I’m happy to announce the immediate release of 30 royalty-free replacement sky images. Each image allows you to create the look of a long exposure image with your own photographs.
Today, Adobe released Camera Raw 13.2. Like most updates to Camera Raw, this one includes new camera and lens support. However, Adobe has added a new feature in Camera Raw 13.2 called “Super Resolution.” This new feature uses AI technology to double the linear pixel dimensions of your image files, including RAWs. The result is an image with 4x the resolution of the original with remarkable detail preservation. This new feature creates a “supersized” DNG format raw file from your camera raw image that can be opened in Photoshop. This new feature is not yet in Lightroom, but it will be arriving soon.
When photographing landscapes at twilight that include the moon, proper exposure can be nearly impossible to achieve. That’s because while the dim light of twilight requires a relatively long exposure, the moon requires nearly a sunny-16 exposure. As a result, there is no one camera exposure setting that will get the scene right. Your options are:
All of the above options have drawbacks. In an under-exposed image, you’ll be prone to getting noise when you try to recover shadow details, and you may or may not be able to recover detail in the moon. If the moon is very small in the frame (as with wide-angle lenses), you can make the conscious choice to just allow it to blow out completely. Bracketing exposures is another option, but I’ve found that traditional exposure blending or HDR tone-mapping just doesn’t quite produce the results I’d like, because the blown-out areas around the moon often bleed into the sky or are exacerbated by thin clouds.
Recently while I was in the field, I decided to try a variation on exposure blending. I captured two shots: the first was exposed only for the moon, and the second shot was properly exposed for the landscape. I then used Adobe Photoshop to combine the images, but instead of just blending them (as with a traditional composite), I had to completely remove the blown-out moon from the landscape photo using Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill tool.
When I got my infrared-converted Nikon Z6 mirrorless camera, a colleague told me to watch out for banding in my images. I have never seen banding in images from my normal Nikon Z cameras, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
It turns out that in rare instances, I can detect slight banding patterns, especially if I’ve made strong local contrast adjustments, like the Structure slider in Silver Efex Pro 2.
While Adobe Lightroom Classic is a powerful image editor and workflow management tool in its own right, there are certain things that it cannot do. To go beyond Lightroom, you need a pixel editor such as Adobe Photoshop. In this class, I will teach you how and why to utilize Adobe Photoshop alongside Lightroom. I will present a coherent Lightroom/Photoshop workflow strategy and take you through the features of Photoshop that every Lightroom user should know, including:
