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  • Open source image editing program digiKam now has video support, new export tools and more

    digiKam is an open-source photo management application that runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS platforms and comes with tools for importing, managing, editing, and sharing photos and raw files.

    Now version 6.0.0 of digiKam has been released after a 2-year development phase and comes with a heap of new features and improvements.

    The biggest news is that the software can now also handle video files, offering many of the importing, sharing and editing functions that are also available for still image. Videos can also be played back without the need for an external player.

    In addition import/export web-service tools are now available across all modules in digiKam – LightTable, Image editor and Showfoto. The same is true for other tools, such as metadata and geolocation editors, allowing for a more seamless user experience.

    There are also new tools to export your images directly to Pinterest as well as the Microsoft OneDrive and Box cloud storage services, and the Raw engine has been updated to process images from a long list of new cameras and smartphone.

    In addition to the new features the digiKam team says it has been able to clean the applications code in order to simplify application compilation, packaging and maintenance for the future.

    For a full list of new features and supported cameras, download links and more detail about the work that has gone into the update, head over to the digiKam website.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • How to Define Your Ideal Photography Client

    The post How to Define Your Ideal Photography Client appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Mat Coker.

    Many photographers in business struggle because they fail to understand who their ideal photography client is. Your ideal photography client is the person you love to work with and who wants exactly what you offer.

    When you understand the sort of person who would want to hire you, you can speak directly to them in your social media and on your website. And when they stumble across your work, they will know that you are the one they want to hire.

    After a couple of years of experience in business I began to tailor what I want to offer to the people I wanted to work with.

    1. Do they want what you offer?

    First, you need to determine what you want to offer as a photographer. What is the end product you want to deliver?

    That decision includes digital or prints, the number of photos you wish to deliver, your style, number of hours put into the job, retouching, etc.

    You may be deciding between:

    • Studio/outdoors (on location)
    • Posed vs candid (lifestyle)
    • Digital vs print
    • Many photos vs few
    • Your vision or theirs
    • Just photography, or a line of products

    First, figure out what you want to offer, then match yourself up with people who want what you offer. Don’t be sidetracked by people who say you should be offering something else. Limit yourself to what you actually want to pursue and deliver (but feel free to experiment too).

    I offer outdoor family photo sessions that focus more on candid moments than posed ones. I provide families with a digital gallery of 100+ photos. This is what I like to give. I like to spend time with the family and then give them lots of photos to enjoy.

    My ideal family wants a lot of photos that they can turn into photo books, etc. I’m thrilled to spend an hour with a family photographing an adventure and then showing them all the fun photos I made.

    When somebody contacts me for one posed print I send them to another photographer who specializes in that.

    2. Match your approach with their personality

    Your personality and approach to your photography is part of what you’re offering.

    It may be the case that people want what you offer, but they don’t like your personality or approach.

    Don’t take this personally. After all, there are many potential clients that you wouldn’t want to work with either.

    For example, some lifestyle photographers take a photojournalist approach to their sessions and will not interrupt the scene. They give very little direction. While other lifestyle photographers direct and control every aspect of the session. The end product may be a collection of candid-looking photos but one photographer micromanaged every detail of those moments while the other influenced very little.

    Whatever your approach to photography is, there will be people who don’t like it. Be clear about your personality and the way you work and you will naturally repel people you wouldn’t want to work with and attract the ones you do.

    If you’re assertive and take charge, let people know.

    If you need space to work out your vision and don’t want constant input from the client, let them know.

    I always let parents know there needs to be room for play and fun in our sessions. It’s hard for some parents to let their kids have fun, but when they do the photos show it.

    3. Look below the surface

    As you seek to attract your ideal client, don’t assume that your ideal clients will have the details of their lives in common with each other or with you.

    My ideal customers are quite different on the surface. Some of them live in the country, others live in big cities. Some are covered in tattoos, others have none. They work in offices, the trades, or are entrepreneurs. Some spend nothing on their wardrobe, some spend more on it than the photos. But it’s not what’s on the surface.

    My ideal customers are families who love each other. They are creative and want a playful photo session. They like candid moments. They love the human nature that I portray in my photos. They enjoy receiving a gallery filled with digital photos that they can share online, and make photo books and gifts with. Family is everything to them and to me.

    What to do when you’re stuck with terrible clients

    No matter what sort of photography business you run, you’re going to end up working with the wrong clients sometimes. That’s okay.

    Working with the wrong clients helps to reinforce who the right ones are.

    When you can learn to make the wrong clients happy, you’ll do even better with the right ones.

