Stephen Bay's Photography Blog

How to Organize Your Photos (Lightroom Catalog)

If you’ve ever had a hard time finding a photo that you took before, couldn’t find the original raw file for a jpeg that you have, or found multiple copies of an image but couldn’t tell which was the final version then read on. I help a lot of people with editing their photos and invariably one area that people need assistance is organizing their photo files. Often their photos will be in mish mash of folders, spread across multiple disks, with random unintelligible file names.

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Star Stacking With Kandao Raw+

I recently tried out a new software program for star stacking called Kandao Raw+. Up to this point I had been using Starry Landscape Stacker which has worked very well so I was a bit skeptical as to whether Kandao Raw+ could actually bring anything new to the table. But I was pleasantly surprised and the short summary is that Kandao Raw+ works extremely well and even handles problematic cases which cause difficulty for programs like Starry Landscape Stacker and Sequator.

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Adobe Super Resolution and Topaz Gigapixel Ai

Adobe just released a new update to Camera Raw with a feature they call Super Resolution (this should be available in Lightroom soon). The main point of this update is to use AI and machine learning techniques to learn how to upscale an image to a higher resolution. In traditional upscaling methods, one basically stretches the image to cover more pixels and it works much like curve fitting in algebra (i.e. interpolation). The difference with AI methods is that they can actually manufacture details and textures and not just scale what exists.

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How to Avoid Halos in Lightroom

Lightroom has a great set of tools for editing your images. However, if you are not careful while processing many of the adjustments can create halos in your images. These halos can occur in any image but are more likely to be an issue in pictures which have hard edges set against an area of smooth tones. For example, a mountain or a building set against a bright sky is an ideal situation for generating halos.

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How to Minimize Jpeg File Size for a Photo Website

If you have a photography website, you’re probably aware that the biggest obstacle to obtaining quick page load times is the size of your image files. You want to use large hi-resolution photos with low compression to present your images at their best. But inevitably this means large file sizes which load slowly. Slow loading files annoys users and makes them more likely to give up and browse some other site instead.

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