Review Digital Camera World 10-24-2013

Digital Camera World

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Holga Effect: Photoshop techniques for cool retro images Oct 23rd 2013, 23:01, by jmeyer By adding deliberate ‘camera mistakes‘ like light leakage, vignetting and grain you can give any photo a cool toy camera look. The Holga effect is perhaps the most popular of these effects. In this tutorial we show you how to use a few simple Photoshop effects to achieve the look of a retro Holga camera. Your camera has been designed to help you capture accurate colours in a variety of lighting conditions. You can shoot in portrait or landscape format, which enables you to produce different compositions when capturing a landscape in-camera. By using a low ISO setting your photos can be free of noise, but this can make your digitally captured landscapes appear too clean and clinical. Here, we'll show you how to add character to a digital landscape by mimicking a variety of typical artefacts produced by a toy camera, such as the Holga. In the early 1980s, cheap and cheerful Holga cameras were churned out in China. These pre-digital film cameras had plastic lenses, which caused dramatic vignetting (or darkening) and blurring around the edge of each frame. The colours produced by a Holga often had strange shifts in hue, giving the image a distinctive cross-processed look. Prints produced by a Holga were grainy, which helped give the images a gritty documentary feel, and due to the shape of the sensor, Holga-produced prints always came in a square format. Here we'll show you how to use Photoshop Elements to endow your pictures with a variety of Holga-style artefacts, as well as tweaking colour hue and adding grain. We'll even simulate the dramatic light leakage effects caused by cracks in the camera's plastic casing. How to create a Holga effect in Photoshop: steps 1-4 01 Open your source file In Elements, go to File>Open and select your image. If it’s a raw-format photo like ours it will open in the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) editor. Because you'll be adding a range of creative special effects to the shot, open it in the standard Photoshop editor. Click Open Image.   02 It's hip to be square To turn your portrait oriented photograph into a square print, as is unique to the Holga, grab the Crop tool from the Tools palette. Hold down the Shift key to constrain the tool so that it draws a square. Click and drag the cursor to select part of the image and hit the Return key to apply the crop.   03 Cross-processed colours Click the Create Adjustment Layer icon in the Layers palette and choose Hue/Saturation. Blues tend to have a greenish tint when shot with a Holga. To recreate this look, choose Blues from the Edit menu and drag Hue to -62. Enhance the wheat by increasing the Saturation of the Yellows to +20. Click OK.   04 Add a vignette To make the edges of the shot fade to black, drag the Background layer onto the Create A New Layer icon. Label the copy Vignette. Now go to Filter>CorrectCameraDistortion. Drag the Amount slider to -100 and Midpoint to +12 to tighten the vignette, and click OK. PAGE 1 – How to create a Holga effect in Photoshop: steps 1-4 PAGE 2 – How to create a Holga effect in Photoshop: steps 5-8 PAGE 3 – How to create a Holga effect in Photoshop: steps 9-12 PAGE 4 – How to create a Holga effect in Photoshop: steps 13-16 PAGE 5 – How we created our Holga effect READ MORE Best photo editing tips for beginners: 18 quick fixes to common image problems 34 Photoshop effects every photographer must try once Photoshop reflection effect: how to add water to your landscapes Image Sharpening: how to bring out more detail in your favourite photos Raw format vs JPEG: how much can you REALLY recover in raw? Exposure compensation: how your meter gets it wrong and what you can do about it Oct 23rd 2013, 10:58, by jmeyer Your camera’s metering system is a powerful and intelligent tool. But it doesn’t always get it right. In our latest photography cheat sheet we reveal how your camera can be easily fooled, what exposure compensation function is and how this function can rescue your images. One of the most crucial things to understand about exposure is how your camera measures light. Get to grips with this and all your exposure anxieties should disappear in a flash. In essence your camera is trying to make everything a mid-tone grey, so if you take a piece of white card and photograph it with the exposure your camera recommends the image should appear grey. Likewise, if you photograph a piece of black card it too should appear grey. All light meters, including the one in your camera, have been calibrated to do this, so you need to arm yourself with this information and use it to your advantage. Of course, no scene you're ever likely to photograph is going to be one tone, it's probably to be made up lots of areas of bright and dark tones and colours. This is why there are several metering modes to choose from, and, depending on what you're shooting, you'll need to use different ones. Exposure compensation explained: download our cheat sheet Click on the infographic to see the larger version Despite being wonderfully clever, your camera won't always know exactly how you want to expose your scene. It might be that you want your image to be light and airy or dark and moody, or simply that there's a dominance of bright light that's fooling the in-camera meter. In cases like this, if you're working in program (P), aperture-priority (A) or shutter-priority (S) mode, you can use the exposure compensation feature on your camera to help you out. Simply hold down the +/- button and move the thumb dial to the right to make your images brighter (+EV) or to the left (-EV) to make them darker. It's quite easy to forget to set it to zero again, so if at a later time you're wondering why your exposures are looking too dark or too light, it could be that you've still got some exposure compensation dialled in. READ MORE 10 common exposure problems every photographer faces (and how to overcome them) Photography Bascis: the No. 1 cheat sheet for metering and exposure What is color temperature: free photography cheat sheet Expose to the right: the camera technique every landscape photographer must know Histogram: photography cheat sheets for achieving perfect exposure

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