Friday, May 29th, 2015

Stop iPhoto from Importing your Photos

How to stop iPhoto from launching when a camera card is inserted into your Mac

Disclosure: I hate iPhoto like the plague.  It isn’t that I just have no need for it but it tends to grab your photos and hide them where you can’t find them and, every time I put a camera card into my Mac it used to insist on grabbing the photos from it.

Now I use Lightroom so I have reason to want iPhoto to do anything at all with my photos. So to save having to close it down each time I put a camera card into the Mac, I stopped it from launching at all. If you’d like to do the same thing, here’s how to put iPhoto in its place:

1.    Launch iPhoto

2.    Choose iPhoto > Preferences > General

3.    From the Connecting Camera Opens dropdown list choose No Application

4.    Click the dialog’s Close button

5.    Exit iPhoto

 

 

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Categories:Lightroom, Mac, photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 2:45 pmNo Comments links to this post

Friday, November 21st, 2014

Photoshop – Quickly Change Your Brush Size

Quickly change the brush size (without using the slider)

When you’re using any tool in Photoshop that uses a brush such as the Brush itself, Eraser, Dodge, Burn and many others, you can change the size of the brush using a keyboard shortcut rather than having to use the size slider.  This fast and easy shortcut can save you a lot of messing around.

To change the size of the brush for any tool that uses it, press the opening square bracket key ([) to decrease the size of the brush and press the closing square bracket key (]) to increase the size of the brush.

Notice from the top image to this one the brush has increased in size (I pressed the keyboard shortcut ] to do this) and I can easily make my adjustments without having to mess around with the brush size slider.

Photo credit: © anitab0000 freeimages.com

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Categories:Mackenzie Tip, photography, photoshop

posted by mackenzieerb @ 6:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Thursday, June 26th, 2014

Remove Edits to a Photo in Camera RAW

It’s not easy to find, but you can strip away the camera raw edits from a photo

Sometimes I look at the edits I’ve made to a photo a few months later and I think – What was I thinking? I simply hate what I did to the photo. I want the original image back so I can work on it again. But how to do that? You see there is no reset button in Adobe Camera RAW that matches the Reset button in Lightroom. It’s easy to do in Lightroom but not obvious how to do it in ACR.

If you get stuck like this and you want to reset an image in Camera RAW, first open the image in Camera RAW and then go to the Presets panel:

 

Open the flyout menu and choose Camera RAW Defaults. Instantly all your fixes will be removed from the image – whether they were applied in Camera RAW or Lightroom and the image will be back to how it looked out of the camera – Yeah!

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Categories:Lightroom, photography, photoshop

posted by Helen Bradley @ 6:54 amNo Comments links to this post

Saturday, March 15th, 2014

Scroll though Blend Modes in Photoshop – Mac and PC

scroll through blend modes on the mac

by Helen Bradley

Learn the keystrokes that help you quickly scroll through blend modes in Photoshop on the PC and Mac

On the PC, being able to scroll through the blend modes in the Layers palette is a simple as selecting one blend mode in the list then use the Up Arrow and Down Arrow key to go from one to the next.

On the Mac, it isn’t as easy but it (thankfully), can be done.

On the Mac, click in the Blend Modes list and select a blend mode. Then use the Shift + + or Shift + – keys to scroll up and down the list. Unlike on the PC, the Mac keys roll you around the list so, when you reach the bottom and press Shift + + once more you go right back to the top. Neat huh?

 

Helen Bradley

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Categories:Mac, photography, Windows

posted by Helen Bradley @ 5:44 pmNo Comments links to this post

Thursday, November 28th, 2013

Rev Up Your Photo workflow – Part 3 – Organizing, Fixing and Sharing images

In this final part of our workflow series we look at organizing and selecting images, fixing and sharing them.

 

Organizing and selecting images

Once you’ve imported your images, you’ll need to determine which of those you want to work with and which you will not. For this you will need to use a system that is supported by your software – it needs to be quick and easy to use so you can quickly identify the best of your photos.

If you have already backed up your images, you may determine that your master file of images will contain only the best of the images, so you might give a low rating or mark as reject any images that you don’t want to keep so you can later find and delete them. Whatever the case, you need to determine what your process is going to be and then work within this process to get the task done as quickly as possible.

