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If you want to get the most from your digital camera, there is nothing more important than photo editing software. Sure you can take pictures without it. Sure you can share them, etc. But what you are going to have is almost certainly the boring snapshots that you hate to get from other people. You can do better, with the right tools.
Photo editing is also called "post-processing", meaning that it's something you do after you shoot pictures, and it's usually part of something called a digital workflow or just a workflow. I really recommend that you understand workflow, and so I've added a page HERE to describe how one works, but feel free to keep reading this to get the range of digital editing first. Unless you're going to edit pictures, your workflow will be pretty simple--copy off the camera.
The best photo software out there in terms of features and capabilities is Adobe Photoshop. The problem is that Photoshop costs nearly $700, is complicated to learn and use, and eats up a ton of resources so it may not run well on systems with limited disk, memory, and processor capacity. I use Photoshop on my home system but I don't take it with me on trips because of its cost and resource burden.
If you can't afford or use Photoshop, what's left in life? There are a number of options, most of which I've tried to use. Most of these choices will work for some people at least, some will work for nearly everyone, and all have some trade-offs you'll need to be aware of. I can't offer a comparison based on every use pattern and every system type, so I'm going to make an assumption, which is that what we're looking for is a photo editor or software tool that can be taken with you on a trip and used to view, change, and share images while you're traveling. If your intended use is on a big home system, some of my comments won't apply, but I'll try to make it clear which ones might not. I also want to make the point that I'm a Windows and Linux user and not a Mac user, so I can't speak for the Apple packages based on experience. I've heard that they're good, though.
What do you need in a photo editor for travel pictures? Obviously that depends on how much editing you want to do and how much time you're prepared to spend. It also depends on whether you're looking for your only editor, or for something lightweight that you can take along so that you can do quick photo-processing to donate some images to others on the trip. My mission is the latter and I have a lot of experience with Photoshop, but I've taught digital editing courses so hopefully I can make some constructive recommendations to even beginners.
The minimum list of things you need in an editor to do a good job with pictures are:
- Cropping capability--the ability to select a piece of the image and throw the rest away (metaphorically; you never want to destroy your original picture so all image editing should save a copy).
- Shadow/highlight control to lighten and darken just the light and dark parts of the image.
- Color balancing to eliminate color casts
- "Sharpening" of the image to make the edges more visible and the image "pop" more.
Let's look at these capabilities to see why they're essential for good images.
Cropping is selecting a piece of an overall picture to create the image you'll print or share. For many cameras and standard print sizes, some cropping will be a fact of life when you print because the ratio of the image dimensions from the camera won't match the print's dimensions. But even if you're just showing the image on a computer, there's a good reason to crop; several in fact:
- You may not be able to get close enough to your subject for the picture, in which case you may find yourself with a little subject lost in background. Cropping will get the background out, make the subject larger relative to the overall picture size, and fix the problem.
- There may be distracting things in the picture that you couldn't avoid, and cropping can get rid of them.
- The best composition for the image, for the artsy effect you're looking for, may be something less than the full image.
The latter is especially important in travel/wildlife pictures because you can't stand there composing your image for a long time. Your subject may fly off or run off (or drive you off!) or your tour group may leave you in disgust (spouse included). Most casual photographers shouldn't try to compose shots in the field because of the time it takes, so shoot with a little more background in the shot than you'd think you need and crop for the best composition when you get home. I used to teach digital photographers this principle: "Perfectible in the field; perfect in Photoshop" and it's a good rule. Just try not to screw anything up beyond repair while you're shooting, and fix it in your editor. Cropping is a big part of that.
Shadow/highlight control is something most people don't think about, but it's essential because your eye and your camera don't see the same way. When you look at a scene you really glance at pieces of it, and for each piece your eye adjusts to optimum exposure. The camera shoots the whole scene at one setting, and so it's easy to see why dark parts might be too dark and light parts too light. You can't fix areas of the picture that have blown out into featureless white or those that are sunk into pure black, but where there's some detail available you can use shadow/highlight controls to "flatten the dynamic range" or range of luminosity in your picture so it looks more like what you saw when you were there.
