Photoshop

The photo above is quite a striking one, and we recently featured it on our Facebook wall. It was shot by Mike Finn, a photo enthusiast who loves to create awesome scenes. After closely inspecting the photo, we thought it would be great to ask him how it was created.

Can you take a guess? We talked to Mike about how he created it. Here's how.

This week in the news: Fujifilm updates its cameras; Zeiss makes an exciting announcement; Photoshop Touch gets updated for the Retina Display, and more.

This is your B&H Photo Pulse News Roundup for September 7th, 2012.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest news as it breaks.

Dodging and burning is a technique where portions of a photograph are selectively darkened (burning) or lightened (dodging). This is where you can add emphasis to certain portions of a photograph, or just bring back detail in certain areas. It’s a powerful technique for composition and creativity. The terminology comes from the traditional darkroom where an enlarger—combined with cupping of hands and cutouts on wire—were used to control the amount of light on different portions of a photograph.

Editor's Note: This is a guest blogpost from Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe.com. If you find this useful, we encourage you to check out the RouteCS6 tour that he is currently doing.

When I first started to do some research for this article, I decided to look up the word "Magic" because that’s how I feel about photography and—for that matter—any other art form. These are the words used to describe Magic: Enchanted, Thrilling, Powerful, Mystery, Supernatural, and Exquisite. If someone were to describe my work, these would certainly be the words I would want them to use. So the question remains: How do you create Magic with your work? How can you design a beautiful portrait of a person, landscape, animal, food etc. that warrants this kind of description? Let’s not forget that we are also trying to make money and stand out from the crowd—at least that’s what I’m trying to do.

For me, the magic process begins with the image I’ve created in the camera. Lighting is everything. It’s my primary concern, regardless of what I’m photographing. In my case, though, it’s usually a person. I make my living photographing children and families, and creating maternity portraits.

Editor's Note: This is a guest blog post from Judy Host of the Monte Zucker Creative Design Tour. BHInsights readers get a discount with customer code BNHCDTS.

Kelby Training's Education Director Matt Kloskowski photographed the stunning sunrise in his photo above. Capturing all of the details in one image like this can be a bit tough to do, but it is totally possible through various methods. How do you think Matt shot it? After being captivated by it, we talked to Matt about how he photographed it.

Take a guess, then read on, to see if you got it right.

A camera's LCD screen can be quite misleading when viewing your images. Often, when you import your images onto your computer they don't look anything like what you originally shot (that is, if you were working with RAW files). In order to get better color out of your images, you'll need to follow a couple of steps. And once you've reached the end, it will be like night and day.

We talked to four of the leading industry professionals to talk about how they get better color. Here are their tips from start to finish:

Lead image is Beached by JCNixonPhoto via the B&H Photo Flickr Group

In this video, KelbyTraining's experts show you how to set up a rounded border around your images in Adobe Lightroom 3. The white rounded border will help you to make your images look better for a print. Different ways to get this done for the future, such as making presets, are also demonstrated. Creating the actual print is done through the Print module in Lightroom, so those of you that love to create prints may want to take a look.

Take a look at the video after hitting the read and discuss button and for more in-depth training please visit Kelbytraining.com. They also have full one day seminars at Kelbytraininglive.com.