Dateline: Eastern Kazakhstan The weather has cleared and we’re making good time across the seemingly endless rolling grasslands that cover this half of the ninth largest country in the world. We’re still spending a lot of time dodging potholes that would be considered mappable geographic features in any other country, but this road from Astana […]

For the traveling photographer—or anyone who shoots in the field—the release of the iPad offered the possibility of a much lighter, easier field kit. Unfortunately, for the first few years of the iPad’s existence, the software did not exist to facilitate a pro-level workflow. Over the last few months, though, a few new apps have […]

Macro photography—the process of shooting extreme close-ups of things—has been popular for as long as there have been cameras. But as you might expect, digital technology, both hardware and software, has made it possible to shoot macro photographs that would have been impossible to achieve with film. And one of the most important macro-related innovations […]

There’s a curious irony to the “death of film.” As the rise of digital shooting has caused camera makers, film manufacturers, and processing facilities to abandon traditional analog technology, it has also created more interest in film-based processes than ever before. Hobbyist photographers who’ve never set foot in a darkroom now have an aesthetic for […]

Pros: Dramatically improved Camera Raw; simple but useful video editing; great new Crop tool; improved performance; improved typographic controls; great wide-angle distortion correction Cons: Bridge sees no discernible improvement; interface changes may bother some Score: 90 It’s been a year since the last update to Adobe’s Creative Suite. CS 5.5 shipped in May of 2011, […]

Pros: Some nice editing tools, good local filtering and rating, cool journal facility. Cons: Metadata is not standard IPTC; edits have limited latitude; iOS sandboxing makes for complex multi-app workflow. Score: 7.5/10 It’s taken a surprising amount of time, but Apple has finally released a version of iPhoto for the iPad. Apple no longer seems […]

Pros: Great selection and compositing tools; very good retouching tools. Cons: Missing some simple, critical features. Interface needs polish. Limits to file size. All original metadata gets stripped out. Rating: 7/10 It’s been two years since the release of the iPad, but Adobe has finally made an entry into the iOS image editing market with […]

“Has that been Photoshopped a lot?” I sometimes hear that question when showing one of my photos to someone, and I have to confess that it bugs me. Not because it’s prying into my photographic process, or because it’s a technical remark rather than a response to the actual image, but because it reveals how […]

A few years ago, I went to an exhibit of Impressionist paintings at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. At one point, I rounded a corner into another gallery room. Just by chance, the room cleared out as I entered, and I found myself at the perfect distance for viewing Monet’s […]

In the first part of this series, I introduced histograms: handy graphs generated by cameras and image-editing software that you can use to analyze a photo’s exposure. Part 2 of this series will concentrate on using histograms as a tool for shooting better photographs. Knowing what’s wrong with your current exposure doesn’t do you much […]