Color balancing is another thing that most people need and few know about. You should normally set your camera on what's called "auto white balance" so it detects whether you're shooting in sun, shadow, or whatever. Most of the time that works, but sometimes the camera gets fooled and you get an image with turquoise sky or yellow skin. Color balancing will let you adjust the "white balance" of the scene. The best packages will have a little eyedropper tool you can click on a white, gray, or black part of the image with to correct the white balance. There's almost always a slider you can move around until you see something that looks subjectively like you'd want it to.
Sharpening is something that nearly every picture needs and that almost no picture ever gets. Ever wonder why some friend shows you digital prints where every hair on a bear seems sharp and clear, while your stuff looks like it's been sprayed lightly with dirt? Digital images often lack contrast at edge points, and "sharpening" increases that contrast to make the edges stand out. Your camera probably lets you set in-camera sharpening and you can check your settings first, but nearly everything benefits from some sharpening in editing.
You can do a lot more if you want to take the time, but most people will probably stop with the basic steps. Here are some examples of more advanced features, but we won't go into them because their use is just too complicated to explain without reference to how a specific software editor does the function.
- Red-eye reduction to eliminate the "lighthouse look" people get from looking into the flash
- "Stamping" or "healing" of spots and defects
- Support for "layers" of image components
- Adding text for copyright notices
- Adding internal data (captions, etc) to images
Nearly everything in photo processing these days is either free or has a free trial option, and you should absolutely try before you buy.
I've looked at a dozen or more packages, and most of them I won't bother reviewing because they don't suit my needs, don't have features comparable to other stuff that's less expensive, or are so hard to find you probably won't ever run into them. The ones I list below are the best of the lot as far as I'm concerned.
GIMP, Free, Idiosyncratic, Powerful
Download at http://www.gimp.org/.
The king of the low-cost (read, "no-cost") photo software tools is an open source image manipulation tool called "GIMP". GIMP is free software and there are versions available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux systems. In terms of power and capabilities, it's a serious rival to Photoshop. GIMP is for people who really want to do photo-editing. The problem is that open-source software isn't really supported (no free software is), and so you may have a harder time getting it to work under strange conditions or adding features and capabilities to it unless you're somewhat of a computer geek or at least have access to one. But if you can use this product, the results can match the best of commercial software. GIMP's performance is also pretty decent as long as you're staying with basic tasks. We tried a few things, like rotating large images to straighten the horizon, that tool quite a while on an Acer Netbook, though.
The biggest problem with GIMP outside of complexity is the fact that many of the editing effects don't provide a preview. There are two kinds of add-ons for GIMP, true plugins that are executables, and "scripts" that look like plugins but are written in a higher-level scripting language. The latter are slower to run and these are the packages that seem to not offer live previews of changes. It's hard to do shadow/highlight editing without live preview, so you may want to think about using something else if you expect to diddle with exposure and color a lot.
GIMP isn't an organizer of pictures, and so if you want to find an image out of a group of photos you've taken then process it, you'll need some organizing software. I use a package called IrfanView, which includes IrfanThumbnails. The latter will view pretty much any file (including camera RAW files) and you have the option to launch an external editor on an image. I set one of my external editor options to GIMP and I'm home free. IrfanView itself (as opposed to thumbnail viewer) is a good way to look at a picture in more detail without editing, by the way.
The most powerful thing about GIMP is the plug-ins, a concept that builds features by adding in capabilities as little modules. Photoshop has plugins, but in GIMP they're an explosive area of new capabilities that can be compared to applications on the iPhone; you need plug-ins to get the most from GIMP. That's where geekiness comes in, though; installation of GIMP plugins means copying stuff to directories and so forth so it's not for the faint of heart. For those who are interested in the very best from their cameras (and who have cameras that support the option), shooting in RAW format is the best course. GIMP uses an open-source plug-in for RAW file conversion, and though we've not tried it for every RAW file, it's generally considered to be the most capable package available outside expensive commercial software.
If you're looking for photo software that's free, capable, expandable, and powerful. GIMP may be that thing.
Picasa from Google: Fast, Basic, and also Free
Download at http://picasa.google.com/intl/en/.
This is a package that has both a strong following and a number of vocal detractors, and we've been (and still are, to a degree) in both camps. What you need to understand to know Picasa is that it's a program for the masses. GIMP is for serious photo-editors, and Picasa is for most people, with some extended capabilities to make "most people" look better than they might really be.
