The term High key typically refers to photos with dominant highlight tones. Most “correctly” exposed photos should have the key or main tone at the midpoint between white and blackpoint. By shifting the keytone up (high key) or down (low key), the photos can be made to convey different moods. High key photos can convey happy, relaxed mood while low key brings drama and tension.
Typically high key photos are result of the combination of light foreground and background, narrow tone range (less contrast), and shadow-less even lighting. Some degree of over exposure helps but it should not be relied on solely. Read More…
Posted in
Other on November 30th, 2008.
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Soft focus is not blur or “slightly out of focus”. If you think you can get the same effect by intentionally turning the lens out of focus during shooting, you will be disappointed. True soft focus should still have the important subject areas in focus while having a sense of softness.
To achieve the soft focus, you could spend anywhere between 20 to 100 US dollars to buy one of the soft focus filters
. Fortunately, the soft focus effect is one f the most simple special effects to achieve in a capable photo editor such as Capture NX2. Read More…
Moose Peterson of moosepeterson.com has a few videos of Nikon Capture NX2 at the D3 media center section of his site showing you how to effectively use some cool features of Capture NX2 and the quick and easy way of removing color casts. Enjoy!
The Crop Tool in Nikon Capture NX2 is quite usable for practical purposes. You can do crop with fixed aspect ratio (presets or custom) or do a free crop that allows you to change the aspect ratio and size on the fly. However you may find it tricky if you want to crop a region with a fixed pixel dimension, for example, you want to crop an exact 1058 pixel wide and 705 pixel high region out of a 4288 (W) by 2848 (H) image. It is easy to set the exact ratio using the custom fixed aspect ratio crop method, but NX2 doesn’t tell you the size of the crop when you start cropping. That makes things a little tricky. Read More…
Posted in
Tutorials on November 2nd, 2008.
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Cross processing (xpro) refers to processing film in a chemical solution intended for a different type of film (Wikipedia).
Two methods are common: processing color negative films in slide chemicals (”C-41 as E-6″), or processing slide films using the color negative chemicals (”E-6 as C-41″). Due to the characteristics of the films and chemicals, the effects are different. Processing color negative film in slide chemical tends to produce flat tones and muted colors with less red but more green/yellow while processing slide film in in color negative chemicals often produces very contrasty images with blown highlights. In either cases, we’d expect to see wild color shifts that are not quite predictable due to many factors such as film/chemical, exposure, etc, will affect the process.
Simulating the cross processing effect in photo editors are fairly easy using curves adjustments in individual color channels. For photoshop users, this is a nice tutorial on how to do the “C-41 as E-6″ type cross-processing in Adobe Photoshop. For demonstration purposes, I will show you how to do the same adjustments using Nikon Capture NX2. Read More…
Posted in
Tutorials on October 22nd, 2008.
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Black and white photography never lose its charm even in the digital photography era. It is difficult to find a camera that does not offer a Black and White mode. Nikon is no exception. If you shoot JPEG, the camera performs the color conversion in the built-in processing engine. This leaves you with little control over the process. Raw shooters are much better off because the Black and White mode in the camera is merely a tag in the Raw file. The Raw file still has all the color information. Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) completely ignores it but Nikon software such as Nikon View/Capture NX recognizes the tag and displays the image accordingly.
So, what’s the point of selecting the Black and White mode in the camera when shooting Raw format? Not much. Perhaps in most cases you are satisfied with the default result so you don’t need to do anything before converting the photos to other formats for sharing or printing. Otherwise, shooting in color mode and convert it to Black and White is likely more flexible.
In this tutorial, I will discuss the different ways of converting normal color photos into black and white in Capture NX2. Read More…
Posted in
Tutorials on October 20th, 2008.
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Nikon sent out a Capture NX2 promotion email today. It offers a $30 discount from $179.95 but the final price is still $1.96 more expensive than current amazon selling price ($147.99). However, if you want Capture NX2 now (for example your trial version just expired), NikonMall appears to be the only place to get the software license key immediately. The Capture NX2 sold on Amazon is full retail version in a box.
If you have never tried Capture NX, you can download the trial version and try it for 60 days. Our extensive Capture NX and NX2 resource guide has lots of information to get you started.
In the email there are also three links to reviews of Nikon Capture NX2.
Posted in
Software on October 17th, 2008.
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Sometimes, the online help files provided with computer software are totally inadequate as a learning material. That’s why there are usually books available with much better organization and examples to illustrate the real world applications of the software.
For Nikon Capture NX, there are only two books available. One is The Photographer’s Guide to Nikon Capture NX by Jason Odell, another one is Real World Nikon Capture NX by Ben Long. Jason’s book appears to be available as ebook only, that is probably why he was quick to publish an updated version of his book for the recently released Nikon Capture NX2. I have just found the updated version of Ben’s book on Amazon. Published by Peachpit Press, the new book, titled Real World Nikon Capture NX 2 (Real World)
will be published on October 13, 2008.
More on the net
Posted in
Photography books on October 4th, 2008.
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