In photography, ‘exposure’ means the amount of light that falls onto the sensor of your digital camera. In modern cameras the exposure is usually set to automatic by default and, most of the time, it can be left there and will produce beautiful pictures. There are times though, when the camera lets us down or we want to produce a particular effect and it would be nice to understand what is going on ‘under the hood’.

Getting a ‘correct’ exposure means recording as much of the relevant information in the scene as possible. In the shot on the left, the important information is the bird. The sky has gone completely white as it was much, much brighter than the bird. If I had let the meter expose for the sky, the bird would have been rendered as a black silhouette.

Even when the exposure is ‘correct’ the problem with all cameras is that they cannot record the entire range of contrast (black to white) that the eye can see. Especially when you take into account that the eye is constantly adjusting to cope with high contrast. On a sunny day if you look into the shadows of a scene then into the bright areas, the iris in your eye will quickly adjust so you can see detail in both.

Faced with the task of recording as much information as possible, the camera will try to average out all the light levels and expose accordingly. As burnt out highlights are normally considered uglier than black shadows, the camera, left to it’s own devices, will normally err on the dark side. Which is no good if you are shooting against a bright background. It’s the subject you want to see, and you don’t really care if the background is white.Auto Exposure Modes

The camera manufacturers have come up with all sorts of ingenious metering systems to try to help, there are now multi mode metering systems, which give you a choice of ‘center weighting’, ‘spot metering’ or ‘multi spot metering’ on many of the better cameras, but none can guarantee to give you what you want every time.

A common use for this technique is when you are taking a close up shot of two people and there is space between their heads, if you’re not careful the camera will focus on the wall or trees behind them. If the background is very dark or very light this can alter the exposure significantly and result in faces that are too dark or too light.

Skin tones are what most meters are set up to consider an ‘average tone’, they are also usually the part of the picture that we most want to get right. If I am photographing a group of people in difficult circumstances, like bright sunlight for instance, I will often move close in to the group and take a light reading from someone’s face or, if we are all standing in the same type of light, I will take a reading from the back of my hand. This is no good, of course, if the subject is in bright sunlight and I am in the shade.
Manual Exposure

Now it’s time to turn that dial away from ‘program’ mode and have a look at the dreaded ‘manual’ mode. There are also a bewildering array of other choices such as ‘aperture priority’, ‘shutter priority’, ‘exposure compensation’ etc., but once you understand the basics you will be able to select the most suitable mode.

The amount of light falling on the film is governed by four things.

• The amount of light reflected from the scene which, if you are outdoors, you can do very little about.
• The ‘shutter speed’ which is the amount of time the shutter is open, measured in fractions of a second.
• The ‘aperture setting’ which is the size of the hole through which the light enters. If you look at the lens of your camera you will see a diaphragm in the middle of the glass which the camera adjusts according to the light. This does exactly the same job as the iris in your eye. Aperture settings are measured in ‘f stops’.
• The ISO setting. This is the ‘sensitivity’ of the sensor. (see ISO Speed)

The shutter speed and aperture settings have other quite separate effects on the photograph which we will discuss in another article, but for the purposes of exposure, making the picture darker or lighter, they are interchangeable. Make the hole twice as big and open the shutter for half the time and you will expose the sensor the same amount.

Why use manual exposure?

The advantage of manual exposure is that the settings do not keep changing as your scene changes. Let’s suppose that you are taking close up photos of cars passing by. Some of the cars will be black or dark colors and some will be light colors or white. If you are filling the frame with almost nothing but car, the meter will be trying to render each car as mid gray. Although it will probably not succeed, what you will notice is that the background is a different shade in each photo.

I often have to take portraits of people, some are wearing very dark clothes and some are wearing white. If I am not careful with my exposure settings will be affected by the clothes.

Although it is by no means always necessary to use manual exposure, an understanding of how it all works will save a lot of disappointment. Below are some links to other articles covering various aspects of exposure.

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Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Master Collection software enables you to design and develop amazing work, collaborate effectively, and deliver virtually anywhere. Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Master Collection software delivers a comprehensive toolset for designing across media. Explore exciting enhancements that include new ways to create interactive content, breakthrough performance, and integration with new Adobe CS Live online services to boost productivity.

What’s new in CS5 Master Collection
Interactive design without writing code
Design sophisticated interactive content and create functional interfaces in new Adobe Flash® Catalyst™ CS5 without writing code. Transform your unique vision into compelling online experiences and deliver perfect project files to developers.

