Entries tagged with “how-to” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

Watch Moldover deconstruct a toylike keyboard and reassemble it as an innovative musical performance controller.

Whether you use audio to sell cheese, catheters, or to warn the world about epidemics, there’s an effective process for creating the right sound for your audience. I start with some detective work.

As part of today's feature article on making movies out of still photos, Michael W. and Debra Jean Dean whipped up this funny demonstration of good and bad background music. It contains five brief examples. See if you can figure out why each helps or hurts the presentation. Debra Jean reveals the answer after each segment. I burst out laughing...

One of the hallmarks of amateur podcasts and screencasts is extraneous sound in the voiceover. Here are two DIY solutions for making quality recordings on the go and on the cheap.

O'Reilly just released Windows Vista Annoyances and you can read the multimedia solutions chapter online for free.

How high can you go? How low can you go? At least when the question is ISO...the answer depends on your hardware. In the case of my Nikon D200, high ISO (shown below) means ISO 1600. Low ISO (far below) means ISO 100, so there's a 16 times difference in the amount of light being captured due to the sensitivity...

The smaller the aperture (opening in the lens), the greater the depth of field (the distance in front and behind a subject that is apparently in focus). The aperture designated by the very small f-stop f/64 provides much greater depth of field than the far larger aperture of f/1.4. Small apertures with great depth of field are used to create...

A reader of my Photoblog 2.0 writes: "I notice that in more than one of your photos you use high f-stop values. Your results look great, despite what I've read about diffraction problems occurring at such small apertures." The reader is perfactly correct on both counts. I do often use small apertures in my macro photos. For example, the photo...

There are a number of problems to solve in night photography, including seeing what you are doing, not falling off a cliff in the dark, running out of juice in your batteries, and dealing with digital noise. The payoff, if you can manage all this, includes wonderful star trails, night music, and the digital landscape of the night as human...

In a world that is saturated with color, there is something about the elegant simplicity of black-and-white imagery that gets right to the heart of things. The removal of color allows our eyes and minds to focus on subtleties of shadow and shape in a way that's different from our everyday visual experience. Creating a beautiful black-and-white image can be...

If you grant my premise that digital photography is an entirely new medium of expression, then you have to wonder about the prevalence of metaphors that use the techniques of analog photography. In Photoshop, we use the Dodge and Burn tools. We "cross process" using Nik's excellent library of Photoshop filters (among other digital "cross processing" techniques). We produce versions...

With the release of its CS3 products, Adobe has once again ever so slightly shifted its official marketing and documentation language. The newest casualty? Palettes. Palettes no longer exist. The word "palettes" has been struck from the Adobe lexicon. Those things that were palettes are now "panels." I probably shouldn't care. But after 20 years of writing, I've come to...

Sorry I couldn't stop by last week, but I was busy fearlessly leading my crackerjack team in the final throes of getting the latest edition of my book, Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One, off to the printer. (An excuse or a shameless plug, you decide. Either way, good news!) This week, I reward your patience by giving you a quick look...

Just wanted y'all to know: In addition to this here HTML version of dekeBytes, there's a new video version of dekeBytes as well. One's up now, and another goes up tomorrow. The movies are short, between 3 and 5 minutes, so the learning-to-time ratio is up there in the stratosphere. And my pals at lynda.com have added zooms, which let...

Want to set up a small photo studio in the garage or spare room, but don't want to spend thousands of dollars on lighting equipment? A trip to the hardware store can provide you with most of the items you need to set up a studio for portraits and inanimate objects. Basic tungsten shop lights with reflectors and clamps can...

This new feature in Photoshop CS3 allows you to automatically align multiple images captured from a single vantage point, even if you shot them without a tripod. For instance, let's say we have these pictures of me and my wife, Elizabeth, from the balcony of our stateroom on the Photoshop Fling cruise, a week-long Geek Cruises event held every February....

Last week, I showed you how to use Smart Filters, a new feature in Photoshop CS3, to apply non-destructive filter effects to an image. Well, just as you can use layer masks with adjustment layers, you can apply masks to your smart filter effects. I'll show you what I mean as we apply a Radial Blur effect to last...

Last week, I talked about how long I'd been waiting the arrival of Smart Filters. In this installment of dekeBytes, I'll give you a sense for how this new feature in Photoshop CS3 works by applying some detail sharpening and high-key softening to an image. Along the way, you'll learn the basics, including how to apply a Smart Filter,...

One of the more surprising new features of Photoshop CS3 is the Brightness/Contrast command, which has gone from being one of the worst features to one that is actually quite useful. I'll show you what I mean with this example. Let's start with an image that's a little bit washed out. Image by David Politi courtesy of iStockphoto Notice how...

Location, location, location: In this brief online video, podcaster David Adam Weiss demonstrates how to improve your voiceovers dramatically just by tweaking your mic position. Weiss makes his point with a $65 Giant Squid mic taped to a ballpoint pen, but says it works equally well with the $15 mic he uses for Boston Behind the Scenes. After watching the...