    Learning to work with people who don’t share your vision will help you to grow. You may even learn something in the process that you wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

    I try my best not to attract clients who are too nervous to have fun, or who only want one or two quick shots, or who are too miserable to enjoy the session. But occasionally those people hire me and I do my best to make them happy anyway.

    Who is your worst client?

    If you’re not sure who your ideal client is, begin by describing the client you don’t want to work with. Then list the clients you’ve been happiest to work with. What did you like about working with them? What did they like about working with you? What was their personality like? Tailor your marketing toward people like them.

    The post How to Define Your Ideal Photography Client appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Mat Coker.


    Digital Photography School

  • Fujifilm X-T30 pre-production sample gallery

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    Given that it uses the same sensor and processor as the X-T3, it’s no surprise that the Fujifilm X-T30 is capable of producing some excellent photos. We took a pre-production X-T30 all over the Seattle area and have plenty of photos for your viewing pleasure.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Photographer asks for help finding owners of a destroyed camera found at Zion National Park

    Photographer Ben Horne has shared a video on his YouTube channel imploring the photography community to help him find the owner of a Fujifilm point-and-shoot camera that a friend of his found while on a hike in Zion National Park in Southwest Utah.

    As explained in the three minute video, Horne’s friend Luke Riding was hiking along the base of Angels Landing — a tall rock formation with a narrow trail at the top where hikers are free to walk along — when he came across a Fujifilm camera that had clearly taken a tumble down the side of the 1,500-foot rock formation.

    The camera itself is clearly battered from its treacherous journey down the side of Angels Landing, but the SD card inside remained intact, complete with a collection of date-stamped images captured before the Fujifilm’s free-fall. The images Horne has shared include a number of portraits with two younger females posing in various areas of Zion National Park in September 2015, according to the metadata.

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    Horne has asked to help spread the word in an effort to return the camera and images back to their rightful owner(s). If you happen to know the individuals in the photos or know of anyone who happened to lose their Fujifilm camera while at the top of Angels Landing, you can contact Horne by email (listed in the YouTube video description) or via Instagram.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Xiaomi launches Mi 9 smartphone with triple camera, up to 8GB of RAM

    We are getting close to the start of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which means we should see a number of high-profile mobile device launches over the coming days. Today Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi has thrown the first punch by launching its new Mi 9 flagship smartphone and, at least on paper, the new Xiaomi looks like an enticing option for smartphone photographers.

    The Mi 9’s triple-cam setup is built around an 48MP Sony IMX586 1/2″ sensor which comes with a quad-bayer filter and produces 12MP image output. The lens offers an F1.75 aperture and 26mm equivalent focal length.

    The primary module is joined by an ultra-wide-angle with 17mm equivalent focal length and F2.2 aperture. It uses a 16MP 1/3″ Sony IMX481 sensor. The tele offers a 2x magnification for a 50mm equivalent focal length and captures image information on a 12MP 1/3.4″ Samsung S5K3M5 sensor with 1.0µm pixels and a F2.2 aperture.

    A combination of PDAF and laser is used for focusing and for very dim conditions a LED flash is on board. By default the Mi 9 records 4K video at 30 frames per second but the frame rate can be increased to 60 fps.

    Images can be viewed and edited on a 6.39″ AMOLED display with 1080p+ resolution and hidden in a display notch you’ll find the 20MP front camera with F2.0 aperture which in some regions will use artificial intelligence to power a face-unlock function.

    An in-display fingerprint reader and fast charging for the 3,300mAh battery are on board as well and Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 855 chipset is paired with 6GB of RAM to power the Android operating system. Photos and videos can be stored on 64GB or 128GB of internal storage.

    Pricing starts at approximately $ 455 for the 6/128GB version. The 8/128GB variant will set you back approximately $ 490. No information on exact pricing and availability outside China has been released yet.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Samsung Galaxy Fold comes with foldable display and six cameras

    Samsung wasted no time unveiling the Galaxy Fold at its Unpacked event today – a foldable device with a 4.6″ display when folded, and 7.3″ display when unfolded. The device contains a total of six cameras – three on the back, two inside and one front-facing camera.

