiosyncratic and unique to me, the general ideas may translate. So, in… [Read More]

I respect the quality of their products, but this current Fuji ad is ridiculous: What are they trying to say here? That you don’t buy a camera to make images, but for some other purpose? Maybe to improve your social standing? Or that a camera is not a tool, but a fetishistic object?

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. I took a look at some of the other Photoshop sharpening filters on the Bruce Lindbloom test image. “Sharpen More” with normal blending exhibits the lime-green artifacts: With Luminance blending, the color artifacts are absent: Is “Smart Sharpen” smart enough to avoid color artifacts with normal blending? No,… [Read More]

If you just fire up Photoshop and sharpen an image with, say, unsharp masking, the program will apply the sharpening kernel independently to each layer of the image. Occasionally that causes artifacts. Way back in the 80’s, canny scanner operators would sometimes convert the image to CIELab and sharpen only the luminance axis. In the… [Read More]

Yesterday I made some more images of the restored fire engines, this time with the Costal Optical 60mm f/4 on the a7R, so I could get a little closer. I continued to use the neutral density filter to keep the exposure times long enough to mitigate the a7R shutter shock. Focus stacked with Helicon Focus… [Read More]