The Dehaze tool in Lightroom is pretty amazing. Of course, like most powerful photo editing tools, it can produce some awful effects when used inappropriately or with too much enthusiasm. But yesterday I found a new use for it: taming specular reflections. I started with this image: Note the bluish reflection on the cucumber that’s pointed at… [Read More]
8-bit filters in Photoshop CC
Last night I was working on an image that had a lot of small imperfections in flat areas that had been emphasized by Helicon stacking. In Photoshop CC, I created a duplicate layer, and applied the dust and scratches filter. Oops. Contouring. I scratched my head and tried a median filter. Same damn thing. Thinking… [Read More]
D850 shadow noise — ISOs 400-3200
This is the 68th in a series of posts on the Nikon D850. You should be able to find all the posts about that camera in the Category List on the right sidebar, below the Articles widget. There’s a drop-down menu there that you can use to get to all the posts in this series;… [Read More]
Lighting a fire with a strobe?
When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I used to delight in making explosives with my chemistry set. Smoke, fire, and loud noises; what could be better that that? The man is just an older boy, so when I saw this: Objects which appear dark absorb light and dissipate this energy in the… [Read More]
Mitakon Zhongyi Speedmaster 50mm f/0.95 OOF PSFs — part 2
Yesterday, I published a post showing unusual behavior of out of focus point spread functions (OOF PSFs) using the Mitakon Zhongyi Speedmaster 50mm f/0.95 on a Sony a7RIII. In a PM, Brandon Dube had some interesting things to say about the effect. I don’t know why it happens. It could be genuine apodization caused by poor… [Read More]