How to Take Good Low Light Pictures

Many would be photographers go out and get a pro-sumer digital SLR camera like the Nikon D90 with the idea that they will be able to take nice pictures of, among other things, their son’s high school football games. I use the high school football example because it represents nearly a worst case scenario for low light pictures; fast action under low light. Depending on your equipment there are several ways to skin this proverbial cat, however I’m going to address what I believe to be the most likely circumstances.

The primary obstacle to getting good photos in low light is that low light typically requires a slower shutter speed. If your shutter speed is too slow, you get blurry photos. To capture the action and still allow for a slight motion blur, I typically shoot for about 1/250th of a second shutter speed or faster. One side note here: Nikon’s Vibration Reduction (VR) and Canon’s Image Stabilization (IS) lenses are said to ‘give you’ two to three stops and allow you to use to use slower shutter speeds in low light. This is true, but misleading. I often shoot still subjects at 1/30 th or 1/15th of a second with my Nikor 18-200VR lens and get good results. The key here is that my subject is not moving. The VR and IS in these lenses compensate for camera movement, not subject movement. If you shoot a moving subject at 1/15th of a second, your shot will be blurry.

The Situation
The Scenario I am describing assumes that you have a quality digital SLR and atypical zoom lens, which, when at maximum zoom, has an aperature (F-stop) of 5.6. For example my Nikor 18-200VR 3.5-5.6 will shoot as fast as 3.5 if I am not zoomed in, however, at 200mm zoom, the fastest aperture the lens is capable of is 5.6.

1. Forget the Flash
Certainly don’t try the built in flash, as it only has a range of about sixteen feet. If you are right on the sidelines (you should be) you may be able to get away with an add on flash like the SB600 or SB800, but I prefer to avoid that as well for a number of reasons.

• The range is still only about 50 feet or so and, at a football game, if you want to capture that interception 100 feet away, there is no time to disable the flash.
• Even if your shot is within range, a flash does not give you the shot you want. It only lights up nearby players, leaving the rest in the dark and providing no sense of the surrounding action.
• Finally, a flash will freeze the action, which causes you lose all sense of motion, ruining the whole sports action feel of the shot.

2. Increase your ISO
You could spend $1000 on an ‘Fast’ F2.8 Lens, which would allow you to shoot 2 full stops faster, however, this too is unnecessary and, in some ways, detrimental to achieving the results you want. The detrimental aspect of a fast lens is the fact that, at F2.8 you lose much of your depth of field. This is certainly desirable for portrait or sports photography, but not always for sports. Similar to the effect of the flash mentioned previously, you lose all of the surrounding action in your photo; only your subject ends up being in focus. In fact, if you are shooting at say 200mm at F2.8, you may even end up with portions of the subjects own body out of focus.

So how, in lieu of spending $1000 for the aforementioned lens, do we get our two stops back allowing us to shoot at 1/250th of a second. We crank up the ISO. Newer models of digital SLRs are getting better and better as far as minimizing Noise at High ISO settings. The bottom line is, you can live with, or even remove image noise and have a good photo, but if your shutter speed is too slow and the image is blurry, you may as well just throw it away. You can’t fix stupid with Photoshop. You can increase the ISO on many cameras up to 3200, and some can go up to 6400.

3. Shoot Raw
I can’t think of a digital SLR that doesn’t allow you to shoot in RAW format. For normal photography under decent light, RAW just adds an extra step to my processing, however, for low light shots, the extra step is worth it. Shooting in RAW format produces an unprocessed digital negative, much like unprocessed film. Just like film can be ‘pushed’ a stop or two to lighten the resulting images, RAW gives you the digital data needed to ‘pull’ about two more stops out of your digital images. This allows you to take photos which, though they may look a little dark, can be recovered in post processing. Most cameras come with a RAW image converter, but I like the Adobe RAW plugin the best.

On the topic of Adobe RAW, I would like to throw in one quick tip that primarily benefits Mac users. As you may know, Adobe offers Photoshop (expensive) and Photoshop Elements for both the PC and the Mac. The full version of Photoshop comes with Adobe Bridge image management and a very full featured RAW converter whether you are using a Mac or a PC. Photoshop Elements, on the other hand, differs from PC to Mac.

The PC version of Elements has a built in image manager and offers a scaled down version of Adobe Raw. The Mac version of Elements, however does not have a built in image manager. Instead, Adobe ships it with the full version of Adobe Bridge AND the Full featured version of Adobe RAW. It is important to note, that the Mac version of Elements itself does contain the scaled down version of Adobe RAW, and it will use this version if you open a RAW image from within Elements. Instead, open the image from within Adobe Bridge and you will be accessing the full featured version.
4. Use Noise Reduction Software
I cast, but not least, if you feel that there is a little bit too much noise in your finished product, plugins like Noise Ninja or Neat Image do an excellent job (better than Photoshop’s built in function) at reducing image noise with minimal impact on image sharpness.

So don’t beat yourself up because you spent $1500 on that great SLR and somehow still can’t seem to get good low light shots. That’s why they call us amateurs. If you follow the above guidelines, however, you should be able to get some pretty nice photos without having to go out and spend another $1000 for a ‘sports’ lens. Falls and football season is coming up. If you manage to get some good shots using the above techniques, I’d love to see them.