Picasa is a combination of photo-organizer and editor, and for people who want that the combination is a good one. For those who don't, the organizing part gets in the way of the main function of editing to the point where I've uninstalled it in disgust at least two or three times. What's changed is a combination of the package, my tolerance, and my mission.
In the organizing mode, Picasa wants to search your whole My Documents or computer folder set to find images, and then index them. This process can take a very long time if you have a lot of images. The new version also wants to recognize and catalog faces, which can take even longer. If you have the luxury of installing Picasa on a system with few pictures, it's a good idea to let it go ahead and do its thing, then disable face recognition and tell Picasa not to look at any folders it finds that won't contain pictures you'll want to edit. Once that's done, the organizing part isn't too bad. To use Picasa as an in-the-field editor, you just let it index any new photos you have (it will download them if you like, but I have another way of doing that), and then double-click on an image to open the editor.
Picasa is what could be called an "overlay editor" in that it builds a stack of changes to an image without really changing it. You have the option to save the changes (in which case Picasa will move your original to a backup folder to protect it) or "Save As.." to put the changed image somewhere else. One byproduct of this approach is that you can't undo individual changes, only all changes at one time. That can be a pain if you've done some complex editing and then accidentally convert the image to black and white, for example!
If you shoot RAW you'll probably like Picasa a lot because it seems to open RAW files well, even the later versions for new cameras. That can be a problem for packages, we've found. GIMP keeps pretty well up to date here, but it appears Picasa does better.
In editing power, Picasa is good but not great. It doesn't support everything that Photoshop or GIMP does by a long shot, but it has very good tools for basic image manipulation including color cast, light and shadow, cropping, sharpening, etc. In these basic capabilities, it's easier to use than GIMP, in fact. My current plan is to use Picasa for most of my field work, and use GIMP when I need to do something that's outside Picasa's comfort zone.
Unless you have experience with a more powerful tool, Picasa is a pretty good choice.
Helicon Filter: A Powerful and (For Now) Free Editor
Download at http://www.heliconsoft.com/
Be sure to get the Free Version 4 and not the beta for the paid version.
We found this editor just recently and have only now started to play with it, but so far we're pretty impressed. Helicon Filter is a fairly powerful editor, not as much as GIMP but more powerful than Picasa. It has a built-in sequential concept of workflow to take you through processing a picture from step to step, and there's even a wizard that will guide beginners but that more expert users can simply drop. What's really nice about the product is the combination of powerful editing features, simple operation, and live previews of the changes you make. Picasa also offers that, but some of GIMP's effects aren't visible in preview, which makes things trial and error.
Helicon Filter opens RAW files too, though the processing takes a bit of time (similar to what GIMP takes, though). There are advanced features available for RAW shooters, like noise reduction, color correction, and even correction for lens faults like pincushion distortion. You'll be surprised at what you can do with this product, we think.
The only issue we've found is performance, and that's an issue only relative to Picasa. For simple stuff, Picasa is a lot faster and the fact that it has an integrated image browser makes it much easier to use for the average digital photographer. You can integrate it with IrfanView's thumbnails program (it acts as an external editor) but the results still take longer than with Picasa.
Another caveat with Helicon Filter; the company appears to have made its Version 4 free in prep for releasing a new version. That may mean that there will be a nice follow-on product that offers even more features at a modest price, which is what we hope. However, from time to time companies do this and in later releases "remove" features. My advice to those who are rightfully interested in this software is to download and keep the current version install package, and don't allow it to update the program with later versions unless you're sure that Version 5 commercial terms are what you want.
IrfanView and Thumbnails
Download at http://www.irfanview.com/
This is a kind of "minimalist" package that has a broad range of capabilities but not a lot of depth in any given category. There are really two packages, one that does thumbnail viewing of images and the other that opens up when you double-click on something and lets you view and "edit" the picture. That's the basic work flow that is best for most people. IrfanView lets you specify what external editor program you want to use if you need to go beyond the basic capabilities it offers.
