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Archive for February, 2013

Using Photoshop To Protect Your iPad!

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

If you have a wifi only iPad you may think you are protected by the Apple “Find My iPad” utility, but you are not.  If you lose it, or it is stolen, how will it be recovered?  Remember, for the Find My iPad app to work, the iPad has to be signed into the Internet.  If you don’t set a password or passcode, it is possible for a thief to go into the settings and shut off Find My iPad.  If you do set a password or passcode, it is only possible for the iPad to go online if it is in a place where it has signed into the Internet before, without asking if it should.  Otherwise, it remains offline, and Find My iPad can’t find it.

This means that should the police or someone else recover your iPad, they can’t find out how to contact you to say they have it, because they, too, are locked out.

This is how Photoshop or another photo editing tool can help.  The iPad allows you to put an image on the lockout screen, other than the one it comes with.

Go into Photoshop and open a new document in the size of the resolution of your screen.  In the case of the iPad 4 it is 2048 pixels X 1536 pixels @ 264 pixels per inch.  Then add whatever colors you want or add an image as a layer.  Next, find the center and use the text tool using the center-justified tool, and put in some text that identifies this iPad as yours.  See the example below.

Property of We Shoot                       

Make something that works for you, and then flatten the image.  Save it as a jpeg.  I used a quality of 7. 

Upload it as an image through iCloud using your Photostream.  Go on your iPad and open Photostream.  Tap the image and when it gets smaller, tap “edit,” tap the image again so there is a checkmark on the thumbnail, tap “Save to Camera Roll.”  Go into the Camera Roll, tap “edit,” tap the thumbnail,  tap “share,” and then tap “use as wallpaper.”  Now choose “Set Lock Screen.”  Turn off your display.  Reopen.  Your new wallpaper should show the image you just put on your iPad.

Of course, you can do this with your 3G or 4G iPhones and iPads as well.

This way, if some thief steals your iPad and can’t break the passcode or password, anyone he or she shows it to knows it has been stolen.  If it is lost, someone who finds it will be able to get in touch with you, or if the police have it, they will be able to contact you.

While not perfect, it should help you hold onto your iPad or maybe get it back.

– Gary Silverstein

We Shoot

We Shoot is a commercial product, food, industrial, and architectural photography team based in the Seattle area.

Tags: apple, apple picking, image, iPad, iPhone, lock screen, lost, Photoshop, police, property, recover, recovery, stolen
Posted in How To, Tips | Comments Off on Using Photoshop To Protect Your iPad!

Bracketing with Studio Strobes . . .

Friday, February 15th, 2013

Product and other forms of commercial photography sometimes require the use of strobes.  Strobes usually provide daylight color balance which helps with architectural photography as it allows a burst of light to light up a room, and use a time exposure to get the (daylight) scene outside a window so it looks like we see it.  Otherwise, the sunlit exterior is blown out, or in some instances, it can look darker and drearier than the interior, if it is overcast outside.  In the case of product, studio strobes are the powerful cousins of your on-camera strobes, and offer many advantages over the smaller units.

First, studio strobes are usually way more powerful, as they use very large batteries, 110v inverters, or wall socket power.  Second, they are portable and don’t have to be mounted on the camera, and give a more pleasing look as they don’t “flat-light” the subject and can be made to mitigate heavy shadows.  They are designed to work with many different accessories from umbrellas to soft boxes.  They can use many different types of wireless triggers.  They can generate more than enough light to shoot at tight apertures, allowing for deep depth of field.  In product and architecture, I find that shooting with small apertures (f11 to f16) allows me to get everything sharp and in focus.  If it is sharp in my original image, I can always create a shallow depth of field look in photo-editing software.  However, the reverse is not true.  Really soft images cannot be brought back into sharp focus even with the best of software.

All of the studio strobes I have used work with totally manual settings.  I usually set my camera on a tripod at f11 to f16 at 1/100th of a second or slower.  The strobe light burst lasts for a very short time.  This eliminates most movement, but how do I bracket under those conditions, since I don’t want to change either the shutter speed or aperture once I start shooting?  The answer is in the manual controls of the studio strobes.  Once I get my best-looking exposure of all elements by shooting and rechecking the image, I plan on shooting a series of images bracketed on either side of that exposure by working the slides or dials on my equipment, usually in half-stop increments.  I may be using as many as 3 or 4 lights at different angles, and each will need to be adjusted individually for each exposure.  This gives me the same object at the same depth of field at the same shutter speed from a dark exposure to an overblown exposure.  Why would I want to do this?  I can then pick and choose the best exposed parts of the object or room and using an editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, I assemble them to make a perfectly exposed object with detail where it needs to be without any noise.  I can also make an HDR image from all the exposures, if that gets me a better-looking image.

Being a commercial photographer means getting the best satisfactory image for your client.  A commercial photographer having the right equipment and expertise means leaving very little to chance.

– Gary Silverstein

We Shoot

We Shoot is a commercial product, food, industrial, and architectural photography team based in the Seattle area.

Tags: architectural, bracketing, commercial, edit, flash, flat-light, flat-lit, food, hdr, industrial, lighting, off-camera, on-camera, photography, Photoshop, product, shadow, software, strobes, studio strobes
Posted in How To, Learning, Tips | Comments Off on Bracketing with Studio Strobes . . .

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