Innovative vector drawing and painting
Quickly and accurately represent depth and distance using new perspective tools in Adobe Illustrator® CS5. Precisely control stroke width, arrowheads, and dashes. And use the new Bristle Brush to draw with the expressive quality of watercolors, oils, and pastels, but with the scalability of vectors.

Interactive documents and presentations
Create memorable documents and presentations complete with interactivity, motion, sound, and video in Adobe InDesign® CS5. Enhance page layouts with rich media using new motion presets for easy animation creation. Take advantage of support for FLV and MP3 audio file import to engage and excite your audiences.

Extraordinary image editing
Use the Mixer Brush and Bristle Tips in Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended to explore lifelike, naturally textured painting. Add dimension to your imagery with 3D extrusions using Adobe Repoussé technology, and make precise image selections more quickly and easily with new Truer Edge selection technology.

Comprehensive reach of the Flash Platform
Realize your vision online with the capabilities of the Adobe Flash Platform. Use Flash Catalyst CS5 to design interactive content without writing code, Adobe Flash Professional CS5 to create free-form, expressive content, and Adobe Flash Builder™ 4 to develop rich Internet applications.

Tapeless workflows in video production
Work natively with pristine tapeless footage in Adobe Premiere® Pro CS5 and Adobe After Effects® CS5. Edit tapeless media formats using industry-leading tapeless workflows to keep from wasting valuable production time transcoding or rewrapping.

Industry-leading performance enhancements
Work up to ten times faster with very large images in Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended and more fluidly on HD projects in Adobe After Effects® CS5 and Adobe Premiere® Pro CS5 thanks to native 64-bit support. New GPU-acceleration quickens work in Photoshop, the new Adobe Mercury Playback Engine speeds up effects processing and rendering in Adobe Premiere Pro, and Dynamic Link is now dramatically faster.

Expressive motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects
Rotoscope in a fraction of the time with the revolutionary new Roto Brush in Adobe After Effects CS5. Isolating moving foreground elements from their backgrounds with automatic transparency is now dramatically faster.

Crisp graphics for web, interactive, and mobile delivery
Create clean, sharp artwork that aligns accurately — and automatically — on the pixel grid in Adobe Illustrator® CS5, eliminating fuzzy graphics for the web or mobile devices.

Online feedback with Adobe CS Review
Streamline your creative reviews from within Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended, Illustrator® CS5, and InDesign® CS5 using Adobe CS Review, part of CS Live online services. CS Review provides easy-to-use annotation tools and commenting viewed in the context of your design.

Adobe Story integration for script collaboration
Accelerate media creation with Adobe Story, part of CS Live online services. Streamline the flow of script data into pre-production, production, and post-production to create more engaging experiences.

Adobe BrowserLab integration for web testing
Preview websites on multiple browsers and operating systems directly from Adobe Dreamweaver® CS5 using new BrowserLab, part of CS Live online services. Avoid buying costly test hardware and maintaining testing labs.

Acrobat.com integration
Enhance communication around the globe using Acrobat.com, part of CS Live online services. Convert files to PDF, store and share files, create documents and presentations online, collaborate, host meetings, and more.

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A simple rollover swaps in the state directly under the top state and involves only one slice.

1. Ensure that the trigger object is not on a shared layer.

2. Select Edit > Insert > Rectangular Slice or Polygon Slice to create a slice on top of the trigger object.

3. Create a new state in the States panel by clicking the New/Duplicate State button.

4. Create, paste, or import an image to use as the swap image on the new state. Position the image beneath the slice you created in step 2. Although you are in state 2, the slice is visible.

5. Select State 1 in the States panel to return to the state that has the original image.

6. Select the slice and place the pointer over the behavior handle.

Note: You can select the slice while in any state.

7. Click the behavior handle and select Add Simple Rollover Behavior from the menu.

8. Click the Preview tab and test the simple rollover, or press F12 to preview it in a browser.

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New Plugins

Custom Image Sizes

Causes WordPress to create custom sizes for your images when you call wp_get_attachment_image() and related functions

Hello in all Languages

Hello in all Languages displays a “hello” word translated to the official language of the country the visitor’s IP belongs to.