    The company’s live presentation includes few camera details – but we’ve preliminarily gathered the following specs for the cameras included on the Galaxy Fold below (subject to change):

    Location Full-frame equiv. FOV Aperture Autofocus Optical Image Stabilization
    12MP ‘main’ camera Rear 27mm F1.5 / F2.4 Dual-Pixel Yes
    12MP telephoto Rear 52mm F2.4 Phase-Detect Yes

    16MP wide-angle
    (fixed-focus)

    		 Rear 12mm F2.2 No No
    10MP selfie camera Inside 26mm F1.9 Dual-Pixel No

    8MP RGB depth-sensing camera

    		 Inside 22mm F2.2 Autofocus (unspecified) No
    10MP selfie camera Front 26mm F1.9 Dual-Pixel No

    Other technical specs known at this point are that it will offer 12GB of RAM, and uses two batteries for a 4380mAh combined capacity.

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    Multi-tasking is a big focus of the device, and Samsung demonstrated the device’s ability to maintain continuity within an app as you switch between displays, as well as its ability to run three apps on the larger screen simultaneously.

    Black, silver, green or blue color choices with personalized hinge color options will be offered. The Galaxy Fold will start at a steep $ 1980.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Picktorial photo editor for macOS gets 4.0 update with new DAM and workflow features

    Non-destructive macOS photo editor Picktorial has been updated to version 4.0, which is free for customers who purchased version 3.50. Picktorial 4 brings new workflow and digital asset management (DAM) features, including its own index — a move to shed its reliance on macOS Spotlight — as well as an updated search function with advanced search fields that aren’t supported by Spotlight.

    With the new search capabilities, Picktorial 4 users can find content globally or within specific folders using filters like capture date, rating, IPTC metadata, tags, and more. The software’s DAM also received a number of other changes, including jpeg+raw image stack support, a new image browser with two layout options, batch exporting and editing, support for albums, smart albums, and quick albums, plus the option to sort images in the browser based on rating, name, capture date, and more.

    Joining the DAM changes are new workflow features, including automatic adaption to Apple’s color scheme for a uniform appearance, a new viewer that displays an image’s focus point, support for dual-layer jpegs that save all editing info within the image file, automatic NAS and connected external drive syncing for seamless remote access to projects, and support for high-resolution images up to 100MP.

    Picktorial 4 is free for existing version 3.5 customers, but some features, including unlimited adjustment layers and batch editing, are only available to Picktorial Premium customers. The plan is offered for $ 9.99/month or $ 4.99/month for an annual subscription. Customers also have a $ 69.99 perpetual license option that includes a year of free maintenance updates. Existing customers have the option to subscribe for $ 39.99/year until February 28.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Photo Finishing – Challenge Yourself to Reveal the Personality in Every Image You Capture

    The post Photo Finishing – Challenge Yourself to Reveal the Personality in Every Image You Capture appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Herb Paynter.

    Many folks think that photography takes place in the camera, but that’s not the whole truth. Photography is a two-part process that involves 1) capturing the light from a scene, and 2) shaping that captured light into a form that matches what your mind saw when you took the picture. The capture process does happen inside the camera, but the shaping part happens on your computer.

    The Capture, or Photo Process

    We give the camera credit for things that it doesn’t actually do. Don’t get me wrong, capturing all the light in a scene is a monumental undertaking. Keeping track of millions of points of light is a very critical and specialized responsibility. However, the camera is not so much an artistic tool as it is a capture device with a single purpose – to accurately record the light from the surfaces of objects in a scene. While that purpose can get complicated with lighting challenges, the camera is still just box with a round glass eye and a single function: to record light.

    When the light of a scene enters the camera lens, it gets dispersed over the surface of the camera’s image sensor, a postage-size electrical circuit containing millions of individual light receptors. Each receptor measures the strength of the light striking it in a metric called “lumens.” Each receptor on this sensor records its light value as a color pixel.

    The camera’s image processor reads the color and intensity of the light striking each photoreceptor and maps each image from those initial values, producing a reasonable facsimile of the original scene. When this bitmap of pixels gets viewed from a distance, the eye perceives the composite as a digital image.

    The real magic happens after the storing of light on the memory card. The image that first appears when you open the file is the image processor’s initial attempt at interpreting the data recorded by the camera’s image processor. Most times, the initial (JPEG) image interpretation of this data is an acceptable record of the original scene, though not always.

    Presets

    Your camera provides several pre-set programs that adjust the three settings in the camera that affect exposure: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.

    Three main controls determine your exposure: the shutter speed, the aperture, and the ISO. The camera presets (A, S, and M) allow you to determine the depth of field and/or speed with which the camera captures the light.

    The A (aperture priority) mode allows you to set the size of the lens opening (f-stop) while the camera automatically sets the shutter speed. The S (shutter priority) mode lets you set the duration of the lens opening (shutter speed) while the camera adjusts the size of the lens opening. The letter P (program mode) allows you to determine the best mix of aperture and shutter speed while your camera retains the correct balance of light for the exposure. The letter M (manual mode) gives you complete control over all settings but requires to balance the overall exposure.

