Taking control

The Mamiya RZ. The workhorse professional roll-film camera.

Students on my beginners photography courses often look at their cameras as if they were mythical one-eyed beasts whose mysteries will never be understood by mere mortals.

They want to take better pictures and understand more about their cameras but one glance in the camera manual can leave them awestruck with the astonishing technical complexity that is digitally available. They can easily assume that only by mastering the camera can they progress as a photographer.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Here’s a useful tip that will help to improve your photography: Look at the shot you have just taken and imagine that it is an important scene in a film.

If you were a film director would you be happy with it just as it is, or would you need to order the cinematographer, set designer, props manager, and film crew to make changes to help tell the story more effectively?

Basic Picture Improvements

In the days of film, enthusiasts would learn how to create a photographic print from a negative in the chemical darkroom. They could adjust the contrast of different areas of the picture by altering the enlargers filters, and could make parts of it darker or lighter by giving them more or less exposure. 

Today's enthusiasts rarely seem to take the trouble to improve their pictures in any significant way. If a picture is worth showing it is worth improving, so here is a short tutorial to show how basic digital techniques can bring a picture to life. 

Photoshop Adjustment Layers - Basics

photographer: Liliane Steinberg

The most powerful and flexible way to improve (or retouch) your photographs is to use Photoshop, and the most powerful and flexible tools that Photoshop has to offer the photographer are centred around the Layers Palette.

Here is a demonstration of how one simple, basic layering techniques can be used to improve this doggy portrait.

We'll use two types of Adjustment Layer  with a simple yet powerful Layer mask technique that can be applied to almost any of your pictures and improve them.

Wacom Pen Setup

The Wacom Tablet and Pen is essential if you use Photoshop to improve your pictures.

It's so much more fun to use than a mouse and gives you the fine control that you need for proper "Digital Darkroom" work.

I'm going to show my own settings that I figured out many years ago. They are the best settings to use for fine work on photographs.