Photographs and articles by A. Cemal Ekin
My friend Steve Szydlowski has been photographing exotic cars for the Newport Car Museum and recently complained about the excessive reflections he got on the cars. This happened even though they had a large space with smooth walls, wall-to-floor transitions, a large light diffuser above, and even polarizing filters. Brush Work Would Be Difficult Against …
A friend called a couple of weeks ago to ask if I had any experience using Canon Digital Photo Professional. The reason was a camera setting that resulted in half of the photographs coming out as monochrome. A Web search told her she could change that setting using DPP. This article on using Adobe Camera …
I have made presentations on printing workflow and making paper choices at area photography clubs, from Connecticut to Maine. After the first presentation, I connected with Red River Paper who sponsored the rest of the presentations. Printing Workflow Presentation A few years back, when I made this presentation at the Photographic Society of Rhode Island …
I wrote about my ongoing scanning of old photographs and some basic strategies in case you were considering a similar project. This post will address one specific issue, color cast removal using Photoshop. I will provide some examples to show you that it can work for a wide range of images. The color cast removal …
Generally, when we take a photograph, there is a single scene, one element that we expect to see. There are, however, reasons to combine multiple frames to produce a more evocative image. This article was supposed to be a presentation for the Stony Brook Camera Club. But, due to an emergency, I had to cancel …
Metadata Embedded metadata in image files is not limited to EXIF recorded by the camera. You can, and more often than you think, you should embed simple information like your name, copyright notice, the title of the image, and the caption. Depending on the operating system and the photo editing software, there are simple ways …
In the previous installment of this two-part post, I explained how you may attempt to reduce or remove the haze in your photographs using a simple Photoshop tool, Layer Blend Modes. In this second part, I will show a more flexible, albeit slightly more complex process to deal with unwanted haze in a photograph. This …
Lightroom Dehaze Slider Started the Trend Since Adobe Lightroom 6 CC introduced the “Dehaze” slider, there has been a new dehaze-craze. The slider has gained the status of Merlin’s wand to cure many ailments. Like all the other adjustment tools, “it is a tool” and not a particularly new one. A process that I will …
A while back, I wrote a post that explained how to make Photoshop CS6 or below to honor the changed screen size elements on QHD displays. Since then, I have discovered a critical setting. This is to update the earlier post. QHD Displays Hard to Read On high-resolution laptops, and even some desktop displays, Photoshop …
During some of my presentations, I get asked about the work environment for editing digital photographs. I also get individual inquiries about the subject. In this post, I will address those questions with some photo editing workspace examples including my own. Vision, the perception of luminance, and color are generally relative. If you want to …
See the Mood One of the neglected, and often violated elements in photography is the mood. Sitting in your living room on a bright sunny day look around and notice how dark the interior looks compared to the bright outside. Our visual system, being extremely adaptable to brightness, allows us to enjoy the bright view …
Addendum July 19, 2015: For a moment I thought this patch to fix the QHD display problem stopped working, then I discovered that in order for it to work you must tweak your display settings in “Change the size of all items” under “Personalize/Display” in Windows 8. I chose medium size although it works with …
From the early days of computing, saving keystrokes, and being able to repeat certain tasks with ease have been very popular. In those days, software programs would offer simple “macro” capabilities, which later became almost a programming language in their own right. That was the predecessor of actions and presets. Look at Excel, which now …
I have just returned from the 69th NECCC 2014 Annual Photography Conference held at U Mass Amherst with a new title, MNEC, Master Member of NECCC. It was highly enjoyable for several reasons, but the most meaningful part of the conference for me started a while back. Towards the end of April 2014, I received …
(Fair warning, long post but worth every word you read!) Your ColorChecker Passport, I mean. Many photographers purchased this very useful piece of equipment but have yet to use it. They probably carry it in their gear bag hoping one day it will suddenly make sense and they will become devoted users of it. Alas, …
Creative Cloud I have been using Photoshop and other products in Adobe’s Creative Suite, beginning with the original CS and through the last version of CS6. As you know, Adobe recently moved to a subscription model and called it the Creative Cloud (CC). Individual products in the CC are suffixed with CC to identify them …
After the series of posts related to sharpening in Photoshop, one reader commented and asked whether split sharpening or edge-mask sharpening would be a better approach. I indicated in my reply that the edge mask is just that, a mask created from the edge information in the image applied to a sharpened layer, and that …
In this final post about split sharpening, I will provide a method of sharpening lighten and darken components of the Unsharp Mask in a way that will allow for changing all the parameters even after multiple saves, edits, etc. (Part 1 and Part 2) Of course, in most instances sharpening will be the last step …
In the previous post in this series, I explained how to separate a sharpened layer into separate lighten and darken components to mask each separately and adjust their opacity. This would allow greater control than keeping the sharpened layer as a unit. In this post, I will show you an even better split sharpening approach …
Sharpening digitally captured images in Photoshop, or any other editing software is unavoidable because of the softness introduced in the digitizing process, no matter how good the capture device may be. When we digitally photograph the continuous tone real world, we force the view to be broken into pixels. This brings with it the potential …
Paradigm Shift to Creative Cloud Adobe has just announced its new software delivery paradigm. A stand-alone program will no longer be available in their former CS, Creative Suite bundle singly, like Photoshop, or as various bundles. They call their new paradigm Adobe CC for Adobe Creative Cloud, where bundles or some single products will be …
I have been writing about the excessive editing of digital images and how unnecessary these edits are. I even challenged the PSA and other photographic organizations to discourage these ill-conceived practices. Now that National Geographic spoke, I am revisiting the subject. Stop Unreal Photo Edits Along these lines, I wrote a comment on a post …
Update: New tests I have run conclusively show the printing issue in Lightroom 4. A few days ago, I printed a photograph from Lightroom 4 (LR4) that came out with a magenta/red cast. Accounting for the possibility of clogged nozzles in the printer, I printed a nozzle check pattern, and everything looked fine. I printed …
Adobe announced the public beta release of the next Photoshop, anyone can download and use the new release until it expires after the release of the actual product. Superstition, as it is codenamed, has, as usual, many new features. Some simply fine, other almost “must-have” features may make the upgrade very compelling. Depending on your …
