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Oxford School of Photography
insights into photography
Category Archives: Photoshop
Best monitor for photo editing: 10 top models tested and rated
May 6, 2016
Posted by on One of our most popular posts has been about monitors and which is the best for photo editing. You may be aware that the monitor you use to look at your images can have a substantial effect on how they look. That is not that they look better or worse more that they are accurate. If your monitor is too bright and you edit your images based on what you see then when you send your images for printing they will come out darker. The same of course goes for colour balance. So if you want some sort of accuracy you should always use the operating system software that is designed for monitor calibration, if you don’t know how just google monitor calibration on a (mac) or (PC). However if you want much better image fidelity you have to get away from a general purpose monitor which is OK for everything and get one that is designed for graphic work. This article on Digital Camera World lists the top ten as at October 2014.
Good luck
Here are some more up to date recommendations but not from sites that I regularly use so cross check what they say
Best Monitor for Photo Editing and Photography 2016
Photo Editing Monitor Buyer’s Guide – May 2016
In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing & Free Nik Software
April 7, 2016
Posted by on My good friend David Thomas alerted me to this article in The New Yorker
This is a really interesting and important article because it looks and addresses the issues that photography now faces. Yes I know that sounds heavy and overblown but there is no doubt that the way we make pictures, what we do with them and how they are consumed has changed, and changed for ever. Don’t worry I am not deaf to all those who tell me film is coming back, it’s just that I think it is doing so only to those who like the film process and mostly those are not the people who are interested in image making. They enjoy the craft based process and uncertainty that they introduce into the image production through lack of control that film can bring if you don’t know what you are doing with it.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JORDAN STRAUSS / INVISION / AP
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1977 book “On Photography.” This was something I thought about when I recently read that Google was making its one-hundred-and-forty-nine-dollar photo-editing suite, the Google Nik Collection, free. This photo-editing software is as beloved among photographers as, say, Katz’s Deli is among those who dream of pastrami sandwiches.
Before Google bought it, in 2012, the collection cost five hundred dollars. It is made up of seven pieces of specialized software that, when used in combination with other photo-editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom, give photographers a level of control akin to that once found in the darkroom. They can mimic old film stock, add analog photo effects, or turn color shots into black-and-white photos. The suite can transform modestly good photos into magical ones. Collectively, Nik’s intellectual sophistication is that of a chess grand master. I don’t mind paying for the software, and neither do thousands of photographers and enthusiasts. So, like many, I wondered, why would Google make it free?
My guess is that it wants to kill the software, but it doesn’t want the P.R. nightmare that would follow. Remember the outcry over its decision to shut down its tool for R.S.S. feeds, Google Reader? Nik loyalists are even more rabid. By making the software free, the company can both ignore the product and avoid a backlash. But make no mistake: it is only a matter of time before Nik goes the way of the film camera—into the dustbin of technological history.”….
Google’s comments—disheartening as they might be—reflect the reality of our shifting technologies. Sure, we all like listening to music on vinyl, but that doesn’t mean streaming music on Spotify is bad. Streaming just fits today’s world better. I love my paper and ink, but I see the benefits of the iPad and Apple Pencil. Digital photography is going through a similar change, and Google is smart to refocus.
Read the rest of this article and here you can download the Google Nik Software for free
Photography Courses For 2015
December 19, 2014
Posted by on well we have done it again, created a new course to get you making better pictures. It has the most unwieldy title because we couldn’t think of anything better, sorry.
Basics of Landscape, Travel, Flower and Black and White Digital Photography
The course is based on our observations that these are the main subject areas along with portraiture, (which is covered in our separate Portrait Photography course), that interest our students. Each session we look at one of the four subject areas.
This course is aimed at students who already have a good understanding of how to use their cameras. There will be no instruction on camera use therefore it might be worthwhile taking our Understanding Your DSLR course first if you tend to use the fully auto mode when photographing. All areas of photography rely on technical and visual skills and although there will be references to camera use and composition there will be no in depth discussion of these areas and if you do not understand basic compositional methods our Composition In Photography course would be a great asset to you. Get full details here
We now have our course schedule sorted out for the next term, here are the dates
Understanding Your DSLR Camera Evening Class £85 Start Dates: 26.01.2015; 11.03.2015
Understanding Your DSLR Camera Saturday Morning Class £85 Start Date: 07.03.2015
1 Day Understanding Your DSLR Camera £95 Dates: 01.02.2015; 01.03.2015; 29.03.2015
Intermediate Photography £97 Start Date 26.02.2015
Flash Photography £85 Start date 05.02.2015
Understanding Lightroom £85 Start Date 03.02.2015
Introduction to Photoshop and PS Elements £97 Start Date 25.02.2015
Composition In Photography – Seeing Pictures £85 Start Date 03.02.2015
Portrait Photography £85 Start Date 10.03.2015
Basics of Landscape, Travel, Flower and B&W Photography Start Date 09.03.2015 £85
6 Practical Ways to Unlock the Real Power of Colors in Your Photography
September 2, 2014
Posted by on From what looks like an updated Lightstalking site comes this very useful and practical guide to improving your colour photography. I agree with all of it so go and have a look.
1. Shoot Raw
Setting your camera to shoot in raw format is perhaps the first and easiest thing you can do to set yourself on a path toward shooting vibrant colors. Just consider this raw vs. jpeg comparison: The 8-bit jpeg format can contain a maximum of 16 million colors (256 shades each of red, green, and blue), but 12-bit raw files can reproduce 68 billion colors and 14-bit raw files are capable of a staggering 4.3 trillion colors. Hence, it’s only logical to capture as much color data as possible; you will have far more success bringing those colors to life in post processing when working with raw files.
3. Avoid Harsh Light
Harsh lighting, whether natural or artificial, will wash out the vibrance already present in any scene and you won’t be able to do much to restore it in post processing. If you are working outdoors in natural light, try to keep the sun at your back or find some shade. If you are working with flash be sure to diffuse it; there are a variety of ways to accomplish this (reflector, soft box, bounce card, etc.) and it will provide the added benefit of preventing blown-out spots on your subject.
4. Expose for the Situation
Getting a correct exposure doesn’t, in this instance, necessarily mean settling for whatever you camera deems to be a proper exposure. In some cases, such as when shooting the color red, underexposing by a stop or two can actually be a good thing. Blown-out reds are ubiquitous in digital photography; this is not simply a matter of an overall luminance issue, it is a problem specific to one color channel — red. The problem is due, in part, to the fact that the range of red that a digital camera sensor responds to is wider than that perceived by the human eye.
5. Calibrate Your Monitor
Every monitor differs in on how it displays colors. Furthermore, the factory settings are not optimized for the monitor to look its best. Monitor calibration is something that tends to scare people off, but it surely needs to be addressed if color reproduction is important to you. In short, a properly calibrated monitor ensures that the colors you see on the screen are accurately matched to the colors in the image file. In order to get a color-managed workflow up and running, you should invest in a colorimeter. A colorimeter will quickly perform color and brightness calibration.
all images ©Keith Barnes
For the full article go here
Visualize for Black and White While You Shoot
July 14, 2014
Posted by on The very best black and white results are achieved by shooting RAW and converting to monochrome in Photoshop but to see your bw image on your camera monitor you have to set the camera up to show bw but record in RAW. This short tutorial explains how…
Paul Fowler, Black & White Digital photography course OSP
Jay Tomasso Black and White Digital course OSP