Photosensitive » Colour Digital

Montreal Botanical Gardens

Jordan — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 04:26:41 +0000

At the Montreal Botanical Gardens on a November evening.

“Popping” images with Unsharp Masking

Jordan — Fri, 01 May 2009 01:13:12 +0000

Over at The Online Photographer (a site that has lately become regular reading for me) a recent post by Ctein linked back to an excellent summary of the benefits of using low-level, high-radius Unsharp Masking as a way to get images to “pop”. This is a technique that I use on almost every scanned image — for lack of a better description, it increases contrast “locally” without making the whole image look contrasty. Ctein explains how it works better than I ever could, though he does use different settings (I typically sharpen at 20% with a 20- or 30-pixel radius, while Ctein uses 8-15% over 60 pixels).

I remember feeling elated when I discovered this technique. It gives images just a bit of an edge without any hint of that nasty over-sharpened or posterized look. You can use it in pretty much any image-editing software that provides an Unsharp Mask tool. It’s simple and definitely worth trying.

Bird Of Paradise

Jordan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:32:55 +0000

This started as a full-colour digital image to which I applied three B&W split-toning layers (with masks on different parts of the image). Split-toning is possible in the traditional darkroom, but the range of tones that can be reliably generated is much smaller, and the process is a lot less predictable.

Anyway, this flower is called a “Bird of Paradise”, and I found it in full bloom along a main street in downtown Naples, Florida.

Wish you were here

Jordan — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:36:46 +0000

I just returned from a short trip to sunny Florida with a whole bunch of digital shots in tow, including a mess of infrared images. Here’s one to whet your appetite.

The Set Table

Jordan — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:29:13 +0000

Ready for dinner at the Academy of Spherical Arts.

Late-summer coneflowers

Jordan — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:08:51 +0000

I spent the week in sunny Rochester, NY, but haven’t scanned the images from that trip yet. In the meantime, here are some late-summer coneflowers.

New photo subject

Jordan — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:55:14 +0000

2,410 g (5 lbs and 5 oz) of newborn baby boy make an attractive photo subject!

Leaves

Jordan — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:25:50 +0000

Autumn comes a couple of weeks earlier in Montreal than it does here in Toronto.

Schoolhouse, Trinity, Newfoundland

Jordan — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 20:08:54 +0000

Revisiting some more pictures from last summer’s trip to Newfoundland.

Gun Hill, Trinity, Newfoundland

Jordan — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:40:15 +0000

This is a re-work of a photo I took on our trip to Newfoundland last summer. I tried to imitate the somewhat overwrought, “compressed” feel that’s so popular these days with the digital crowd — here I used some adjustment layers with Soft Light blending in PS and a couple of sharpening steps. The effect is dramatic, if not completely realistic.