Chibipaint for WordPress

This plugin integrates the java applet “Chibipaint” with WordPress. This allows the user to draw and save their drawings directly to the server. Features included are editing and mass deletion, editable preset and user-defined templates and canvas sizes.

NdB_UserHidden

Ndb_UserHidden hides parts of wordpress posts for unidentified end users. By surrounding private text with [hide] and [/hide] tags you can force guest users to register and login to view member-only content. This plugin is interesting for webmasters that want to expand their user base for newsletters and other purposes. For download sites it will force users to identify themselves before downloads are shown.

WordPress Tweeter

WordPress Tweeter is a plugin that will update your twitter account every time you make a new post on your blog. You will be able to use your own tweet template.

Updated Plugins

WP Minify

This plugin helps you easily integrate the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating and review plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, multi ratings, templated rendering, has a widgets build in and extensive shortcode support. Plugin can be integrated with comments for making a review website.

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator (TOCC) automatically generates a highly customizable dynamic site wide table of contents that is always up-to-date. All entries are navigable making your site very SEO friendly. TOCC can be configured to display static pages, blog entries and forum comments.

NextGEN Gallery

A photo gallery management plugin

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator

Email and normal links are obfuscated, hiding them from spambots. It automatically encodes each link, then uses JavaScript to decode and show them. Disabled JavaScript users get access to obfuscated links too.

Hikari Titled Comments

Hikari Titled Comments enables each comment to have a title, so that commentators can give a subject meaning to their comments

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The Photoshop scratch disk is your hard drive. Photoshop uses your hard drive as temporary “swap” space, or virtual memory, when your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation. If you only have one hard drive or partition in your computer, then the scratch disk will be the drive where your operating system is installed (the C drive on a Windows system).

Setting Up Scratch Disks
You can change the scratch disk location and add multiple scratch disks from Photoshop Preferences. Many power users like to create a dedicated hard drive partition for the Photoshop scratch disk. Although Photoshop will function with a single scratch disk on the system partition, you can improve performance by setting the scratch disk to be the fastest drive in your system. Other useful guidelines for setting scratch disks are to avoid using the same drive where your operating system is installed, avoid using a drive where the files you edit are stored, and don’t use network or removable drives for a scratch disk.

Delete Photoshop Temp Files
If Photoshop is shut down improperly or crashes in the middle of an editing session, this can leave fairly large temporary files behind on your scratch disk. Photoshop’s temp files are typically named ~PST####.tmp on Windows and Temp#### on Macintosh, where #### is a series of numbers. These are safe to delete.

Clear Disk Space
If you’re getting an error message that the scratch disk is full, it usually means you need to clear some space on whatever drive is defined as the scratch disk in Photoshop Preferences, or add additional drives for Photoshop to use as scratch space.

Defragment Your Hard Disk
It is also possible to get the “scratch disk is full” error, even if the scratch disk drive has free space. This is because Photoshop requires contiguous, unfragmented free space on the scratch disk drive. If you are getting the “scratch disk is full” error message and your scratch disk drive does show a good amount of free space, you may need to run a disk defragmentation utility.

Scratch Disk Errors When Cropping
If you are getting a “scratch disk full” error when attempting to crop an image, it’s likely that you inadvertently have size and resolution values entered in the options bar for the crop tool, or you entered values in the wrong units. For instance, entering dimensions of 1200 x 1600 when your units are set to inches instead of pixels is going to create a huge file that could trigger the scratch disk full message. The solution is to press clear in the options bar after selecting the crop tool but before dragging a crop selection.

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• Built-in HTML and CSS editors and validators as well as WYSIWYG
• In context CSS editing lets you see all the CSS styles that affect any area of a page
• Modify the display to fit your working style, with just the elements you need showing
• Includes Spry framework, Subversion integration, and even support to build Adobe AIR files
• Live view lets you check your dynamic and data driven elements right inside Dreamweaver

• Still only checks links on the same site – doesn’t validate external links
• Very complicated, can be intimidating to novices

• HTML and CSS editors work in the background to create designs in WYSIWYG mode, or directly in code view; all with valid code.
• Text editor with color coding for HTML, PHP, ASP and many other languages, plus tag completion.
• The site manager includes global search and replace across all site files as well as file transfer by many methods.
• Direct connections to Photoshop and Fireworks and the ability to do basic graphic edits right inside Dreamweaver.
• Wizards for many of the more complex actions including CSS, forms, frames, and tables.
• Lots of pre-built templates and snippets of code for use. Plus the CSS templates are really well done.
• Dreamweaver CS4 includes the ability to use HTML as a data source for Spry frameworks.
• Support for special characters and UTF-8 character sets to write effective non-English Web pages.
• Huge library of customizations available on the Exchange.
• There’s even a photo gallery maker.