For example, in Lightroom you can use the flag feature to pick or reject images as you move through them – you can do this using the letters P and X. If you use Reject (X) for images you want to delete you can later choose Photo > Delete Rejected Photos to remove them. Then you might work through the picked images and allocate a star rating to them to indicate their relative value.

In Bridge you have various options for managing images and one is to select a folder of images and choose View > Review Mode to view the images in review mode. Here you can drag and drop images from the panel to select or reject them. As you rotate around the images only those you haven’t dropped off the screen will be left in this view. This feature allows you to quickly move through your images, previewing them at a good size and determining which you want to keep or reject.

Depending how you are working, when you exit the view the images you had visible will be selected. If they are the worst images you can now delete them. If they are the best, you can, while still in Review Mode click the New Collection button in the bottom right of the screen and create a new collection for them. Back in Bridge you can right click the selected images and chose Label and then add a label or star rating to them.

In other programs such as Photoshop Elements and Picasa, you can apply star ratings to your images – in Photoshop Elements you can use 1-5 stars and in Picasa just a single star. In Picasa, click on an image or select multiple images and click the star button in the middle bottom of the Library window. When you apply a single star to an image in Picasa you can filter out only those starred images later on by clicking the star icon at the top of the program window.

 

Fixing Images

In many programs, you can apply basic fixes to multiple images at a time. For example, in Lightroom’s Library module if you are in Grid view you can select a series of images and apply one of a range of fixes to the images from the options in the Quick Develop panel. The Auto-Tone option, for example, automatically adjusts every image that you have selected with the appropriate fix for that image’s particular needs. You can also adjust the relative Exposure and Brightness and the White Balance.

In Photoshop Elements, you can select multiple images and click the Fix panel. Click Auto Smart Fix and the selected images will all have a basic fix applied to them. Here too you can choose Auto Color, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast or Auto Sharpen.

In Picasa, you can select an image and double click it to move to the edit module. When you have fixed the image you can choose Edit > Copy All Effects and then move back to the Library view. Select one or more images to apply these same changes to and choose Edit > Paste All Effects. The changes that you made to the first image will be pasted onto the other images.

Sharing images

When it comes to sharing your images some programs include built in tools that let you upload images direct to sharing sites from within the program. These integrated tools save you time – you don’t have to export the images and then upload and you can do it all in one step.

Lightroom, for example, is integrated with Facebook, Flickr and SmugMug allowing you to connect direct to your accounts with those services and upload images direct from inside Lightroom. If you are working in Picasa, you can upload direct to your web albums and you can send an image to your blog. In Photoshop Elements, you can share images in a number of ways including Flickr, Facebook and SmugMug.

 

In some cases, you may need a plug-in to integrate your software with an online site. For example the Picasa2Flickr plug-in for Picasa lets you send images direct from Picasa to Flickr. You’ll find this at http://picasa2flickr.sourceforge.net/index.html.

If you cannot link your software direct with a sharing site, look out for a download from your sharing site that lets you upload bulk images at a time such as one of the Flickr tools. While these aren’t a single step solution they can save time when you have a lot of images to upload and, if you make sure to include captions, titles and keywords in your editing program you can save having to do this when the images have been uploaded.

When it comes to managing your images, in most cases you have a choice of workflows – one that gets things done and one that gets things done efficiently and effectively. If you design a workflow that does things more quickly and more efficiently, you’ll get your shoots processed much faster and you can get back to taking more great photos.

 

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 4:46 pmNo Comments links to this post

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013

Rev Up Your Photo workflow – Part 2 – Keywords and Copyright Metadata

Continuing our look at revving up your photo editing workflow we look at keywording and adding copyright metadata

 

Keywording your images

One step that takes time now but will save time in future is keywording or tagging your images. The process involves adding descriptive words to your images that you can use later on to find images in your collection. For example you might add keywords for subjects’ names and the contents of the images. If you are selling images for stock you will need to use lots of keywords for each image to maximize the chance that someone looking for an image of this type will find it.

While some programs let you add keywords to images as you import them this isn’t always the best time to do so. The reason is that if you are importing a variety of images that all have different content you’ll only be able to include generic keywords at import. In most cases you will need to add detailed keywords to a few images at a time so you will need to add keywords after importing images.

To add keywords in Picasa, for example, select the images that you want to apply a keyword to and then select to display the Tags panel. Here you can type keywords to attach to the images. If you configure Quick Tags you can add them to an image or series of images by simply clicking on the image and then on the tag. Quick tags can be changed at any time so you can create a set of quick tags that are useful for a particular folder of images, use them to keyword those images then create a different set to use on another folder.

