Getting to know editing digital photography |
| Date Added: September 24, 2007 12:00:00 AM |
| In order to edit pictures successfully, one must have the proper tools, just as when processing photos in a darkroom. In the latter, chemicals, exposure times, and certain materials can affect the outcome of a photograph. In todays darkrooms, photo editing programs, one must know how to use the tools at hand to create the results wanted. Using photo editing programs makes editing much easier. It is far less expensive than working in a traditional darkroom and far less time-consuming if you wish it to be. However, you may also take your time editing to come out with the best results. Mistakes are not embedded in stone, for theres always the "undo" button to rely on. Using your software, you can improve an image, or change it to something completely different. When you upload your pictures from your digital camera to your computer, most of them will probably be a little blurry. Probably it wont be enough to make you want to change it, but if its not, theres always the UnSharp Mask that you can use to sharpen the image. Most cameras dont apply any kind of sharpening filter to pictures they take, and so they wont always look as crisp as you might want. Most likely if you have a basic editing program you will be able to sharpen your pictures successfully, and you can sharpen them as much or as little as you want. Whats the "right" size for a picture? Well, that depends on the photo. Most monitors display at 72 dpi (dots per inch). So, if you want the picture to be 5 inches wide (probably about the biggest you would want for an e-mail message), the picture would be 360 pixels wide (5 inches x 72 dpi = 360 pixels). Pixel is short for "Picture Element" and is the smallest unit of visual information used to build an image. If you have ever zoomed in on an image, Pixels are those little squares that you see. The more pixels in an image, the better the resolution. When you want to auction off your last minute items, or you have set up an online auction shop, the most common place to do it is on eBay. Bidding online is one of the most commonly used forms of buying anything online. Pictures are often used to say a lot about a product, you want to make sure to get a picture. Here are few tricks of the trade: Take photos of different parts of your product and try different angles. Photographing your product from many angles helps add depth and avoid a flat online appearance. Pick one main overall shot of the item, but also use other detailed photos or different perspective shots. The more buyers can see, the more likely they will buy your product rather than your competitors. Once youve saved all your photos to your computer, you can optimize your pictures for online viewing. Make sure your images are saved as JPEG files and increase the compression so that your pages will download more quickly on a users computer. Also crop your photos so that it is composed only of your product, eliminating white space and making your product look better. Edit your photo. Adjust the light and contrast to improve on your original photo. Make your subject stand out by adjusting the contrast between the foreground and background colours. You can also make certain parts of your picture lighter or darker to improve the overall look. Once youve practiced photographing your products using these tips, visitors will have a better shopping experience and will be more likely to bid on your items. Take the Saturation slider and slide it to the left until the skin color looks pretty good, or the best that you can get it without looking fake. Dont worry about the other parts of the picture right now. Just concentrate on the skin color. We will fix the background colors next. Once you are satisfied with your skin color, click OK to close out of the Hue/Saturation window, and you will see your new layer above your original picture. If you notice though, the adjustment that you made affected the entire image. To get that back restored to normal, click on the layer mask part of the new layer, and grab your brush tool. Make sure that your foreground color is set to black, and you have a large enough brush so that you are not brushing the background back a long time. Now, using black, brush in the parts of the photo that you want to restore back to normal. I usually brush in the whole picture except the skin areas that I wanted to fix. This gives me the most realistic look. You are now done with the Photoshop tutorial on how to fix skin color in a picture. Stop down metering. In most lenses, the aperture remains fully open and automatically changes to the aperture setting for the shot when the shutter button is pressed. However, when using an adaptor for screw mount lenses, the connection between the lens and the camera is lost. In "stop down metering", the aperture is adjusted to the desired size before pressing the shutter button. The inbuilt light meters in Pentax DSLRs will operate in manual or aperture priority mode, giving some degree of automatic metering for using screw-mount lenses. There may be menu options to enable use of the lens aperture ring when it is not set to the A position or, in the case of the screw-mount lens, there is no connection between the aperture controls and the camera. When using small aperture settings, focusing be may difficult, so set the lens to its maximum aperture for focusing and composition and then do the metering last. If the in-camera metering presents problems but lens mounts properly on the camera, use an external light meter. Another alternative is trial and error, using the LCD screen and the camera histogram. Sharpening is one of the most impressive transformations you can apply to an image since it seems to bring out image detail that was not there before. What it actually does, however, is to emphasize edges in the image and make them easier for the eye to pick out - while the visual effect is to make the image seem sharper, no new details are actually created. The first step in sharpening an image is to blur it slightly. Next, the original image and the blurred version are compared one pixel at a time. If a pixel is brighter than the blurred version it is lightened further; if a pixel is darker than the blurred version, it is darkened. The result is to increase the contrast between each pixel and its neighbors. The nature of the sharpening is influenced by the blurring radius used and the extent to which the differences between each pixel and its neighbor are exaggerated. One of the most recognized and utilized programs for photo editing is Adobes Photoshop. From this software the term "shopped" was phrased. People who work with and view photography use the term to refer to photographs which appear to have been manipulated to show something that was not in the original photograph, to remove something which was, or when the appearance of a person or object in the photo seems to have been altered. For example, you find a picture of a group of famous (or infamous) people, then you replace the face of one of them with your own for laughs, you have "shopped" the photo. Other programs are Corel Paint Shop Pro, and Serif Photo Plus, to name but a few. About the author: Start fixing your digital photos right now and learn how to use Adobe Photoshop Editing Programs. Look over a fun report on creating filter effects it can be so simple! |
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