Editing is more primitive than with the other packages but also simpler. The only thing you can't do is adjust highlights and shadows individually. Read the help files and play with the program to get the most of its capabilities, though. It's not quite intuitive in editing; most features are menu-driven. The best thing about it is that it will render RAW files in both the thumbnail viewer and in the editing window, and you can save files in a very wide variety of formats, which is handy for exchanging images with others.
This isn't a sophisticated editor by any measure, but once you learn its basics you can do all the essential things very quickly and easily and it works on every possible image type you can think of. It's also free!
Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3
Download trial at http://www.corel.com . This is a commercial package!
We used to use (and still have) a version of Corel's old Photoshop competitor, called PhotoPaint. That was a pretty darn good package, and for a time you could get it as part of a "Corel Draw Essentials" package for about $80. Sadly, while it's still available as a bundled part of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, you can't get it as a standalone product for editing. One reason is that Corel seems to be taking it more in the direction of bitmap art work, and using a package it acquired (PaintShop Pro) as the flagship for digital editing.
This package isn't free, but it is powerful and it seems to handle the RAW formats well. In terms of editing capability, it's equal to GIMP but lacks the vast array of plug-ins that GIMP has for tuning its features. The organizer is built into PaintShop, and as we've found with some other commercial products (Photoshop Elements, notably) this inclusion seems to have mucked up the interface and the performance of the package considerably. We suspect that it would be a decent photo package on a desktop or laptop with dual-core technology and maybe 4GB RAM, but on a small laptop or netbook it's very difficult to wait out complex operations. We also found that many of the screens were not laid out for the netbook standard 1024x600 resolution, and that it was difficult to use the screens because all the buttons didn't show.
I'd have bought this in a second if it had been a solid performer without netbook problems, but it wasn't and I didn't. Unless your situation is different, you'll probably end up in the same place. In any case, use the trial option to get some experience with this before you buy!
Photoshop Elements
Adobe Photoshop is the gold standard for editing, and when Photoshop Elements first came out I was really encouraged that quality photo editing might now come for the average joe who can't spend seven hundred bucks. That was the case through perhaps Version 3 or 4 of the package, but I'm afraid I'm no longer a fan.
The problem with Elements is similar to that of PaintShop from Corel. They've tried to make it both simple and powerful at the same time, and as a result have made it a lot more clunky. You could see it coming in the progress from Version 3 (which I liked) to Version 4 (which I had problems with) and on to the current version, which is simply too slow to be useful to me.
Elements is better designed than PaintShop, and for those who need something full-featured and that comes with commercial support it may be a better choice than GIMP, but it's my honest view that there won't be many in that category. If you need the kind of power that justifies Photoshop Elements versus Picasa, for example, you'll find the performance and the orientation of the software pretty hard to overcome.
The Bottom Line
How computer-confident are you? Can you use Windows Explorer to locate directories and move stuff around? Are you a Linux user? If you fit in this category, then pretty much anything above will work but GIMP and Helicon Filter are the more sophisticated packages and you'll probably like them better unless you really don't want to get involved with details of digital post-processing. If you have more modest levels of literacy, GIMP is probably out because it's more difficult to use and to install tools for. Picasa and Helicon Filter are both relatively easy to use, with the latter a bit more sophisticated and thus perhaps not quite as intuitive. Picasa is a pretty good overall choice for lighthearted photo processing. IrfanView shouldn't be dismissed, though. It's a step down in sophistication from Picasa but it's still a lot better than not having anything and just using shots right out of the camera.
Photo Editing
The whole idea of digital cameras and their popularity seems somehow to be linked with the modern urge for instant gratification. With a film camera, you shoot a roll and maybe you remember to get it processed. If you want the pictures bad, even one-hour photo is a long time, and when you have to wait you get tied up with other things…you get the picture (no pun intended). With digital, you have the picture the instant you take your finger off the shutter button.
Well, maybe.
Certainly all digital cameras have at least an option to let you pull an image out of the camera and use it "as-is". A lot of really good photographers with lots of experience often make this "no-touch" method work for them by carefully setting the camera's controls and watching lighting and exposure critically. Unfortunately I'm not one of the people who can do that. To be kind to myself, careful preparation and controlled settings don't go well in wildlife photography, which is primarily what I do. If you're not going to be able to get everything set up perfectly, then you're going to have to fix the image after you've shot it.
