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]

I’ve been working with a couple of new — to me — fire engines. These are quite different from the old warrior that I started out with, in that they are lovingly restored. The first pictures were in large part about the scars the equipment had gathered over the years. I was initially disappointed that… [Read More]

I’ve posted images here, and here, of my on-again, off-again slit-scan series, Timescapes. I’m back at it, this time trying to make longer exposures. Here’s a four-hour one: Mike Collette, who runs Betterlight, the company that makes the scanning back I’m using for this series, told me about a mode in which the back will… [Read More]

I was on a panel on raw processing about a year ago, and so was Eric Chan. At the break, I congratulated him on the big improvements in resizing in Lightroom 4. He said that the algorithms were similar; the big change was that, rather than doing the calcs in the standard Lr working space,… [Read More]