Touching up Your Photos
Interesting article for the non-professional photographers among us about how to do some quick-and-dirty touch ups to eliminate common causes of less than ideal photos: shiny face, distracting background, and red eye. You can read the entire article at Wired: Touch up your pics
If only your girlfriend didn’t look sweaty and possessed — and the background didn’t resemble the mothership’s control room — this snapshot would be frame-worthy. With Adobe’s consumer-grade image editor Photoshop Elements ($100 for PC, $90 for Mac), you can remedy these common photo spoilers in seconds.
If you’re on a Mac, you can also try using the lightweight photo-editing app Pixelmator ($60). And those of you on Linux can give the free and open-source GIMP a shot. The controls and keyboard shortcuts won’t be exactly the same as the techniques described below, but they’ll be close enough that you should be able to figure out the correct combinations.
So far, I’m kind of low-tech. The MacBook Pro comes with iPhoto, and it takes care of just about everything I need. I crop, every now and then I adjust contrast or give it a little more or less lighting. Once I even straightened a photo that was tilted – wow, that makes me feel so powerful!.
AdventureMan has PhotoShop Elements, which he has explored, but I think maybe he was a little overwhelmed by all the processes. We both like taking photos, but we aren’t going to spend a lot of time trying to make a bad shot into a great shot. We try to do that when we are taking the photo. It’s all fun for us, when we start taking it too seriously, it stops being fun.
I like articles like this, though, that take something step by step and make it easy.
Do you PhotoShop? What’s your favorite tool?
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I Photoshop from time to time – mostly for artistic reasons, rather than practical ones. My favorite tool is a filter called ‘liquify’ – it allows you to adjust proportions/shapes. I’m not sure if it’s available in Elements (my brother’s Photoshop is the pro version), but it is a lot of fun to be able to warp an image at the click of a button. 😀
In terms of just photography, I’m with you on the ‘fun’ bit. I love doing the editing (or ‘composition’) before my finger even touches the trigger. I love it so much, that it took me years to trade my beloved manual Minolta for a digital camera.
I love Photoshop! Hmm… all tools are cool and editing pics is so easy and boy you can do miracles
C, I know what you mean about going digital. . . I used a Nikon for years. It took fabulous photos. The digital shoots under low light conditions, and gets sharper photos. I couldn’t believe it.
That “liquify” sounds like a lot of fun!
Chicki – What is your favorite tool? Which do you tend to use the most often?
Take a good photograph to start with. In fact a cheap film camera will take a better photo than a digital camera as colour negative film can capture a wider dynamic range. Meaning that you can see details in the shadows and the highlights at the same time.
Digital has hooked people because of instant gratification and ease of shooting lots of photographs But, for top quality photographs digital is a challenge.
Photoshop has a steep learning curve and if you are honest and actually buy the software it is expensive, costing more than most cameras people use. That being said, as a serious photographer I use digital cameras and several different programs including Photoshop, Lightroom, Nikon Capture NX, plus plugins for noise reduction etc.
Mr. Ian! You sound like the real thing. Do you do this for a living?
What wowed me about digital was my husband and I had the same cameras, really nice Nikons with big lenses we would take on safari. I thought one year I would also take my digital camera. We saw a leopard at dusk, and my husband is cursing about not having enough light and my little digital is just snapping away. Not every shot was sharp, but one good shot is enough, isn’t it?
For me, the lightness of the camera, and the range of light conditions under which it takes sharp shots outweighed the depth of the film cameras. I still look at my old shots though, at the depth of the colors and details and yearn for the perfect digital.