Software to alter digital images is usually called "photo editor" or just "photo software". Many of the digital cameras will come with software, and Microsoft, Adobe, Corel, and a bunch of other vendors all have photo-editing products available for purchase. Sometimes a version of one of these commercial packages will be provided with a camera. With a photo-editor, you can correct many of the problems that are likely to pop up in your digital picture-taking. A good photo-editor is essential if you can't go back and take the shot over if you've messed up. It makes the difference between having a picture (maybe not the best, as we'll see) or having nothing.
Before we start, I do want to point out that there's no substitute for doing a good job when you take the picture in the first place. Digital cameras and photo-editors cannot fix some cockpit errors. Among them are out-of-focus shots, motion blur, and extreme over- or under-exposure. You've gotta get things at least close to right. So to open our tip on photo-editing, let's start out with some rules to apply before you crank up the computer and start diddling. These are rules that are applied where the rubber meets the road-when you're taking the picture in the first place.
Rule number one is to get to know your camera and what it can do. Try shots under a lot of different conditions and with different settings until you have a decent understanding of your gear. One nice thing about digital is that it doesn't cost you anything for film or processing. Burn those electrons like they were water! When you're comfortable, you can move on to taking pictures for real.
The second rule is to check the results of any shot while you're still there on the spot. All digital cameras will play back an image, and some will even show you a chart or histogram that depicts the light-and-shadow distribution in your shot. If you're taking pictures of running wolves who probably won't go back and rerun their course for you on command, take a shot of the area before you start looking for wildlife to get your exposure set. While you're doing this, check the shutter speed and lens opening (if they're accessible) to insure that you're not trying to shoot running wolves with a half-second shutter speed. Heck, at that speed you could get one of your travel companions to streak through the scene and claim the resulting blur was a wolf! A running animal moves at about 20 feet per second, so your wolf will have moved ten feet in the time the shutter was open.
Rule number three is to take multiple shots (preferably with somewhat different settings-what pros call "bracketing") of anything important where possible. If you are shooting a critical shot without a tripod and are afraid of camera shake, blow off two or three extras in the hope that at least one will be steady.
Got that? OK, let's say you've done all this stuff and you are still interested in photo-editing. How do you go about it?
Picking Your Editor
The premier photo editor is, without much question, Adobe's Photoshop. Now a part of Adobe's new "Creative Suite", Photoshop lets you do about anything you're likely to ever want (or be able) to do with a digital image. Photoshop's an expensive product, though. The retail version is about $700 bucks if you don't have an older version to upgrade, and the new CS version is licensed for one computer and registers to insure you don't use it on more than that. If you're serious about digital photography but not that serious, there are some down-home options you may want to consider.
First and best is a program called "Photoshop Elements". PE is a stripped-down version of Photoshop designed more for the typical consumer than for the professional or graphic artist. You can get PE for less than a hundred dollars; Version 4 is the current one, and it's darn good.
Another option that may be good for many is Corel's PhotoPaint. Available as part of a low-end product called "Essentials", PhotoPaint is a decent editor with features at least on a par with Photoshop Elements, and in many areas as good as Photoshop itself. Since Corel Draw, a graphics and presentation package, comes with "Essentials" too, some may want to go this route.
Other editor programs are available (Paint Shop Pro is a popular one), but I can't recommend them; I have no experience in their use. Frankly, it's very likely that if you really want to do good editing you're going to want either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. The techniques used in each program are similar, and there's a host of good documentation and tips available for them. If you can, get one of these packages.
For the really and truly adventurous, there's a very powerful open source (meaning "free") image editor called GIMP. The Windows version of GIMP is available at http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/ and there's documentation of a sort on the homepage http://www.gimp.org. There are free plugins for GIMP, and it has incredible flexibility and capability, but the user interface is very different from the Windows standard and the documentation is best used by someone who has some technical skill in both computers and imaging. If you fit the bill, try it out. I believe in the open source movement, and you can find more on it and on other open source software at http://www.sourceforge.net. Check it out.