 

Lightroom offers a similar feature in its Library panel – here you can select the Keywording panel and then select images and apply keywords to them from the keyword suggestions list. You can also create keyword sets that are saved with Lightroom and which you can select to make it easier to add keywords to your images. By selecting multiple images at a time in Grid view you can apply selected keywords to those images all at once.

In Adobe Photoshop Elements, you can keyword images manually and, in some cases automatically. For example, if you have a folder of images of people, select the images and click the Start People Recognition button in the keyword tags area. The program will attempt to recognize faces in your images and you can then double click the purple icon that appears on the image to open and type the name of the person in the picture. Over time Photoshop Elements will offer a subset of likely names to choose from and it will get better at recognizing people. You can also apply Smart Tags to an image by clicking the Auto-Analyze button on the status bar. The program will auto-analyze your images for a set of predetermined characteristics such as faces, blurred, high contrast, motion and so on. This lets you quickly and easily isolate images that are blurred or low contrast images. In the Keyword Tags panel you can also create custom tags for your images grouping them in various categories such as people, places, events and other. Once a keyword is created you can drag and drop it onto an image or multiple images you have selected.

 

When adding keywords to your images it is important that the keywords are written to the files so that they will be available in other programs. For example, in Photoshop Elements, you can select a group of files and choose File > Write Keyword Tag and Properties Info to Photos to write the keyword data to the files. In Lightroom, this can be done through the Lightroom Catalog Preferences or you can select the images and then choose Metadata > Save Metadata to Files.

If you don’t manually save the keyword metadata to the files and if the program doesn’t do it automatically then, when you open the image in another application, the keywords and metadata that you have applied to the images won’t be visible. If you only ever use one program for working with your files this is less of an issue than if you use multiple applications. However, it is always a good idea to write the metadata to your files so that you won’t lose all your work if your program’s catalog becomes corrupt.

Most software that includes a download tool and other tools for organizing your images will contain a tool for adding keywords or tagging your images. While it takes time to define the keywords that describe your images and apply these to those images the benefit is that it is a very simple process later on to view images tagged with a particular keyword so you can find images even in very large collections very quickly.

Copyright Metadata

In some situations, you may want to add metadata to your images such as IPTC metadata indicating the creator of the image and copyright details. Some programs allow you to do this easily and others do not. For example, Photoshop Elements will let you add a Creator name and copyright details as you import your images but once the images have been imported you can only view this information in the Properties panel by choosing Window > Properties. The only metadata that can be changed is the data you view by selecting the General tab in the properties panel.

In Lightroom, you can add metadata to a file by opening the Metadata panel in the Library module and select the type of metadata to view, for example IPTC. You can then type your own details into the boxes that appear in the panel. You can also create a preset by clicking the preset dropdown list and select Edit Presets and create a preset with the data that you want to apply to all your images. You apply this to one or more images in your catalog by selecting those images in Grid view in the Library module and then select the preset to apply it to those images.

In Photoshop, you can apply metadata in Adobe Bridge by choosing Window > Workspace > Metadata to view the metadata panel and select one or more images in the preview area. You can now type the metadata details for those images and click the Apply button to apply the data to those images.

If you are capturing in the jpg format you can add some IPTC metadata to your images using the free program IrfanView. Download, install and launch the program and select a range of images from the Thumbnail view. Right click and choose JPG Lossless Operations > Set IPTC data to Select Files. Here you can set copyright information, keywords and other details to be applied to the selected jpg images.

 

Coming up in the final part of this series: organizing images, fixing and sharing them.

 

 

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 4:26 pm2 Comments links to this post

Monday, November 18th, 2013

Rev Up Your Photo workflow

Learn some tips and techniques to speed up your photo workflow.

When you return from a shoot or vacation with hundreds, if not thousands, of photos you need a smart workflow in place to process them. The more effective your workflow is, the less time you’ll waste on processing your images and the quicker you can get back to shooting. In this column, I’ll show you some techniques to use to streamline your workflow from downloading your images to adding metadata and keywords and then fixing and sharing the best of them.

Downloading

Before you begin to download any images from your camera you need a plan for storing and working on them. You should have a plan for how you will organize your images and how you will name your folders and whether the images will be renamed or not.