Getting Rid of Image Noise
Most image editing packages allow for you to add and decrease noise, as an effect or filter. This works well enough for adding noise, but removing it is a much trickier process which, when applied with simple built in filters causes the image to lose sharpness. Enter Neat Image. Neat Image is a digital filter application specially designed to efficiently reduce visible noise in digital photographic images. Neat Image is provided as a stand alone application, but also as a plug-in for a wide range of image processing applications, like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, Ulead PhotoImpact, PhotoLine32, IrfanView and others. Neat Image reduces the high ISO noise associated with image sensors in digital cameras and scanners, the film grain visible in scanned slides and negatives, JPEG artifacts of over-compressed images, and color banding. Another benefit of noise reduction by Neat Image is that the reduction of noise produces smaller file sizes for JPEG image with the same quality setting generating a file which is about 30% smaller.

Neat Image incorporates the most advanced noise reduction algorithms in the industry that surpass the quality of all classic noise reduction methods and even that of the wavelet-based methods. It provides the most accurate noise reduction currently available. Neat Image uses device noise profiles to make noise reduction custom-tailored to your camera or scanner model, making it the the most accurate noice reducer available. It offers premium noise reduction and image sharpening utilizing an advanced noise filter to reduce noise and grain in digital images. The professional editions of Neat Image fully even support 48-bit RGB and 16-bit grayscale images.
No Noise Dude
Saving Money with Neat Image
As we’ve already discussed, Neat Image does noise reduction best, but why do you need or want it. Well, if you have any modern hand held point and shoot, you’ll love what it can do to improve your low light images. But what if you already have a nice Digital SLR? This is where you can save a little money with neat image. When it starts to get dark out (think football game) you have a few choices if you want to capture sharp images. You can get up close with a flash, but this really freezes action and eliminates the opportunity for desirable motion blur. You can spend $900 (minimum) for a fast lens, like an F2.8 zoom but, apart from being cost prohibitive for many of us, this low f-stop also dramatically reduces the depth of field of your image so that only your immediate subject is in focus, which may also be undesirable. The alternative is to use a good variable zoom lens at say F 5.6 and shoot at a higher iso setting. This does cause image noise, but for $75 or less depending on the version you buy, you can clean up the noise without losing sharpness and leave the $900 in the bank.  To get your own copy, check out Neat Images website at http://www.neatimage.com where you can download the demo version for free.

When considering the question, “what is graphics design” I’m reminded of the movie Groundhog Day, where the camera man tells a would be female companion, “you know, people think I just take a camera and point it at stuff, but there’s a lot more to it than that.” The same goes for graphic design. Take a look at the video these guys put together. I can’t say that I’m excited about their choice of background music, but the meat is there anyway. Good job dude.

Adobe has at long last announced Creative Suite 5 and furnished specifics regarding its innovative new features.  The new Creative Suite 5, along with the various programs inside it, is supposed to deliver within thirty days.  It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I got CS4, but here we go again with a new and improved Creative Suite of products.  Here are just a few of the benefits of going with the new upgraded version.

New CS5 Features
Creative Suite 5 programs, for the very first time, incorporate access to Omniture technologies–Web tools which capture, store, and evaluate information and facts created by World-wide-web sites and some other sources.  Creative Suite 5 Design Premium will additionally integrate with Adobe CS Live, a brand-new collection of services which Adobe claims will speed up crucial elements of the creative work-flow and allow designers to concentrate on making their finest work.  Furthermore, Creative Suite 5 introduces Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5, a new design tool which enables you to generate web application interfaces without the need for writing code.  Creative Suite 5 delivers complete version upgrades of flagship creative tools, as well as features integration with on-line content and digital advertising and marketing measurement and optimization abilities along with technology from Adobe’s purchase of Omniture.

Are you buying CS5?
Creative Suite 5 builds on the user interface improvements brought in by its predecessor to draw the integrated tools even closer together, with a stronger emphasis on the designer workflow, while at the same time incorporating around two hundred and fifty fresh features to the bundle. I’ll give them a little time to get the bugs worked out, but in the meantime I’ll be saving my pennies so that I can add CS5 to my own suite of design tools.

It doesn’t matter if you happen to be an artist, a webmaster or a graphic designer, you have without doubt relied upon Adobe software applications to help you get your work completed. At present, the graphics community is still aglow in regard to Adobe Creative Suite 4, a compilation of computer imaging design tools which are thoroughly integrated to permit users to operate in nearly any medium.

Adobe boasts 6 various editions of CS4, created to suit the requirements of a wide variety of graphics pros. The six versions are as follows:

Adobe CS4 Design Premium – Created for the graphic designer that operates in mobile, Internet, as well as print publications, CS 4 Design Premium consists of the ‘Pro’ or extended variants of Flash, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat and Dreamweaver.

Adobe CS 4 Design Standard – Ideal for the specialized designer who functions mainly with printed output, CS4 Design Premium comes with Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat Professional, and InDesign.

