Digital Diversity

If your new to the world of DSLR’s like my self you will more than likely have purchased a camera body with a kit lens.  The latest kit lens tends to be the 18-55mm IS lens. This is a nice little lens that gives you a wide to mid zoom range. A lot of people will find this lens is a good place to start as you can take nice landscapes, scenes, snaps and event shots with it. It probably wont take you long till you wonder about extra lenses and read one of the many many many websites / forums where this subject is discussed. It can be fairly daunting and often make you feel your current lens is sub par. This article is intended to simply show you the starter lenses I have chosen that wont break the bank and give you a great place to start. The idea is to have some nice starter lenses that will get you going, then later when you work out what you use most you can then decide whether you want to upgrade to a lens that fits your needs better. Many people read these forums and websites and just decide on a £900 lens without really knowing if its for them. Then down the line they have these expensive lenses sitting there not being used.

So what lenses do I use?

I currently have 3 lenses. None of them broke the bank and all of them are of a reasonable quality that will give me nice results as long as I use them right. These Lenses are:

• Canon 18 – 55 mm f/3.5-5.6 IS (came with camera)
• Canon 55-250 mm F4-5.6 IS (£166 of amazon)
• Canon 50 mm F1.8 (£80 of amazon)
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One of the most common tasks in photo retouching is sharpening up the image (or at least parts of an image). No matter what camera you have (or what lens if you have a DSLR) the image will almost always come out a little soft. This Varies from camera to camera and if you have a DSLR you can get sharper results by buying higher quality lenses. Even so, images still tend to need at least a small amount of sharpening no matter what.

This tutorial will go through 3 different methods of sharpening your images. You just need to  find which one suits your needs the most. They all work just fine but have different methods and adaptability.

For this tutorial you will need to have an understanding of the following Photoshop techniques:
Layers and Masks

These 3 methods are:
• The UnSharp mask
• High Pass sharpen
• UnSharp mask plus lighten and darken blend modes split over 2 layers.
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If you have read the very first post I made here at Digital Diversity you will know why I bought my Panasonic FZ28. I did it because I wanted more out of a camera than my little Canon Ixus 75 could give me. More zoom, more control and better quality images. Well its happened again. I hit that roof where my camera was slowing me down.

Dont get me wrong, the Panasonic FZ28 is a great super zoom bridge camera that can give you some great images but it does have its limits. For example, in low light it really did suffer, I couldn’t shoot in rapid burst while using RAW files, The dynamic range was a bit limited which led to easily blown highlights and so on

Because of this I started to look a bit more into DSLR’s. I was already aware of their advantages from an image quality point of view but I needed to learn more about lens quality, prices and what type of DSLR would sustain my needs.

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