When it comes to structuring a system, be aware that what works best for someone else may not work best for you. You need to develop a system that you understand and that you can work with. Once you have a plan, it will help to write it down so you have a step by step process for working with the images from any shoot at any time. Any software that you use today or in future should be chosen so it supports this workflow.

Start by downloading images from your camera cards. How you do this can impact how easy it is to do other things later on. For example, if you’re using Lightroom and you have multiple cards from a shoot, you might consider downloading all the images from all your cards into one folder on your computer before importing the images into Lightroom. This way you will have all the images in the Current/Previous Import folder in your Catalog panel allowing you to isolate all these images to deal with them as a group.

In any application you will need to set the import dialog so that the downloaded images are handled in accordance with your image handling workflow. Programs like Photoshop Elements include a special photo downloader and if you accept its download defaults then your images will be stored subfolders by date. If this isn’t what you want to happen you need to change the settings before downloading so you don’t have to fix the problems later.

So, in Photoshop Elements Photo Downloader dialog, select the source location for your images and the place to store them in. While the default is your My Pictures folder you can change this as necessary. Select a subfolder for the images and then determine how to name this – either by date or a custom name. If your workflow calls for your images to be renamed then you can do so as you import them – there are options in this dialog to name files by date, or to apply a custom name and sequence number.

Taking the time to not only get your images into the right place the first time and to rename them on import will save you hours of work later on.

In addition, in Photoshop Elements for example, if you select the Advanced dialog, you can add creator and copyright metadata to the images as you import them – something that you can’t do later on. This Advanced dialog is the same dialog that you would use if you are importing images via Adobe Bridge but in the case of Bridge it is possible to edit and add metadata  later on.

Whichever program you are using, check the program’s import options carefully to see what features it includes for renaming files, organizing images into folders, applying simple fixes and adding metadata as you import the images. Anything that can be done automatically as you import your images will save time later on.

Making backups

If you store all your images on just one disk there is a risk that you will lose them if your disk crashes or something happens to your computer. As a precaution and as part of your import process, and before you do anything more to your images, you should create at least one backup copy of them.

Some programs like Lightroom make this easy to do. In Lightroom’s Import dialog you can chose to backup your images to a second location as part of the import process. This is only the case if you choose Copy, Move or Copy as DNG as the import option, if you choose Add this option is not available. In the File Handling panel is a checkbox you can select to make a second copy of the images to a different location.

In other programs, you may need to back up the images manually. For example, in Picasa you can select the images to back up and choose Tools > Back Up Pictures. This opens up a set of step-by-step panels from which you will first select a Backup set or create a new one. The you can choose the folders or albums to back up and then click to Burn these to a series of CDs or DVDs or copy to an external or network drive.

A  benefit of using this Picasa backup tool is that it will take note of which files you have backed up so that you won’t have to back them up again. This will reduce the time involved in backing up new downloads in future and will save you unnecessary duplication of effort.

Whatever your program offers, backing up is a task that should be done routinely whenever you download your images so you’ll be protected if your computer crashes or if you make mistakes while editing and need to restore an image from the backed up version.

 

In the next part of this series: Keywording and Copyright Metadata

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 4:09 pmNo Comments links to this post

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

JPEG vs RAW – what’s the difference and what should you use?

 

Learn the difference between capturing in jpg and raw and when to use each.

One key decision that every photographer needs to make is whether to capture images in jpg or raw formats. With newer and more advanced tools on the market for processing raw images, the incentive to move to capturing in raw is attractive. However, raw images will require additional processing and they are very large so, to help you understand the issues behind the question “jpeg or raw?” I’ll explain the difference between capturing in jpg and raw and why you might choose one over the other and when to do so.

What is in a format?

Before exploring when you might want to capture an image in jpg or raw, it’s worthwhile looking at the differences between these two file formats. The raw file format is a format which is a camera specific so the format of raw images from a Canon camera is different to the format of a raw image from a Nikon camera. The reason for this is that a raw format image contains the data captured by the camera’s sensor and it is unprocessed. Because each camera’s sensor is different, the basic raw format is proprietary to that camera manufacturer and it may even vary from one camera to another within a camera manufacturer’s own range.

