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Mike Johnston writes in a brief essay about over-saturation of digital images: Why is inaccuracy in color rendering simply a given, while a little blurring of fine detail resolution or a touch of noise in the shadows are so adamantly not tolerated? It's widely accepted that we can adjust the white balance of an image. [...]

Aside from Aperture 2's new Recovery and Black Point tools, the tool that's impressed me the most has been the Retouch Brush. I had a love/hate relationship with the "Spot and Patch" tool in Aperture 1.0, if by "love" you mean hate and by "hate" you mean hate. The Retouch Brush, on the other hand, [...]

I often see people trash Aperture's "Levels" adjustment tool. These people typically state that Apple should have borrowed, bought, stolen, or otherwise implemented the "Curves" control from Photoshop as if it's a given and anything less is just plain stupid. Moronic. Inconceivable. I grew up using Curves. We all did, didn't we? I've come to [...]

Today I spent a little time playing with a new site that integrates with flickr. It's called "photophlow, and the owner describes the site as: photophlow is a way to share flickr photos in real-time with your friends, and is a good way to discover new photos in a social way or receive more immediate [...]

I skimmed a book in Barnes and Noble and wrote down quite a few tips. The book was How to Photograph Your Life and the concept was that the author used what amounted to a point-and-shoot camera to photograph the images. He'd usually show you an example of a "bad" photo, then an example of [...]

If you're well beyond the "beginner" phase in photography, have a little free time to work on a project that could be fairly successful, and the interest in combining those two things, get ahold of me. I've recently re-thought a lot of the UDSLR project I've had on a back burner for a few years [...]

Later this week I expect a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens to arrive at my house. It should come with a 1.4x teleconverter and a drop-in circular polarizing filter. The 300/2.8 is perhaps one of the finest lenses Canon makes. Its average overall rating is a perfect 10 at FredMiranda, and many say [...]

This is simply an experiment, but one I'd call relatively successful. I took three exposures of the local Outback near my house. The scene has a wide range of light and dark tones, and thus was suitable for an HDR technique. The three images (+/- 2 stops) are included along the top row. I picked [...]

Sometimes Aperture 2.0's hue selector yields some surprising results. Moving around within this bright sun, I can grab just about every color: blues, yellows, greens, reds, oranges, purples… That makes sense, and should serve as a warning: don't try to select hues in super-bright or super-dark areas, or you'll get similarly surprising results. You can [...]

Aperture 2.0 arrived today. The upgrade process went smoothly until Aperture began updating previews. I would rather it have given a progress bar and insisted it do that work modally rather than as a background task. The app was unusable during that time anyway. FlickrExport fortunately works with 2.0 out of the box, and I've [...]

Now that Aperture 2.0 is out, with "image adjustment plugin support," I'm curious what kind of plugins people might want to see made. My personal list is rather short. Great noise reduction (there are a few good ones out there). A complete HDR plugin. A panorama stitcher. A plugin that can flip images horizontally and [...]

A few people have asked (here, here, and in email and IM) about submitting photos for or joining the Photo Battle Blog. I'd like to accommodate the requests, and if possible, I will - just not at the current site. In fact, given the relative success of the project, I'd like to propose a little [...]

I'm going to wait for my upgrade version to arrive (I paid for two-day shipping, hoping to get it by Friday), but based on the Aperture pages and some "first impressions" posts by others, here are my first impressions.

I'll keep this short and sweet: I've started a "photo battle blog" here: http://pic.nslog.com/. Two pictures are posted daily by two people (one of them me). You can click the images to view them at their full size (800 x whatever) and then click a button below to vote for the one you prefer. Please, [...]

I knew Orlando had an upside-down building for the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum, but the theme appears to be spreading.