In today’s video, I’m going to show you how to un-clip any photo.
Fixing a photo at this level may seem difficult at a glance but it’s actually not hard and we’re going to make short work of this. I’m going to show you what to do when NON of that is enough and you have an image so clipped that it seems like it’s useless. This is how you can fix ANY clipped photo.
If you expose well you can usually get rid of clipping and have stunning dynamic range using simple sliders, presets like Natural HDR or Filmist presets with a few of its dynamic chemical mods.
So for me there are 3 levels of clipping. Here’s why it happens and how to fix it every time.
You can also DOWNLOAD the RAW file I use in this to follow along.
White balance defines the color temperature of the real-world light you’re capturing in relation to your sensor based on middle grey. Then the software can set it to appear balnaced. OK, so what is white balancing in photography? Well, it’s usually second to every other setting on your camera.
Photographers make you fret so much about What White Balance because they don’t understand how it works I’ve been doing this for 20 years and made many arrogant mistakes. So I’m going to explain it practically in this video.
Time to Stop worrying about what white balance is!
So do you need to white balance? Usually, you can do it in the post, leaving it on auto in the camera. If you shoot JPEG only pay a little more attention and make sure it’s visually the way you want it in the camera. With RAW, you don’t need to worry about it at all.
So Gavin, what is White Balancing in photography then?
When editing in Lightroom I’ve often said… Good presets should NOT touch WB. When I make presets for Lightroom and Styles for Capture One like Filmist or Natural HDR, they are WB-free. It’s part of why they work great on any photo you use them on.
White balance helps you control the warm and cool tint of a photo. Like the base hues, separate from other developed settings. WB gadgets are almost never needed. Especially if you shoot RAW since all possible variations of white balance are in the RAW file.
There’s really no WRONG white balance, but…
Why is white balance so confusing then? It was not like this in the film days. The hype over White Balance came after pros started using digital. It gets very technical. But back in the film days, we had two or three white balance options. We even used the “wrong” ones at times for creative styles.
Don’t use it for effects! White balance is for light color correction. If I want a gold look like this, for example, I could crank the temperature slider right and adjust the tint. But WB does not work great as an extreme and it does not copy to other photos. Strong looks should be done with good use of color channels and curves. In this case, I just used the Black Gold preset, from Gold-Chrome.
Digital arrived and companies created products to “correct White Balance”. In reality, most photographers don’t need anything for White Balance. Because anything goes if it works in your final look.
This is not laziness. If you’ve seen my videos or attended my Shadow hackers class, you know I’m huge about getting it right on camera. But on a RAW file WB settings literally make no change to your file. They simply add a marker in the file to tell the RAW processor what you set it to.
Use Auto WB in the camera, not in the software!
You can leave the camera to Auto WHY and it usually makes it look very good. Auto WB in software like Lightroom, Capture One, etc however usually messes it up. I don’t know why, but it’s not at all the same and usually makes the photo ugly.
Look at this example. The Camer Auto WB was fine. After processing this with the Filmist Portra 400 preset. I warmed it up. Not because it was more “correct” but because I felt the warm light worked well.
Keep it simple, instead of making this a distraction. If you follow this guide you will never have to worry about White Balance. You’ll use it as needed to balance your photo to the color tints that work for you. What a grey card says is correct does really matter. Sometimes you want a warmer or cooler look and in the end, the look. Make every photo yours.
I hope this helps you understand what is white balancing in photography and what it’s not. Leave a comment if you have feedback. – Gavin Seim
This is a primer to my Shadow Hackers workshop. If you have not yet signed up for Shadow Hackers do it HERE.
Photography is all about tone, but not how people think.
In today’s primer video, I’ll use Black and white photography as a reference and we’ll start hunting shadows. This still applies to color because with this you can learn to people’s attention ONLY where you want it.
You can’t just have BLACK but you need black!
I love shooting in black and white to help me see tone better, even if I return to color. That tone-based sight makes you see better. It makes you plan your image to amaze.
My mentor Ken Whitmire died about 5 years ago now but I will never forget one of the most important lessons he taught me. Today we’ll look at some basics and histograms and in Shadow Hackers, we’ll go deeper.
The Birds, by Gavin Seim
“Tone” Ken said – “It’s the least used and least understood aspect of photography”.
That knowledge has driven me to discover something more. What I learned from that is that tone is complex but also simple Photographers are not using tone because they are afraid of it.
There are histograms, exposure charts, tools for luminosity making and tone, and RAW and actions. I even make some of them like
I realized that a rich tone starts with blacks. Zone 0, Zone 12 for you Ansel Zones Fans. If you stop being afraid of blacks, it changes the way you see and builds photos everywhere because you start seeing that contrast
Shoot shadows a bit and watch what happens…
Take the time to watch this video till the end. If you apply what’s shown here your blacks, your tone and as a result, your entire photography game will level up.
I’ve also been focusing on the latest editing tools I make to make finding shadows easier. Tools like Blackroom and Lumist. completely change how I can manipulate the shadow.