Dreamweaver CS4 is still the editor of choice for freelancers and corporate Web designers alike, and this release just makes it more useful. As with CS3, Dreamweaver CS4 has strong integration with Flash, Photoshop, and Fireworks. But now there are some new elements as well:

• Photoshop smart objects
  These act just like images inside of Dreamweaver, but they are generated from the Photoshop original PSD. So any time you edit it in Photoshop, you can get it updated in Dreamweaver. And if you resize the image in Dreamweaver, you can get an optimized version for that size from the original.
• Subversion integration
  If you work on a team, you will want the ability to check-in and check-out files and have the strong version control that Subversion offers. And Dreamweaver CS4 integrates directly with Subversion.
• Extended Spry framework support
  If you weren’t sure how to use the Spry framework in CS3, now you’ll really like it in CS4. Now you can use existing HTML pages as your data sets and the framework even comes with some of the more popular uses pre-built for you.
• Author Adobe AIR applications
  Dreamweaver CS4 now supports writing Adobe AIR stand-alone applications that run on the desktop.

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Most digital cameras capture your pictures at a size large enough for quality printing. But when sending pictures by email, it’s important to reduce the size of your pictures so they transfer faster and are more viewable on the recipients screen. Windows Vista has an automated function that will resize, optimize, and email a group of pictures without altering your originals.

1. Open My Computer and navigate to the folder containing the pictures you wish to email.
2. Select the group of files that you wish to email. Use Shift or Ctrl to select additional files.
3. If the picture files are inside your Pictures folder, you should see an Email button at the top of the Window. Click this. If you do not have the Email button, right click and choose Send To > Mail Recipient. The Attach Files dialog box will appear.
4. Choose a size for your pictures. The small option is suitable for most purposes and will give you the best reduction in file size. If you know your recipient has a fast Internet connection you may want to choose Medium or Large.
5. Click Attach.
6. A status bar appears as Windows resizes the files, then a new message is opened in your default mail program with your pictures attached.
7. Windows inserts the file names into the subject field of the message. You will probably want to change this.
8. Fill in the recipients email address, add a personal message, and you’re ready to send.

1. Most images will be converted to the JPEG format for best compatibility.
2. Some files types (such as PSD) cannot be converted by Windows. You should convert these yourself before emailing them as they can be quite large.
3. Most Email providers have a maximum file size limit per message, usually around 10 MB. Try to limit the total size of all attachment to less than this when sending to recipients with a high speed connection.
4. If your recipient is on a dial-up internet connection, limit your total attachment size to 1-2 MB or less.

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Store links that you build will link to the store of any seller that you choose. When a customer clicks on your link, you will earn a referral fee on anything that visitor buys in that shopping session.

This is an example of a store link. Click the link to see how it works.

ONimages Vintage Designs

When visitors to your website use this new home page link, you will earn a referral fee on anything they purchase in that visit! I have chosen many different Zazzle stores to visit with amazing products that you can purchase. Or if you wish you can join Zazzle and leave a comment with the name of your Zazzle store on my blog and I will create a referral link to your site.

Here are some Zazzle stores to visit:

Christianphotogirl Boutique
Prawny
The Candy Store!
Noteworthy
OddBob
Perfect Postage & Cards for your special occasions
clean_world
Cards | Postage | Gifts | More
Katie Tormala Photography
Brooklyn Born Productions
The Jason Mraz Store

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This tutorial will teach you how to save an image or picture and use it as a new pattern in Photoshop. And next time, whenever you’re working with larger canvas, you can just use the Fill Layer feature in Photoshop to set the pattern as your background.

1. Open the image you want to use as pattern.

2. Then, go to Edit > Define Pattern. Type in the name you want for the new pattern and click OK.

3. Now, we want to use the new pattern as a background in our new project. Open a new document, whatever the size is up to you.

4. Go to Layer > New Fill Layer > Pattern. You’ll see this small window.

Click OK and you’ll see another window for you to select the pattern you want to use. Choose the pattern you created just now and click OK.

And you’ll have a nice background for your new project.

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