No, that's not why. The reason you can do that, if you can do that, is that you have learned to use one of the many features and techniques available.

Of course, you could buy a different coloured shirt instead.

To be fair, we can get away very nicely with a bit of leeway, but for optimum results providing the printer/publisher/website with exactly what their specification asks for is always a good idea.

It's the same as the exortation to read the rules in competitions.

Photoshop just simulates darkroom techniques, obviously it can't actually do them all exactly the same way. Just as layers are not actually layers of acetate on an overhead projector, but it can be useful in understanding to explain them that way.

As with many things, the more you know the more there is to know.

There's no exclusion of any image in the weekly.

I don't think it would be fair to exclude anyone who has entered whilst the system is open, so I'll reset it to 29th August.

Don't forget to let us see the images when you can.

The answer is, maybe surprisingly, Unsharp Mask. Recorded in the literature in the 1930s and maybe even earlier, you make a second slightly defocused negative and print is slightly out of register with the original. Hence Unsharp Mask. The optical effect of this is to make the print look sharper.

That is why sharpening in Photoshop is called Unsharp Mask.

Edit: the other way with conventional film photography is, of course, to use a slower film. And yet another way is to use a harder grade of paper - more contrast looks like better sharpness to the human eye.

Is the doubling of the EV scale or any scale not 3dB, it being logarithmic?

Our cat has only ever once shown any interest in two dimensional images. One day she watched, avidly, an entire hour of nature programme. Nothing before or since, so who knows how the feline mind works.

An angel with a mobile phone? I suppose it had to happen, even angels must move with the times.