Before you can use a camera raw image in a program such as Photoshop, you need to process it using either your camera manufacturer’s raw processing application or a tool such as Adobe Camera Raw. One downside of  capturing images in the raw format is that you need to do this preprocessing before you can use your images. If you capture in camera raw, you will be reliant on special software to be able to read your raw images in future in, say, 10 or 15 years’ time.

As a move away from the notion of a proprietary raw formats that are created by each camera manufacturer, Adobe recently released the dng or Digital Negative file format. This is an open format which can be used by camera manufacturers as an alternative to their own proprietary raw formats. It frees photographers from being tied to a specific manufacturer’s raw format and offers protection for the future simply because of the sheer number of people who will have images stored in this format. The format’s popularity should ensure that there will be programs available in future for most operating systems that can read and process these files.

Camera raw images, when captured in the camera manufacturer’s own format such as crw, cr2, nef or pef cannot be written to and can only be read from. For this reason, if you make changes to a camera raw image in a program such as Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, then the changes that you make to the image cannot be written to the original image file. Instead, they’re written to what is called a sidecar xmp file which stores details of the changes that you’ve made to the image. Camera raw image processing applications read the original camera raw file and the sidecar xmp file and display the image with the changes you have made to it. However you need to be careful that you do not move a raw file to another location and leave its sidecar xmp behind – if you do, you will lose any changes that you’ve made to the image. The Adobe dng file format avoids this problem as it is a file format that can not only be read from but also written to so changes can be stored in the original file.

Differences in data

The advantage of recording all the data captured by your camera’s sensor in a raw file whether it be your camera manufacturer’s own raw format or Adobe dng is that you have a wider range of image data than you would have if the image was saved as a jpg image. When an image is saved as a jpg image by your camera, it is scaled down considerably so that it is no longer a 32-bit image but is now a 8-bit image with only 256 levels of brightness.

Other changes that are made to the image include sharpening the image and the camera will also apply any white balance setting you have selected to the image. If you have other “in camera” settings configured such as variations to the image saturation, contrast and brightness then these adjustments will be made to the image before being saved as a jpg file. In addition because the jpg file format is a lossy and compressed file format you will lose some detail in saving the image even if you opt for saving at the highest quality.

In contrast, a dng or raw image is not adjusted and all the data that was available from the camera’s sensor will be in that file. Situations in which this can save you some grief is where you have under or over exposed the image or configured an incorrect white balance setting. If you capture in a raw format then you have a larger range of exposure adjustments available to be made inside a camera raw processor than you would have with the corresponding jpg image. In addition, because the white balance setting is not applied to a raw image, you can change the white balance setting later on without compromising the image.

The tools in Lightroom make it easy to apply changes to a range of raw images all at once.

File size differences

Because jpg images include only a subset of the data that the camera captured and camera raw images contain it all, there are significant file size differences between images captured in the jpg and the raw format. For the equivalent pixel size image, a raw image might be around 20MB in size where the corresponding jpg image would be around 5Mb in size. The reason is, of course, that the jpg image has less data in it and the data is also compressed.

One drawback to capturing raw images in the past has been the difficulty of processing these images. Many programs simply couldn’t read the wide range of raw image formats in use by the varying camera manufacturers. This meant that you were either limited to using your camera manufacturer’s own software to preprocess raw images or you needed to purchase an expensive application like Adobe Photoshop to do so. These days the dng format and many proprietary raw formats can be read by a number of applications including the free applications: Picasa and IrfanView.

IrfanView is one of the popular free programs that can display and edit dng and some other popular raw format images.


However, operating systems like Windows Vista and Windows 7 still do not include native support for dng or other raw formats so, when viewing a folder full of dng images you will see icons instead of thumbnails. There are some downloadable codecs available from http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/dng_Codec but they have limited application.

When to use which format

Now that we’ve investigated the difference between capturing in jpg, raw or dng, it’s time to look at when you might opt for one in preference to the other. If you already use a program that includes built-in support for camera raw images such as Picasa, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Corel Paintshop Photo Pro then you may opt to always shoot in raw or dng because of the ease at which you can work with your images – this is particularly the case with programs like Lightroom and Picasa.

On the other hand, if you typically shoot images to share online on sites like Facebook or Flickr and you don’t usually do much, if any, processing then jpg may be the best option as the files are smaller and you can quickly download them and then get them uploaded to your sharing site. For example, Flickr will let you upload full size jpg images but you can’t upload raw or dng images.

One advantage of capturing in jpg is that you have the flexibility of being able to determine the pixel dimensions of the image you will be capturing in the camera. Most cameras have varying size options available when capturing in the jpg format and also different compression options. If you’re only shooting snapshots for uploading to the web, then you don’t need very big images and you may find smaller jpg format images work as well.

That said, you need to accept that if you are capturing jpg format images you’re reducing the amount of image data that you have available and, if in the future, you decide that you want to do something special with a particular image, you won’t have the full range of image data there to do anything with..

If you’re shooting to sell images for stock, then you absolutely must capture images using the camera raw file format so that you have all the data in the image available to you. Many stock agencies will not accept images captured as jpg images because of the processing that’s applied to those images by the camera including the image sharpening. Stock agencies prefer unsharpened images so that the purchaser can then determine the amount of sharpening they want to apply in each specific case.

There is a way to “have the best of both worlds” and you can capture in both jpg and raw formats. Most cameras can capture jpg and raw or jpg and dng so you’ll get both files for each image that you shoot. You can then download both formats – use the jpg images for your day to day use and store the raw originals in case you ever need to work with those images in future.

 Picasa supports many raw formats so you can view and work with raw images in the same way as jpg images.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 3:45 pm1 Comment links to this post

Friday, November 8th, 2013

Depth of Field – how to use it in your photography

Once you  know how to achieve  different depths of field, the question then becomes when would you use this in your photography?

Once you understand how you can achieve different depths of field in your photography – the question then becomes when would you use this knowledge to craft better photos?

Portraits and a shallow depth of field

There are a number of situations where it is a good idea to have a shallow depth of field and one of these is for portrait and pet photography. In this case you will want to remove any distracting background from around your subject. When the background is cluttered or distracting, a shallow depth of field helps you to isolate the subject from the background.

To achieve this effect, you would do one of these things or a combination of them:

1    Use a zoom lens and zoom in to your subject,

2    Get closer to the subject, and

3    Set your camera to use a large aperture, such as f/2.8 – f/3.8.

When you do this, take care to focus carefully on the subject. One disadvantage of working with a very shallow depths of field is that the amount of the area in the image that is in focus is very small so if you don’t get your focus right, your subject will be out of focus. You need to make sure that what you want to see in focus is the area you are focusing on.

Photographing flowers and products

Another situation in which you may want to use a shallow depth of field is when photographing flowers. The closer you get to the flower the more likelihood the background will be attractively blurred.

In product photography, you may also want to get a shallow depth of field and you’ll find that in many cases, the shallower the depth of field, the more attractive the image is. The difference between a shallow depth of field and a deep depth of field can often be the difference between an attractive photograph and one that looks more like a snapshot.

Landscapes benefit from a deep depth of field

While a shallow depth of field is extremely attractive for portraits and many other types of photographs, when you’re shooting landscapes and cityscapes you will typically want the opposite to be the case and you will want a deep depth of field. For landscape photography, you’ll typically want everything in the image to be in focus.

When photographing landscapes photographers often talk about hyper-focal distance. The hyper-focal distance is the point at which you point your camera at to focus the shot so that everything from that point to infinity is in focus and, in addition, an area halfway from the hyper-focal distance to your camera is also in focus. The image shows you how this hyper-focal distance affects the depth of field.

For landscape photography, you’ll typically want to use a small aperture such as f/9 – f/11, a short focal length such as 17mm and be a good distance away from your subject. Calculating the hyper-focal distance then becomes the issue. In many cases, people simply opt to focus the camera at infinity as this typically gives good results without needing technical calculations.

Too much of a good thing

If you’re tempted to increase the depth of field by simply dialing down your aperture to the smallest possible size such as f/35 or so, think again. While it may seem that this will give you a very deep depth of field it can be counterproductive. At very small apertures an effect called diffraction kicks in and this can cause a decrease in quality in your images. Instead you need to find the sweet point at which the smaller aperture gives you a good depth of field but stop short of where it gets so small that light is diffracted decreasing the image quality.

DSLR vs Point and Shoot for controlling Depth of Field

When you’re looking to achieve different effects with different depths of field, you’ll find that a digital SLR will give you much better results than a point and shoot camera. The reason for this has to do with the relative sensor size of the cameras – the larger the sensor size – the more control you’ll have over the depth of field.

Understanding depth of field and how it impacts the images that you take is a key way that you can impact the quality of your images. Choosing the right option for each shooting situation and knowing how to set your camera to achieve the desired result will enhance your photos.

