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The ABC of Photography – Curves

The ABC of Photography – Curves

This powerful Photoshop tool enables you to adjust the exposure and contrast of an image. By altering the shape of the curve, different areas of tone can be lightened or darkened by varying amounts. By altering the curves for each of the different colour channels, the colour balance of the image can also be altered to create special effects, or simply to correct for unwanted colour casts.

Elements’ version of Curves, called Adjust Colour Curves, is more limited than Photoshop’s Curves.

Sources:  Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School

 

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The ABC of Photography – Crop factor

The ABC of Photography – Crop factor

 Sensors of several different sizes are used in D-SLRs, and this size affects the angle of view offered by a particular lens. The smaller the sensor, the narrower the angle of view. The ‘crop factor’ is to convert the actual focal length of a lens to the effective focal length (EFL – see below). The crop factor for Four Thirds and Micro Four Thirds models is 2x; the crop factor for most popular D-SLRs is 1.5x or 1.6x. Full-frame D-SLRs need no focal length conversion, so they have a crop factor of 1x.

Sources:  Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School

 

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The ABC of Photography – Converging verticals

The ABC of Photography – Converging verticals

A term used to describe the effect of parallel lines  getting closer together, particularly the two sides

of a building, or a section of a building, when shooting from a low angle of view.

Sources:  Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School

 

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The ABC of Photography – Contrast range

The ABC of Photography – Contrast range

 A measurement of the difference in brightness between the very darkest and lightest parts of an image. See brightness range.  

Sources:  Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School

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The ABC of Photography – Continuous autofocus

The ABC of Photography – Continuous autofocus

This is an autofocus setting in which the focus is constantly adjusted until the shutter is actually fired. It’s especially useful for moving subjects such as in wildlife or sports photography, where it would be unhelpful for the focus distance to be locked as soon as it’s initially found.

Sources:  Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School

 

 

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The ABC of Photography – Contact print/sheet

The ABC of Photography – Contact print/sheet

Contact prints are photographic images made by laying one or more film negatives on a sheet of photographic paper, usually under a sheet of glass, and exposing it to light. In the traditional wet darkroom, a contact sheet is usually the first stage of printing an image.

Sources:  Wikimedia.org, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School

 

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The ABC of Photography – Compression

The ABC of Photography – Compression

The process of reducing the sizes of files such as digital images, so that they use less storage capacity and are faster to upload and download. See lossless compression and lossy compression.

Sources:  Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School

 

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The ABC of Photography – Complementary colours

The ABC of Photography – Complementary colours

Also known as ‘opposite colours’, these are pairs of colours that create a strong contrast. On the traditional colour wheel they are red/green, yellow/violet and blue/ orange, while the CMYK and RGB models use red/cyan, green/ magenta and blue/yellow.

Sources:  Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School