Posts Tagged ‘GIMP’

Post-processing Tips for Landscapes

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The vast majority of photos look better with some post-processing, and this is particularly true for landscape photos. Often landscapes can come out with colors that look quite dull compared to what we remember, or flat and lacking in contrast. Thankfully, this can be remedied through a bit of careful processing.

You might even want to make more extreme changes, in order to more strongly evoke a feeling with the image, rather than just give an accurate portrayal of what you saw.

In this article we'll cover several post production techniques that can be very useful for landscape photographers. You can use them minimally to enhance what was captured, or make stronger adjustments to completely change the mood of an image. How you use the techniques is up to you.

Post-processing Tips for Landscapes

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Written by Discover Digital Photography

July 24th, 2016 at 7:16 am

Split Toning Explained

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Split toning is a technique where a color cast is applied to an image, but the color cast applied to the highlights is different to the color applied to the shadows.

Different color casts can give different feelings to an image. Oranges, reds, and yellows can give a warm, sunny day feeling. Blues can give a cold feeling. Greens and magentas can give a cross-processed film look.

There are quite a few different ways a split toned effect can be applied to an image. Different methods can be applied at different stages of the image editing process, they differ in how much control they offer, and how quickly they can be applied. In this article we'll look at the main split toning methods so you can decide for yourself which one would work best for your needs.

Split Toning Explained

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Clean up your photos with the Clone Stamp Tool

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While I always advocate getting as much right in-camera as possible, most photos can still look better with a little touch-up in post production. It might be something in an otherwise great shot that you had no way of changing. Or it might be something you just didn't notice at the time you took the shot. But there's no foul in retouching your photos to make them look better (unless it's a strictly documentary photo).

In this article we'll look at some tips on using the clone stamp tool. This is a very useful tool for quickly and easily removing an unwanted item from an image.

Clean up your photos with the Clone Stamp Tool

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Written by Discover Digital Photography

May 22nd, 2016 at 4:42 pm

Daylight Long Exposure Photography Tips

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Long exposure photography allows you to capture movement in a still photo, rather than just freezing a moment in time. You can capture silky smooth moving water, or clouds blurring as they move across the sky. Even blurred trails left by people as they move about.

In low light conditions, long exposure photography is quite easy. There's not much light, so exposure times will necessarily be long. But in daytime there is lots of light, and getting a shutter speed slow enough to blur anything but very fast movement can be almost impossible.

Daylight Long Exposure Photography Tips

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How to add a vintage haze effect to your photos

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Photos with a soft, low contrast hazy look seem to be very popular at the moment. You can purchase packs of film presets for most image editing software that allow you to easily create this look.

I've also seen several Photoshop tutorials that show how to create a similar look, making use of various adjustment layers. However, the look can also be achieved using only RGB curves, which are available in Adobe Camera RAW, Lightroom, Photoshop, GIMP, and the majority of image editing software. No need to purchase anything additional, and no need for multiple layer Photoshop documents.

In this article I'll cover both creating the hazy look in-camera and using RGB curves. Plus, I'll explain why the curves adjustments create the effect, so you'll better understand how you can modify the curves to fine-tune the effect.

How to add a vintage haze effect to your photos

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Product photography on the cheap with only one light pt. 2 – Compositing the images

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In the previous article Product photography on the cheap with only one light pt. 1 - Taking the photo, we looked at taking multiple photos of a product using only one light, and lighting each shot differently. The next step is to combine those images into a single image, which will look like it has been shot with multiple lights.

The final photo will look like this:

Final product photo

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Written by Discover Digital Photography

September 30th, 2013 at 1:50 pm

How to get people or traffic free photos

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Famous locations (such as the Eiffel Tower in France and Mesa Arch in Utah, for example) can make great photographic subjects. But the problem is, there are likely to be plenty of other people there as well, getting in your shot. Even relatively unknown tourist destinations can get pretty busy.

So, how do you stop all the other tourists (who have as much right to be there as you) getting in the way and ruining your photo? Sometimes getting to the location really early in the morning, before anyone else is up, can be good enough to secure you a tourist-free photo.

But other times, this is not enough, or the location is not open early in the morning. In this case, we have to rely on the wonders of Photoshop (or similar image editing software).

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Written by Discover Digital Photography

December 2nd, 2012 at 1:31 pm