Every time i pack my camera bag, besides UV filter which already mounted on my lenses, I will make sure CPL and ND 8 filters are packed.

UV filter is a must in order to protect your glasses from scratches but try to avoid those filter do not have HMC because cheap filter might cause ghosting image in some focal length and some lighting situation. Many people think Hoya HMC filter is expensive. In fact, Hoya HMC price is not much different with Hoya standard filter.

Another filter is CPL, it allow you to capture the blue sky, enhance the saturation and cut through the reflection which you can’t achieve through post processing.

This Picture captured with Hoya CPL to enhance the blue sky.

This Picture captured with Hoya CPL to cut through the water reflection at the bottom.

Another filter is ND (Neutral Density) filter, it can help you to slow down the shutter speed during bright day bright in order to achieve special blur effect in day time.

ND8 has been used to achieve the slow shutter in order to get the misty effect of the water current.

For this picture, I have used ND 8 to get 15s to make the water reflection as smooth as mirror.

Hope this short article can help our readers to decide what filter they need to use or buy.

Want to know what is the different between Standard vs HMC filter? Check out here for detailed explanation

In photoshop, anyone who’s scaled an image down, changed their mind and then tried to stretch the image to its original size will know of the pixellated mess that occurs.

This can now be avoided with the Smart Objects feature. It allows you to scale the image like a vector object. You can reduce and enlarge a photo without loosing the image quality. This feature is only available in photoshop CS2 and above. By using the Smart Object feature, the original image is embedded in the layer so any resizing that occurs calls on the original hi-res version.

1. To add a smart object, all you need to do is go to File > Place.

2. Choose your picture and click place. Your image will open with a bounding box around it. Use this to scale the image. Hold down Shift key and drag the corner point. After that press Enter to confirm your selection.

3. This is your Smart Object layer. Your Smart Object should have a little page icon in the bottom right corner of the layer’s thumbnail.

Now, enlarging and shrinking the object is no longer a problem with Smart Object in Adobe Photoshop.

I am out for training this week in Kuala Lumpur Convention Center. This training is provided by our company. What training my company is sending me to? Business process management (bpm), maybe my boss thinks I should improve my skill in this area. After this training, I am able to learn the how to efficiently aligning a company with the wants and needs of customers. Then I can help my company to promote business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation and integration with technology. BPM also helps to continuously improve processes within an organization to define, measure and improve your processes also called process optimization.