Have you ever noticed little bits on your photos? Not the little crumbs from a cookie that help make the photo more real looking. But, little indiscernible dots or smudges or blobs that appear, usually if you are shooting something on a solid white background. That’s dust. And, if you are using a dSLR, you probably have some on your sensor.

Here’s a quick way to tell. Close down your aperture as far as you can… probably somewhere around 22. Then take a properly exposed photo of something white. Any dust that is on your sensor is going to show up, and look something like this:

The first image is at 100%. You can see two little light grey spots within the red highlighted area. The second box (below) is that red box zoomed in even further. If you look closely in the first box, right by the right edge, you’ll see another dust bunny… a little squiggly do like thing. These little specks will appear in the same place on every single photo I take. Now how annoying is that?

The good news is that there are many ways to fix this problem. First off, if there are just one or two spots, the clone brush in Photoshop or the spot healer in Lightroom will make quick work of them. The only time they are really noticeable (if they are small and light like these) is when they are on solid color backgrounds where they are also easy to fix.

If you easily get weary of the manual dusting, SensorKleen is app that can do the cleaning for you. Basically, the software analyzes a batch of photos, and tries to find the common spots… then it can clone them out automatically. I tend to go the old-fashioned way, but if anyone out there has tried it and has feedback, I’d love to hear it. I’ve also heard that the software that Nikon ships with its cameras that has a dust removal feature.

Of course, once it gets bad enough, you really do need to clean your sensor. There all manners of brushes and swabs created for this task. Personally, I’m terrified to touch the sensor on my camera. I tried to clean my view finder up one time and mucked it up… so I stay far, far away from the inner workings. Instead, I take my camera in 3 or 4 times a year to get it professionally cleaned. In Seattle, I can highly recommend CameraTechs who will clean a dSLR sensor for between $35 and $45 dollars (depending on the size… 5Ds are more than 20Ds). If you live near one of the Canon service centers in New Jersey & California, I’ve heard rumors that you can take it in there and they will clean it for no charge.

Canon has started to introduce automatic sensor cleaning to its cameras, but early results have been not so good. Olympus’s model seems to have faired better, so perhaps there is hope in the future for this technology. Until then, CameraTechs has a pretty regular customer in me.

I think you all know how big of a fan of Capture One I am. I’ve been using it for a few years, and it makes tethered and remote capture super simple whether it’s batch applying settings or making it braindead simple to convert images from Raw to a whole set of other formats. I usually output TIFF, 2 versions of JPEGs and sometimes thumbnails. Click, click, click, it’s done and I almost never go into Photoshop for editing.

All that came to a screeching halt recently with the addition of a new iMac to my studio and the soon-to-be upgrade to Leopard. It turns out, Capture One Pro won’t work tethered with Canons (not sure about Nikons) on Leopard. I just want to note for the record, that Vista isn’t the only OS with problems on upgrading, even if they don’t have silly cool ads pointing fingers. Leopard is NOT all puppies and sunshine. But, anyway, that’s besides the point.

The real point is that between the lack of Leopard support along with the changes to Capture One 4, it seems I was going to need to be finding some new software. I had already been intent on trying a few new apps… something to manage my ever growing library of images. I’m starting to do some stock photography work with one (and maybe two) of the big rights managed agencies (Stockfood right now, and Jupiter Images’ FoodPix as soon as I can get my act together) and so having a great way to keep track of what I’ve submitted to who is going to be critical.

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I’ve been meaning to start a regular post series featuring some of the emails I get with questions about photography and styling, and what better way to kick it off with a question that I know comes up all the time with folks just getting started into some more advanced digital imaging. A reader writes:

Dear Lara,

I’m really confused about which image editing software to buy. I’m planning to go in for the Canon 40D. I heard you talk about the phase one capture pro on your site. Maybe I will look at it as an option in the future as I don’t want to suffer from information overload!

I need to edit images for publishing in websites and magazines/newspapers. Should I go in for the Photoshop CS3 or CS3 extended? What are your thoughts on the Adobe Lightroom?

I have heard that Mac is better for photographers so i’m switching over to Mac after years of PC use.

Thanks for being helpful.

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Most professional photographers out there put some sort of transparent-ish watermark on their images when posting them to the web. It’s one of the few, albeit not necessarily fool-proof, ways to keep your photos from being used without your authorization. For pros, this is important not only to protect the value of the work, but often because the photos are under exclusive use license… it’s bad for both the photographer and their clients if those photos are misused.

With services like Flickr making it so simple to “borrow” images from, unauthorized use is becoming more of a problem. I can name quite a few cases where Flickr photos with All Rights Reserved clearly indicated on the web page were taken and used in magazines or websites without permission. In fact, I just stumbled upon this post with an old image of mine that was used without my permission. As a result of this kind of issue, more and more people are tagging their images with a copyright notice, and sometimes even quite a big one.
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One of my early posts on Still Life With walked through my workflow of taking food shots in my studio (ie, my kitchen). Well, I recently realized how much a seemingly small change has made to my overall workflow. That change was starting to shoot tethered to my laptop, and it’s had numerous impacts on the steps I follow.

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If you are looking for a simple photo editor, and don’t mind the slowness of uploading your photos to a server for your quick fixes, you should give PXN8 (pronounced pix-en-ate) a try. It provides all the basic corrections like an auto-exposure (called Enhance), fill flash, rotation and even some manual control over saturation, brightness and hue. But what’s particularly cool about PXN8 are the fun tools, including the easiest way to round the corners of your image that I’ve seen yet, and a nice little lomo filter. PXN8 also integrates easily with Flickr, so once you’ve uploaded your photo, getting the edited image into your Flickr account is a simple button press.

PXN8 is for smaller images (under 1Mb)… uploading a jpeg image from my 20D (about a 6 Mb file) took a painfully long time, and then it resized the image down to a web size. But once my photo was uploaded, all of the corrections were very quick. For the image above, I applied the lomo effect (which would have worked better on a darker image) and rounded the corners, pushed the changes over the Flickr and was done in about a minute.

Or, for even an even more tightly integrated editor, check out Preloadr, which works on photos you’ve already uploaded to Flickr, but want to make quick changes to. Moving into the “editing” space was a bit slow for my large images, but unlike PXN8, Preloadr seems to keep my image size intact… so it’s not too surprising it’s not as zippy. Preloadr also offers more advanced tools, like layers, a histogram and even an exposure curve… but leaves off some of the cool quick fixes (like the lomo filter and rounding the corners.) Still, if you are working with 1Mb or smaller file sizes and just need to brighten up your whites or saturate your colors, Preloadr may be what you need.

Technorati Tags: Photography, Tips

I started to write a post on lighting today… how to take better photos in less than perfect lighting conditions, whether that’s too little or to much. But it would have taken me all day to write it, and as I was trying to catch up with all of my bijillion food blog feeds, I realized that perhaps it would be more helpful to have a discussion about correcting exposure in your photos. This may sound involved, but for the most part, it’s a very quick fix and will make a world of difference in the look of your photos… enough that you may not worry quite as much about what light you shot them in.

And then, as I started writing that post, I realized that I had not yet talked about software. The one thing you will need to correct exposure is some software. I use full-blown Photoshop CS2 on the Mac. But you don’t need to go buy a piece of $500 software to fix the exposure in your photos. Here are some options for both computer-political parties (sorry, I don’t have any Linux recommendations).
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