Tips & Tricks: How to take Sharp Photographs

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

Brightness/Contrast, got better for editing photographs

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

Color management. Adobe RGB or sRGB?

We all happened to get lost in this, sometimes, crazy and very weird subject, and end up asking ourselves: “Why my photos aren’t looking the same on the paper as on my computer?”. What, are we going to do?  We are going to search Google, and we will see ourselves surrounded by thousands of websites and each other having a different opinion about this subject, and everyone advising different things base on technicalities , few base on tests. It’s true that you cannot show the exact differences because the web browsers shows the photographs, that are in any color profile, into sRGB. So i will try to explain myself as clear as i can.

I recently got myself mixed up in this and I have spend  a few days reading and reading about what anybody else think of it, what are the experts saying, and i came to the conclusion that first I have to see for myself. And i have been pretty amazed and a little relieved of the results.

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Tags: Adobe RGB, Color Management, Color Profiles, Photo Print, Photo Test, sRGB