January 2009 Archives
An anonymous reader asks,
I took a bunch of photos at a party over the weekend. They looked fine on the back of my camera, but when I posted them to the web I noticed that a lot of them were blurry. Why doesn't my camera do well with quick movement?
As we love to say at MyPhotoSucks, the problem isn't your camera, it's how you use it. The simple answer is that you should have used your flash.
Before I discovered Lightroom I opened every image in Photoshop, closed the ones I didn't like, and adjusted the ones I did. I got pretty good at it and I had macros to do things like create jpegs for use on the web. Lightroom changed all that and introduced me to a much faster and more efficient process.
Lightroom takes a workflow approach that is quite different from traditional image editing software. Once you have imported your images into Lightroom, you can use it to select and/or rate your images, perform adjustments like cropping, levels, and minor retouching, and output the images to various file formats, a printer, or web galleries. While Lightroom has many great features, I love it because it is easy to use, very flexible and completely non-destructive. It also cut my postprocessing time by more than half.
Adobe Photoshop has long been the defacto standard for professional photographers and serious amateurs alike. Adobe recently released Photoshop CS4, and it includes some great new features.
A reader asks,
"I'm thinking of entering [an image in a competition]. The rules state that I can send jpg images on a CD but that they must be in RGB format and not CMYK format. When I capture images on my Canon S2IS what colour format does the camera use? If I use Picasa as my photo program does it use CMYK (I know most printers use these colours)? If I have a jpg image, can I use something like Photoshop to convert from CMYK to RGB?"
Virtually every digital camera on the market produces image in the RGB colour space, so the good news is that you don't have to do any conversion. People are often confused by the fact that their inkjet printer uses a CMYK process. However, the printer appears to your computer as a RGB device, as does your monitor, so you should continue to work in the RGB colour space unless there is a specific reason for you to convert to a different colour space.
