10 tips that will enable you to shoot like a pro.

1. Warm up Those Tones

Have you ever noticed that your shots sometimes have a cool, clammy feel to them? If so, you’re not alone. The default white balance setting for digital cameras is AUTO, which is fine for most snapshots, but tends to be a bit on the “cool” side.

When shooting outdoor portraits and sunny landscapes, try changing your white balance setting from AUTO to CLOUDY. That’s right, cloudy. Why? This adjustment is like putting a mild warming filter on your camera. It increases the reds and yellows resulting in richer, warmer pictures.

If you don’t believe me, then do a test. Take a few outdoor shots with the white balance on AUTO to CLOUDY. Upload the images to your computer and look at them side by side. My guess is that you’ll like the warmer image better.

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When taking pictures, there are a number of choices you can make about such things as image sizes, compression ratios, and file formats. Your choices determine image quality and the size of the files you create.

When you take a photograph, the size of the image file is huge compared to many other types of computer files since each pixel requires 24 bits (3 bytes) to store color information. As the resolution increases, so does the file size. A file for a low-resolution 1 megapixel image is 3 megabytes, and at 3 megapixels is climbs to 9 megabytes, and at 6 megapixels all the way to 18 megabytes. The files become too large to easily store, transmit, and edit. To make image files smaller and more manageable, digital cameras use a process called compression. Compressing images not only let’s you save more images on a camera’s storage device, it also allows you to download, display, edit, and transmit them more quickly.

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This tool enables you to experiment with high-dynamic range lighting in a photo or 3D image that might be used in a game or 3D world. The options for controlling HDR lighting are simple: adjust a slider for gamma correction, load a tonal mapping tool to adjust light sources and other variables. Then, save your work for modeling in a 3D world.

Qtpfsgui is an open source graphical user interface application that aims to provide a workflow for HDR imaging.

Supported HDR formats:

• OpenEXR (extension: exr)
• Radiance RGBE (extension: hdr)
• Tiff formats: 16bit, 32bit (float) and LogLuv (extension: tiff)
• Raw image formats (extension: various)
• PFS native format (extension: pfs)

Supported LDR formats:

• JPEG, PNG, PPM, PBM, TIFF(8 bit)

Supported features:

• Create an HDR file from a set of images (formats: JPEG, TIFF 8bit and 16bit, RAW) of the same scene taken at different exposure setting.
• Save and load HDR images.
• Rotate and resize HDR images.
• Tone map HDR images.
• Copy exif data between sets of images.

Qtpfsgui is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X

Why this name?
Qt: the program uses Qt4 to show its graphical widgets.
pfs: the main backend library and original source code base.
gui: this stands simply for graphical user interface.

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