 

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 3:29 pm1 Comment links to this post

Tuesday, October 29th, 2013

Controlling Depth of Field in your Photographs

Learn what depth of field is and how your camera settings affect it

Some subjects need to be fully in focus to be shown at their best and others need dreamy out of focus backgrounds to create the right setting. The feature that is key in both situations is called depth of field – it gives you both that ‘everything in focus’ look and it also gives you soft out of focus look. Depending on what you are photographing getting the depth of field right is often the difference between a snapshot and great image.

I’ll explain what depth of field is and how to control it with your camera settings.

What is depth of field?

At its simplest, depth of field is the zone of sharp focus in front of, around and behind the subject in your photo when you are focused on that subject. When you have a shallow depth of field, only a small area around the subject will be in focus and quite often only a small part of the subject will be in focus. Everything else in the image will be out of focus with things further away from the subject, either in front of or behind the subject, being more out of focus the further away they are. This image has a shallow depth of field – it’s a great way to shoot flowers:

When the depth of field is deep, nearly everything in the shot is in focus. You control the depth of field in your images by adjusting the camera’s settings for aperture, adjusting the focal length of the lens and the distance you are from the subject. This image has a deep depth of field – that’s important as we want to see everything in this scene from the grass in front of us to the horizon miles and miles away.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Control depth of field with aperture

One way that you can control the depth of field in an image is to change the aperture that you are using. For this, you will need to have your camera set to Aperture Priority or Manual mode. Selecting an aperture that is very large, such as f/1.4 to f/2.8 will give you a shallower depth of field around your subject. The aperture used for this image was a huge f1.4 so only a small portion of it is in focus:

 

If you shoot with a small aperture, such as f/9 to f/11 or more you will find that more of the image will be in focus, which gives you a deeper depth of field. If everything else stays the same, the difference in the aperture setting you use can result in a very different image. The aperture used here was a small f11:

One benefit of shooting with a large aperture, such as f/1.4 to f/2.8, is that a lot of light is getting into the camera so you can use a fast shutter speed. Conversely, a down side of shooting with a small aperture such as f/9 to f/11 or more is that less light gets into the camera so you will need to use a slower shutter speed  or a higher ISO value. In some cases you will be shooting with such a slow shutter speed that you will need to use a tripod.

Control depth of field with focal length

The focal length of your lens can also have an impact on the depth of field when you use this to make a subject bigger. So, if you are shooting with a 50 mm lens, you will get a much deeper apparent depth of field than you would if you were capturing an image with a 200 mm lens at the same aperture and if, in both situations the subject size is the same. The depth of field is actually not significantly different but it looks different because there is more background in an image when you capture it with a 50mm lens than you will get when you capture it with a 200 mm lens. So a rough rule of thumb is that the more zoomed into the subject that you are, the shallower the depth of field will appear to be. This giraffe was shot at f5.6 which isn’t a particularly large aperture but it was shot at 300mm zoom so the giraffe is quite sharp and the background is nicely out of focus:

 

If you are shooting landscapes you will get best results when you use a short lens such as a 28 mm lens as the image will appear to have a much deeper depth of field. On the other hand, a zoom lens can be a good lens to use when shooting portraits because the further you’re zoomed in to the subject the less background will be in the image and the shallower depth of field you will appear to have. This image was shot at f11 with a 28mm lens so everything from the lamp post to the building is in focus:

Control depth of field by varying the distance from your subject

The distance between the subject and the camera is another way that you can impact depth of field. So, for example, if you photograph a subject close up, such as in the region of up to 10 feet away, then the depth of field will be much shallower and more of the image behind the subject and a little in front of the subject will be out of focus. On the other hand, if you move the subject further away from you so that the subject is 20 feet away then the depth of field will be much deeper and there will be a lot more of the image in front and behind the subject in focus. This image was shot with a 200mm lens – the singer was relatively close to the camera  and the background was some distance behind him so the musician is in focus and the background nicely out of focus:

Whenever you’re considering depth of field, you should also note that, when the subject is in focus, the amount of the image that is in focus behind the subject will be greater than the amount of the image that is in focus in front of the subject. The ratio is approximately one-third to two-thirds, so the depth of field will extend roughly one-third in front of the subject and two-thirds behind the subject.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:03 am1 Comment links to this post

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