Adobe CS4 Web Premium – Adobe has taken this world wide web design software package to a higher level by giving designers the ability to work on projects that cross virtually all Adobe products, including Photoshop Extended, Flash Professional, Illustrator, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Bridge, Contribute Cue, and Device Central.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Standard – Perfect for website design, this graphics software integrates Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Fireworks, and Contribute to create an unmatchable set of internet design tools.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Platinum – Adobe has attacked the difficulties of video production and post production by incorporating a broad variety of solutions, such as Dynamic Link, Bridge, Device Central, After Effects, Acrobat Connect, Photoshop Extended, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Flash Pro, Encore and Soundbooth. For pros operating on an MS Windows platform, Ultra and OnLocation are included as well..

Adobe CS 4 Master Collection (cue the angelic choir) – The CS4 Master Collection is a proffesional graphic designer’s dream package, including practically every single Adobe product built-in  so one may develop graphics in pretty much any medium, whether it be print, web, interactive, mobile or video. The Master Collection comes with Photoshop Extended, Acrobat Pro, InDesign, Dreamweaver , Illustrator, Contribute, Fireworks, Soundbooth, Encore, After Effects and Premiere Pro. Web apps include Bridge, Device Central, Version Cue, Acrobat Connect, Stock Photos, Dynamic Link, Ultra, and OnLocation.  I’m kind of drooling just thinking about it.

Basically, CS4 supplies professionals with software configurations which  allow them to effortlessly achieve their particular goals. For instance, creative designers are able to design web pages, user interfaces, develop games, create  e-learning products, produce animations, and do develop for mobile devices as well. Those of us who like to edit video for a living can do production and editing, multi-media, audio production, as well as visual effects. It goes with saying that CS4 users, as always, are able to combine and edit images and produce sophisticated page layouts for print.

Graphics pros will also appreciate Adobe website design software as it works on a number of platforms, eg. Windows XP and Vista on the PC and either Tiger or Leopard on the Mac. In addition, for those who have already purchased Adobe products, it is straightforward to upgrade to Creative Suite 4 – even if you currently have stand alone graphics applications. Last but not least, for those of you who buy one edition of  CS4 but then change their mind and decide that they need a more powerful version, going from say, Creative Suite 4 Design Standard  up to Design Premium, are able to effortlessly make the switch and get the additional functionality they need to accomplish their goals.

Apparently, the creative feats of designers in the various mediums has encouraged Adobe to rise to the challenge and create a set of tools which has, in turn, empowered video, graphics and web pros to achieve far greater results than could previously have been imagined.

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I. Utilizing internet images on printed materials.  With countless new designers arriving primarily from web design and style foundation the move over from internet design to conventional design for print may carry with it a number of web design sins. Photos delivered at 72dpi and shrunk down in order to load quickly on a web site are generally going to end up looking very poorly in print. One may be able to get away with little thumb nails however, blowing items up to any kind of noticeable dimension is likely to be pressing your luck. Presently there are a great deal of on-line websites providing totally free or extremely low-cost high quality hi resolution graphics which are a great resource for appropriate images.

II. Not permitting sufficient bleed. A rather frequent mistake is to deliver to print a file or flattened graphic which has no bleed whatsoever. Generally, you ought to allow a minimum of 3mm around each and every single edge. Not doing so will offer the printing companies zero slack and will possibly crop off the edge of the page or present you with a white border. It’s always a nice idea whenever providing graphic files to offer a psd version of the files with layers. That way, in the event that the image needs extending or possibly cropping, it can be done on a layer, thereby saving you some effort.

III. Utilizing obscure fonts along with not embedding them all for output. We have probably all been guilty of that at some time and it’s usually okay if you are planning to be the sole person opening your own art work or document. Even so if somebody else wants to change the files or make use of your vector logo design in one of their publications, you must provide the fonts. Unless you bundle up the utilized fonts, these people are possibly not going to end up being able to open up the files properly and several software applications might substitute any unfamiliar fonts using a default font, profiding inaccurate results. This is usually a major issue when you have to search out information which was produced a number of years beforehand and you simply no longer have the previously used fonts on your machine.

IV. Providing print ready art work utilizing spot colors or even RGB
There are good motives for utilizing spot colors in art work, logos that have to reference specific pantone colors for example. In normal design work however almost all print is processed on four color presses CMYK together with occasional fifth color for metallic colors or for localized Ultra-violet varnish. It’s very commonplace for couch potato creative designers to simply put RGB graphics in to files and depend on the glorious colors displayed on the monirtor to be reproduced in print.

V. Enabling design and style illiterate buyers to dictate your entire design.  The say that The customer is always right,however, having said that, it is occasionally said with clenched teeth and a certain amount of dismay, that identifies that these fools will at some point in time be giving over a extra fat check for your effort. It is usually a fine idea when you first submit pictures to your customer to put in a few  junkers that would potentially lure them into admiring the
creation you would most like them to agree to. There still exists a possibility, however, of them choosing the piece of garbage that you thew together in three and a half minutes in order  to help them believe that you have been working hard to earn your money. Oh well, you can’t win them all, but as long as they’re happy, we’re happy.

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