George Barr has posted an interesting piece in which he describes the process he used to arrive at a final black and white photograph of an interior shot. He covers both technical issues and esthetic considerations.
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Frost and Fog, Dawn
Frost and Fog, Sunrise. Yosemite National Park. October 7, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)
The story: I was driving up to the Tuolumne Meadows area to meet a backpacking buddy for our final pack trip of the 2006 season. I had heard reports of snow on the road and a temporary closure so I decided not to leave for the mountains the night before but to instead get up very early and drive straight up to the trailhead. I drove into the park and turned left onto Tioga Pass Road… only to come to a road closure a mile later. I had just seen this foggy, frost-covered meadow which, on a typical drive to a pack trip I might have passed, thinking, “I really should stop and take a photo.” With the road closed, I had no excuse so I pulled out the camera and tripod and wandered off into the frost covered grasses.
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Morning, Mission Ridge
Morning, Mission Peak Ridge. October 28, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)
The story: I often hike to the top of Mission Peak, but recently I have begun taking a detour from the busy main trail and instead following an alternate route that reaches the ridge just south of the peak. On this day I had hoped to arrive by sunrise but didn’t quite make it. However, I was attracted to this post-sunrise light creating a pattern of shadows on a ridge just west of the peak – light that would not have been there at sunrise.
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Think Secret Posts Update on Next Version of Photoshop
Another new feature substantially improving both workflow and raw performance is Live Filters, which effectively brings the dynamic editing features of Layer Styles to Filters. The pixel radius of a Gaussian Blur, for example, can be adjusted long after it has been applied with just a single mouse click. Sources report substantial performance improvements to the filters themselves, as well, and have speculated that Photoshop may now be tapping the GPU of the video card to help the CPU crunch filters.
There are lots of other features (e.g. – native code for Intel Macs), but the making filters undoable will be very useful.
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