Posted by Constantin Chirila on Dec 28, 2008 in
Photoshop Hello guys/gals, long time no see. Hope you all had a good time this Christmas and Santa was kind and generous.
Today I would like show you a quick tutorial on how to create a Fujifilm Velvia film effect. This one it’s popular through landscape photographers, and gives to the photo a colorful look and having a slight over saturation.
Here is the photo, which in my opinion doesn’t put into value the beautiful colors of the Autumn season.
Tags: Color Management, Editing, Photoshop, Tutorials
Posted by Constantin Chirila on Dec 11, 2008 in
Camera Gear,
Photography,
Tips & Tricks 
Taking sharp photographs is the dream of every photographer. However taking crisp, clean images can be quite challenging. I would like to share with you guys some tips on how to get razor sharp photographs, but before that let’s see what are the common causes for lack of sharpness:
Wrong focusing. The most common cause for blurry photos is not focusing right. Often happens to focus on the wrong part of the image, or using a very narrow depth of field, or taking the photo quick without checking if it is in focus, and all of this helps in throwing your subject out of focus and obtaining blurry photographs.
Low value of the shutter speed. This causes 2 sets pf problems: Camera shake and Subject movement. This two makes blurry photos because your shutter speed is too low to freeze the action.
Noise. Sometimes using high ISO values might get you results with lack of sharpness. Although since cameras evolve so quickly these days, higher ISO values might still get you very sharp images.
Here are 9 ways of improving your photographs sharpness:
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Tags: Camera Gear, Canon, DSLR, Editing, Lenses, Nikon, Photo Test, Photography, Photoshop, Tips & Tricks
Posted by Constantin Chirila on Dec 4, 2008 in
Photoshop,
Tips & Tricks Many people asked me how come I have so sharp images. Well, beside the fact that I do my best to keep my shutter high and keep my camera steady, I retouch the photos in photoshop. You all might think “Ohh, the unsharp mask”, but i have to tell you that you are wrong. The alternative method I use for sharpening is the High Pass Filter method. This method provides good sharpening while minimizing image degradation.
Read more…
Tags: Editing, Photography, Photoshop, Tips & Tricks
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
