Take a perfectly good image, add a couple of layers with pictures of textures, play with the blend modes, and you may end up with something very painterly.

Today I received my copy of Nik’s Color Efex Pro 3.0, Silver Efex, and Viveza. These are powerful Photoshop plug-ins that let you adjust the lighting in your image, add color effects, or create a black and white image that looks like it was shot on film. You can also mix and match the plug-ins. The effects of the filter are saved to a separate layer. If you don’t like what you get, delete the layer and try another filter. I used Viveza in the following image to darken the corners of the image and draw attention to the bride’s face. Then I used Silver Efex to make the image look like it was shot with Infrared Black and White film.

Sometimes your digital camera doesn’t do a scene justice. When you open the image in Photoshop, it appears somewhat drab and colorless compared to what you remember. You can easily make the image pop with just a few steps. Here’s how: Read the rest of this entry »

It seems as though your flash always runs out of power when you least expect it. Prepared photographers always carry an extra set of batteries for the flash so they can continue a shoot with iminimal interuption. But they don’t exactly give away AA batteries anymore, especially the Alkaline and Titanium types. That’s why I use rechargeable AA batteries. But the ones I use can be recharged in 15 minutes.

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If you own a camera capable of capturing images 8 megapixels or higher, storage is a problem, especially if you shoot RAW images. The images captured by my camera use a whopping 12.8 MB of space on a memory card. You may think I’d be tempeed to purchase the highest capacity memory cards. But I don’t. Read the rest of this entry »