Archive for editing

Grab a Frame From Your iPhone Video with VideoPix

With VideoPix you can adjust the speed from 1 to 60 fps.

So…you drop by the supermarket on the way home from work to pick up some orange juice. While checking out the no pulp, extra pulp, and low pulp options you swear that you see Lady Gaga browsing the store’s selection of yogurt. It’s not like you are the paparazzi or anything, but you are a photographer and it’s in your DNA to grab that shot. Think how cool it will be to be flipping through your iPhone pics with your friends and say, “Oh yeah, that’s the one of Gaga when we were shopping at the Foodland.”

But do you go for a still picture or a movie? A movie would be cool, but you really want to Twitter it too. So a still shot? But what if she flips you off for taking her pic? You wouldn’t want to miss that! Decisions, decisions… Read More→

HDR – What’s Next and What’s Already Possible

Love it or hate it, high dynamic range photography (and video if you’ve been keeping an eye on Soviet Montage Productions) is the future. HDR photography isn’t new by any means but the technologies that are evolving are quite exciting.

Photoshop CS5 was shipped with it’s latest HDR innovation and Canon have raised the game with their recent patent application (USPTO Appl. No. 12/630,594). Without going to to too many details, it seems that Canon have found a way to alter exposure values at pixel level, thus creating a single image, from a single frame, with a wider dynamic range than we’ve seen from any DSLR.

Now that’s pretty exciting wouldn’t you say?

I had plans to head to the PhotoCreative workshop and build a camera from the ground up which uses a beam splitter optic and two full frame sensors… but this might prove a tad time consuming and somewhat expensive so I’ll wait to see what Canon come up with!

The thing is I’m not really a massive fan of HDR software… I’m a wedding and portrait photographer, so posing a subject in a Daguerreian style whilst a capturing multiple frames it’s terribly practical.

Till Canon tempt me into another camera body with this new technology, I’ve settled for merely taking advantage of the wonderful range that my RAW images already have.

Just for the record I don’t use Lightroom or any ‘reclaiming’ tools. All of my RAW files are processed using Aperture (which gives you a better range to work with than Camera RAW). The changes after that are all done in Photoshop utilizing the channels.

Here’s quick example of how I like to increase the dynamic range of my images…. (This isn’t a full on tutorial but the fundamentals are there) Read More→

Easy and Creative Grunge Effects

Grunge photography has become the latest trend in photography.  This tutorial is going to walk you through 6 very easy steps to taking your photo to the grunge level.

In this tutorial, we will be increasing the contrast, adding grunge effects to the image as a whole, adding tram lines to the right and left, and finally warming the image through the use of photo filters.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have learned where to find free software (if you don’t have Photoshop), and know how to create your own grunge effects. Read More→