    Your camera’s variable ISO (International Standards Organization) setting adjusts the light sensitivity of the camera’s image sensor, allowing you to capture scenes in dim or bright light; the higher the number, the more sensitive the light receptors become, allowing you to capture images in lower levels of light.

    The Histogram

    Your camera provides a small graph that roughly indicates how well the camera is set to correctly capture the light in the current scene.

    This graph displays the range of light coming through the lens and approximates the current light distribution that captured under the current settings. By adjusting the three settings mentioned above, you can shift and somewhat distribute this range of light to best record the full range of light.

    Color balancing the light

    Every scene’s color cast is influenced by the temperature of the light illuminating that scene. When the scene is captured outside, the Sun’s position in the sky and the influence of cloud cover alters the color of the light. Your camera offers at least two ways to compensate for the differences in color temperature (Auto White Balance and Pre-set Color Balance).

    Auto White Balance

    The Auto White Balance (AWB) sensor in your camera seeks any prominent white or neutral subject in the scene and shifts the entire color balance of the scene in an effort to neutralize that element. But there is an assumption with AWB that you desire the current lighting to be perfectly neutral in color.

    Any clouds interfering with the sunlight will have a slight influence on the neutrality of 6500° (natural sunlight) lighting. AWB takes that slight shift out of the equation. Most of the time, this is a great idea. However, to record early morning or late afternoon (golden hour) lighting accurately, AWB will neutralize those warm colors and completely lose that “warm” mood.

    Pre-Set White Balance Settings

    Your camera offers several pre-sets to offset any known color casts caused by specific lighting situations. These settings appear in every digital camera “Settings” display and may appear in a slightly different order or wording. Daylight sets the camera to record scenes under typical mid-day outdoor lighting. Cloudy/Overcast shifts the colors toward orange to compensate for the bluish cast caused by light filtering through nominal cloud cover.

    Shade offers a stronger orange shift to compensate for completely overcast (stormy) skies. Flash provides a very similar color temperature lighting as Daylight and is intended to prepare the image sensor for artificial daylight or “Speed light” type flash devices.

    Tungsten/Incandescent shifts the colors toward the blue end of the color range to compensate for the warmer shift of incandescent lights. Fluorescent attempts to compensate for the greenish cast of gas-charged fluorescent lights.

    Kelvin/Custom permits the user to set a custom color balance setting, essentially teaching the camera what “neutral” gray color looks like. All of these pre-sets attempt to correct non-neutral lighting conditions.

    The Sculpting, or Finishing Process

    While the camera does capture the full range of reflected light in a scene, it has no way of knowing the best tonal curve to apply to each image. Many times the five tonal ranges (highlight, quarter, middle, three-quarter, and shadow) need to be reshaped to best interpret the light captured at the scene. This tonal contouring process is the magic of sculpting the light into a meaningful visual image.

    This little fella perched outside my front door and caught me off guard. I didn’t have time to fiddle with the controls to optimize the lighting situation. My first click got his attention and the second got this expression. Fortunately, I capture my images in both jpg and RAW formats simultaneously. Doing so allowed me to post-process the tones and display to you what I actually saw that morning.

    I use the term “sculpting” when talking about image editing because it best describes the rearranging of tones in a digital image. Only ideal lighting balance looks great when rendered as a “stock” JPEG camera image.

    This sculpting or finishing process amounts to the clarification of tones and colors in a digital image; making the image appear in final form the way the human mind perceived it in the original scene. While the color balancing aspect of this process is a bit more obvious, the tonal recovery is actually more critical to the final presentation.

    The digital camera cannot capture all of the dynamics of the visible spectrum on a sunny day, nor can it determine the best balance of those tones. The camera’s image sensor simply captures all the light possible and presents the data to the camera’s image processor to sort out. Under perfectly balanced lighting, this works out just fine, but occasionally detail hides in the shadows and gets lost in the highlights, requiring help from the photographer/editor to balance out the tones.

    This is where the individual tone-zones come into play, and the sliders available in RAW processing software (Camera Raw, Lightroom, On1 Camera Raw, Exposure X4) are invaluable. The internal contrast of every image (Whites, Highlights, Middle tones, Shadows, Blacks) can be pushed around and adjusted in a very non-linear manner (in no particular order) to reveal detail that otherwise remains hidden.