I also uploaded a FREE sampler pack from my Silver 4, the black and white Lightroom presets. Play with those or the Capture One Styles are also included. Watch how blacks are being used to do what we’re seeing in this video. See tones first, regardless of whether you’re photographing in black and white or color.
Don’t miss Shadow Hackers because in it we’ll go deeper and I’ll show you the entire process to master this – Gavin Seim
The Fuji worm invasion came after the film! In today’s video, I’ll show you how to fix it.
I want to tell you a story as we continue the LR vs C1 experiments because today I going to show more important ways to control details like the wormy artifacts sometimes caused by ISO noise.
I was starting photography in the late 90’s when I saved up for a Canon EOS 3. Oh I thought I was the coolest ever (hint, I was not)
I devoured the magazines. In those days we talked about fine-grain films like the new Portra 400, but words like worms and color noise were not topics. 1600 ISO was about the limit and it was noisy. Take it or leave it!
These days I’ll sit for hours and tinker with a formula for presets like Natural HDR 4 to get the best detail and tone from our files. Photographers that use presets actions and tools get better results. Because they see more without working harder.
35mm film was like having 10-20 megapixels.
This was me in the early 2000’s with my prized EOS 3.
Serious pros of the day said 35mm was not enough. Strangely they downgraded a few years later to the 6MP generation of digital SLR’s.
No matter. My EOS 3 cost $1000 without a lens and I used it for years, starting out my portrait and wedding work and being the official photographer at the local speedway. It had eye control focus, meaning it focused where you looked in the viewfinder. It did not detect the subject’s eyes like today’s cameras. It was just cool and it worked, some of the time.
Each Saturday I would go early to the speedway and pre-sell photos for 15 bucks. Then I would sit all night in the center field taking photos, playing with pans, and getting dusty. On Monday I developed 6-10 rolls of film, sort 4×6 prints, store the negatives and give the prints to my racers, hoping to profit about $200
That 35mm film with it’s noisy ISO 800 grain was what I had and I made it work and I learned a lot in that dusty center field.
But noisy was relative and more organic then. It was silver. These films were classic and looked beautiful. The formulas I’ve created in Filmist presets are more high-res than we had then, but they look great because they look like film.
PS: Download my FREE Filmist pack to get my noise presets and the film looks if you missed it. You’ll see what I mean about film color and detail.
Today I think about the hurdles we had to get a good print and how many stages of noise and artifacts and dust and scratches could be introduced.
Today we pixel peep and panic over a little blip in a sensor or a little noise that as I showed in last weeks video is easy to clean up with good use of detail and grain tools
Watch my worms video and learn how to control detail.
I love doing testing. It’s experimenting like in this week’s video that help us understand more. It’s that hunt that results is tools like my presets and like Emulsion 3 and Lumist for Photoshop.
So this week I uploaded another video looking at more grain and noise. It’s a focus on Fuji files, but also another look at LR vs C1 and how it will handle noise regardless of what camera your worms and artifacts come from.
That’s all for this week. I’m hitting the streets looking for light like I found here and processed with Filmist. Come Monday I’ll be back to my experiments, working on formulas and ideas for next week’s email.
See you then, Gavin Seim
Fuji X100V ISO 800, Filmist process and Gavs detail preset
In Lightroom, Capture One RAW, ISO noise is a big problem… Or is it?
There are lots of De-Noise tools. I’ve owned most and reviewed more thru the years. The story behind me obsessing over noise goes back to the early RAW processing days and I’ll show you in today’s video how to avoid that pasty digital noise reduction look and switch it for a rich detailed film look.
I made you noise and grain filmic preset for Lightroom and a style Capture One.
This week’s discovery is so important that I made a free UPDATE for FILMIST with what I discovered. I even updated the Filmist FREE pack to include one of the presets.
Get Filmist complete or FREE here and download my detail and noise preset I’m using in the video. I made it as a Lightroom preset or a Capture One Style.
How to correctly reduce noise and use grain in LR and C1
There are two kinds of noise. Luminance and color. Both need some processing, but NOT as people think. Noise will be the friend you’re looking for to make photos amazing. I started exploring these detail techniques when I made the filmic looks for my Silver 4 black and white presets pack.
I explore this idea more when I made the new Natural HDR 4 presets as I created formulas like Night Mode preset for dark photos.
Then I saw it! That’s what this week’s video is about.
Great edits are about the formulas and how we use light. Whether you make your own or start with tools like mine. To that end, I’ve been tinkering more explain the solution to most noise problems. Including worms and artifacts that can plague our files.
So today I’m finally going to show you what I discovered about the noise that turned into a little workshop of its own. Watch the new video and I’ll make this easy. It doesn’t really matter what RAW editor you use.
Watch the video…
This works like magic and it’s why you need to STOP removing your noise and start leveraging it in your photography. Leave a comment if you have questions and I’ll see you next time.
This was me in the early 2000’s with my prized EOS 3.
There are lots of De-Noise tools. I’ve owned most and reviewed more thru the years. The story behind me obsessing over noise goes back to the early RAW processing days and I’ll show you in today’s video how to avoid that pasty digital noise reduction look and switch it for a rich detailed film look.