Photography and the Art of Seeing

 Making Selective Edits with DxO PureRAW 5 - ISO 11,400 Click on the images to enlarge them to better see the results. Above is the before image and below is the after using DxO PureRAW 5 with selective masking edits. This is how the Masking works; when we start out in PureRAW 5 in the Corrections Panel, we choose a Process method and in this case DeepPRIME XD2s with the Luminance and Force details set to 40 and 0 respectively. This cleans up our image quite well and some may say too well, too smooth, but I am leaving it like this for this tutorial. So the original image is very noisy and the initial processing gets rid of all the noise but may have gone too far and the image looks synthetic as you can see below. The faces are too smooth. The jersey's are too smooth and the football is lacking detail. This is where masking comes in. Step by Step - Starting in the Corrections Panel - Note all of the settings I am using here. When we are in the Masking Panel, by default, our cursor i...

Speeding up your Workflow using Adobe Lightroom Classic and DxO PureRAW 5 Although this article is not necessarily or completely limited to Adobe Lightroom Classic as everything was covered in Part 1, these other options are available to the user in the stand-alone application as well. In the previous article when we sent our NEF Raw file over to PureRAW 5 we choose the "Preview and Process with DxO PureRAW 5" option. Now I would like to discuss the other two options that are available to us;  "Process Instantly with DxO PureRAW 5" or "Process Directly using last settings DxO PureRAW 5". The Process Instantly with DxO PureRAW 5 option presents us with a dialog. More on this shortly The Process Directly using last settings DxO PureRAW 5 automatically starts processing your image(s) without any further interaction with the app. Whatever you used the very last time is exactly what will be used with this option - no dialog, no interaction with the app just get...

 DxO PhotoLab is available at www.dxo.com Wow. Look at the digital noise in this image. Both the luminance and colour noise are so pronounced you could probably feel it if you ran your hand across this print. This image was taken back 2013 in the evening on a poorly lit football field at ISO 12,800. The noise reduction software we had at the time was relatively good back in those days but once I enlarged it .... well you know where I am going with this. This image is cropped quite a bit and ended up about 5.3 inches square. Good enough for social media but not so good for enlargements so I decided to disguise the flaws in the image by adding a painterly filter effect to it. That actually looked quite good as a 16 inch square print. Quite the conversation piece. The technical specs are: Nikon D3 (12 MegaPixel sensor), Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8 VRII lens shot at 1/500th second at f2.8 using ISO of 12,800. I am sure that the newer cameras on the market today would produce better quality im...

DxO PhotoLab's Deep Prime noise reduction is simply amazing at getting rid of unwanted noise in your images to say the least. Don't get me wrong; I do like the look of film grain in some images and leaving some of the digital noise in our images is perfectly fine but I believe there is a better way to achieve that look than what some or most software does with the click of a button or moving a slider one way or another. I'll leave that for another post . For this article I will be using an image shot on a Nikon D500 using a Nikon 105mm f2.8 lens. The technical specs are as follows; ISO 4000, 1/640 sec at f2.8. There are two things about crop sensor cameras; one good and the other, not so good but not terribly bad either. Crop sensor cameras can get in closer to your subject due to the nature of the crop - this is the good thing. The not so good thing is these sensors tend to product more visible noise in our images. More on the pros & cons of crop vs full-frame sensors ...

The Fuji X-T4 and Fujinon Lenses continue to wow me at every turn and in this case I want to discuss the Fujinon 50-140 f2.8 lens that I use to shoot Pro and Semi-Pro hockey in today’s arenas. I have been shooting hockey since the late 1980’s when the arenas had some of the poorest lighting known to man. Today, these arenas are much brighter and for a photographer this means that we can use lower ISO settings than in the past and this translates into our images having less digital noise to deal with. In the image examples presented here I used an ISO of 3200 at 1/1000 sec @f5. Yes, I could have shot at f2.8 and probably and ISO of around 2500 or lower but at f2.8 the depth of field is not too great. Anyways, let’s get back to why I am “wowed” by this Fuji camera setup … well, why don’t I just let the images do the talking for me? Before that, I just want to explain my shooting vantage point or lack thereof at this particular arena. A lot of arenas have “photographer portals” cutout of ...