    Conclusion

    Photo finishing isn’t complete until both color and tones are correctly adjusted for maximum effect, matching the emotion of the original scene. Only then is your image ready for viewing. Challenge yourself to squeeze the detail and reveal the potential personality out of every image you capture. It’s well worth the extra effort.

    The post Photo Finishing – Challenge Yourself to Reveal the Personality in Every Image You Capture appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Herb Paynter.


    Digital Photography School

  • Samsung unveils Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus with triple-camera; budget-friendlier S10e with dual cam

    At its Galaxy Unpacked event, Samsung has officially unveiled the Galaxy S10 and S10+, both offering a rear triple-camera array, alongside a budget-oriented S10e ‘essential’ model with a dual camera unit. Also announced is the S10 5G, the largest of the bunch, featuring the unique ability to apply background blur and filters in real-time to video. All four devices offer a stabilized standard wide and a fixed-focus ultra-wide camera, as well as a front-facing selfie camera, while the S10e omits the optically stabilized tele-camera available in the other three. As expected, the S10 series’ display is the center of attention with a hole-punch style front-facing camera embedded in the screen in favor of the much-maligned notch.

    The rear triple camera array comprises a standard 12MP ‘main’ wide-angle, 12MP telephoto camera, and a 16MP ultra-wide unit with a 123-degree field-of-view. The F1.5/F2.4 dual aperture feature introduced in the S9 is offered on the main rear camera on all models. The S10+ offers a secondary front-facing RGB depth sensor to allow for blurred background selfies – the S10 and S10e offer a single front-facing camera.

    The S10 5G also offers additional depth sensing cameras on both the front and the rear, but these are specialized low resolution (240×160) time-of-flight cameras that can sense distances of nearby objects for real-time effects like background blur. The table below summarizes all camera features for all models.

    Models Location Full-frame equiv. FOV Aperture Autofocus Optical Image Stabilization
    12MP ‘main’ camera S10, S10+, S10e, S10 5G Rear 27mm F1.5 / F2.4 Dual-Pixel Yes
    12MP telephoto S10, S10+, S10 5G Rear 52mm F2.4 Phase-Detect Yes

    16MP wide-angle
    (fixed-focus)

    		 S10, S10+, S10e, S10 5G Rear 12mm F2.2 No No
    10MP selfie camera S10, S10+, S10e, S10 5G Front 26mm F1.9 Dual-Pixel No

    8MP RGB depth-sensing camera

    		 S10, S10+, S10e Front 22mm F2.2 Autofocus (unspecified) No
    Time of Flight depth-sensing camera S10 5G Front/Rear N/A N/A N/A N/A

    The S10 cameras are equipped with added intelligent features, including a Scene Optimizer capable of recognizing 30 unique scenes, as well as suggestions for optimal compositions. A new ‘Bright Night’ mode attempts to improve image quality in low light, presumably using long exposure image stacking techniques like Google’s Night Sight or Huawei’s Night Mode. New bokeh effects have been added to the traditional bokeh effect: spin, zoom and color fade.

    The S10 cameras are capable of shooting 4K UHD video using the HDR10 format, meaning that high contrast scenes can be captured while being displayed with saturated colors and punch. The front-facing cameras can also record at UHD resolution. The time-of-flight depth sensors on both the front and rear of the S10 5G allow it to apply background blur in real time to your videos – the first time we’ve seen this ability in a consumer device.

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    Display sizes vary across the series: the S10e offers a 5.8″ screen, the S10’s measures 6.1″ and the S10+ offers a 6.4″ display. Each is an AMOLED display supporting HDR10+ video playback (Samsung’s version of Dolby Vision), and uses dynamic tone mapping to optimize brightness levels on the fly based on your viewing environment (a clever way of ensuring images appear similar in both dim and bright viewing environments, as we explain here).

    Samsung has improved what was already a very color accurate display – these phones cover the full DCI-P3 color gamut, and offer up to a whopping 1200 nits peak brightness. Unfortunately, like all Android phones to date, most (if not all) applications don’t ‘opt-in’ to the wide-gamut mode with proper color management, so images may appear over-saturated relative to color managed devices or what most web viewers would experience.

    The Samsung Galaxy S10 will start at $ 900; the S10+ at $ 1000 and the S10e at $ 750. The S10 5G is likely to be priced above $ 1000.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

  • Shooting with the Fujifilm X-T30, the frugal flagship

    After a rare Seattle snowstorm finally subsided, DPReview editor Jeff Keller was able to escape the snow and spend some time with the impressive Fujifilm X-T30, a camera that offers a lot of bang for the buck.

    Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)