Posted by Constantin Chirila on Jan 19, 2009 in
Photoshop Last week I have watched a series of videos (actually a idea divided into 4 parts) on the blog owned by Scott Kelby.
In this video Scott Kelby, Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowski, are pointing out the huge improvements the new Photoshop CS4 has suffered. From performance improvements to workflow improvement, Photoshop CS4 is better then ever, making you able to get the job done faster.
Here are the videos:
Tags: Comparation, Photoshop, Software, Web
Posted by Constantin Chirila on Dec 16, 2008 in
Camera Gear,
Photography Due to fact that I love shooting landscapes, I am in love of the new Canon 5D Mark II. Talking a lot about it a friend asked me what’s that special with this camera compared to my Canon 40D. And it all came to one major difference: the 5D Mark II has a full frame sensor and the 40D has a crop sensor. So in this article I will try to explain the “Crop factor” notion, and the difference between them.
Full frame notion. A full frame sensor has an area of 36 x 24 mm and it’s close to the area of a 35mm film camera, back in the film days.
Crop factor. Well many of the digital cameras, from compact to DSLR cameras, have different image sensors with different dimensions. Most of the sensors have sizes equal or smaller than 36 x 24 mm. Because of the smaller sensor, the camera tends to capture less than an image giving the effect of cropping. There are a lot of crop factors starting from 1x (the Full Frame) and going all the way to 2x (Olympus), for DSLR’s and going even further than 6x for compact cameras. A 2x crop factor refers to a sensor size 2 times smaller than the full frame meaning a roughly 18 x 12 mm sensor size.
Now let’s see how this translates in the actual size of the image:
Read more…
Tags: Camera Gear, Canon, Comparation, DSLR, Nikon, Photography
Posted by Constantin Chirila on Nov 24, 2008 in
Photography,
Photoshop 
A few years back when i seriously started to use Photoshop, i was a heavy user of the “Brightness/Contrast” adjustment, until some day i have read an article that said that’s incredibly wrong to use this adjustment because it shreds your histogram.
Increasing Brightness with any version of Photoshop until CS3 will add whatever you set the control at to every pixel in the image, shifting everything towards the right in the histogram. When are decreasing the brightness , all will be shifted equally darker. The tone of every pixel moved right or left equally with the same value, even when some parts of an image needed it more than others. The traditional version of Contrast adjustment was equally simplistic in how it operated, stretching or contracting contrast equally over the entire range of the histogram.
A photograph can contain 256 brightness levels ( from 0 which means pure black to 255 which means pure white). Let’s say that our photograph has a brightness level from 20 to 180. When we increase the brightness by let’s say 20, the new photo will have a brightness level from 40 ( the old vale + 20) to 200 (the old value +20). So the Whole histogram is move to the right, when decreased move to the left.
So for the last two and a half years i only used Curves and/or Levels adjustments for increasing contrast and brightness. Now I saw that “Use legacy” option and started googling to see what exactly does and I found out that… Read more…
Tags: Brightness/Contrast, Comparation, Editing, Photo Test, Photography, Photoshop