When you select an editor, before you even try to use tips like this further, play with it, read the manual, and get at least a nodding familiarity with its features. If you want to do serious digital image processing, buy a how-to book or two. One should cover your photo editor as a product, and others should deal with specific issues like color correction or fixing digital images. Where a choice of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements will really help you is that nearly all the good books on how to do things with digital photos are written for Photoshop. Many of the tips can be applied with Elements as well. Some may be workable with other products if you take the time to figure out the equivalent step. Whatever you decide, take the early study process seriously. If you just start fiddling, you'll get into a lot of sub-optimum habits.
This tip is a half-book as it is, so I'm afraid I can't cover how to do everything in all the editor choices. I'm going to use Photoshop as an example, with comments on the small differences in Photoshop Elements.
Workflow and You
Besides "Photoshop", the word you hear most often from pro digital photographers is "workflow". This nifty sounding term basically means the procedure you follow in processing a digital image. The idea is to establish a very structured way of approaching the task of editing a picture, so that you get consistent and good at it. Digital workflows tend to be very personal; people trade tips on them all the time and everybody generally goes back to the way they've learned to do it themselves. It's almost like the superstitious set of things that players do before a big game. Still, workflow does have its basic elements, and that's what we're going to cover here.
The first thing you need to do when processing a digital image is to save your negative! Before you go berserk and wonder why we're taking "negatives" when we left film and chemistry behind to go digital, let me explain that I'm talking about a digital equivalent of a negative. Your camera produced an image file, and you downloaded it somehow into your PC. Before you do anything at all with that image file, you need to preserve it. Digital editing is destructive. You'll learn new and better techniques every week for the first couple of years. If you ever want to go back and correct what you now know are your early stupid amateurish mistakes, you'll need something to go back to.
When you get a bunch of images loaded onto your PC, scan through them looking for ones that are clearly beyond hope. You know the type-hand in front of the lens, forgot the flash and it's all black, photographed the sun and it's all white, moved the camera or the subject moved…we could go on. Save a defenseless humanity from this stuff and delete it now. You can pretend these shots never happened. What you have left over is the stuff you have hopes for, and those are the shots you need to preserve.
When your "hopeful" shots are culled out, the first step is to rename the digital files into something at least semi-logical. Cryptic file names like "DCS0020.jpg" aren't going to help you find Auntie Maud's image two years from now when your buttering her up so she'll put you in the will. You'll need a system to name your files. The simplest is one that is based on date: "2004-01-27-001.jpg" might be the first shot taken on January 27th, 2004. If you use your camera as I do, to record trips or adventures, you can assign a leading code to identify the trip, then number sequentially by day of trip and number of picture. That's the system I use. My Churchill trip was "B" in my new naming, and the next two digits are the day of the trip, with the last four being the image number within the day. If you don't like that system, make up your own.
Renaming can be done by hand, but it's a pain in the neck. A better approach is to get an file renaming utility. I use one called "A.F.5 Rename"; it's free and you can download it at http://www.fauland.com/. Learn to use the one you get so you don't mess things up at this early stage! You can also get a product that renames while acquiring the images. Photoshop Elements does that, but some may not want to clutter up an image laptop with big software packages. Another tool is ImageIngester (http://basepath.com/ImageIngester/) which is an absolutely wonderful tool for grabbing raw files, converting them with Adobe's DNG converter to compress them, renaming them, and saving them.
Now that you have your files named, there are two ways to create a "digital negative". The best way is to save the shots, exactly as they came from the camera or compressed with Adobe's free Digital Negative Converter, on something durable like a CDROM. A second way, for use when your camera saves its images in a compressed "JPEG" or "JPG" format, is to convert the images to a lossless format like Photoshop's own .PSD files or the generally usable .TIF files, and then archive them to CDROM. In theory, there's no reason you have to convert and then save, and your files will take up a lot more space if you convert them to a lossless format. In practice, it may save you a problem later on-I'll get to that point in a minute.
When your files have been archived to CDROM, you're ready to go with digital editing. That brings us to the first rule: You will always start your editing process with your digital negative, never with the result of previous edits (unless you're doing something very minor). Copy your negatives back from CD to your hard drive to work on them if you've erased them or edited them before. This is particularly true if you're using the JPG format, because that compression scheme loses small elements of detail every time you save the file, and if you continually resave a JPG you're likely to end up with visible defects in the image.
The workflow for actual digital editing is a phased process. We're not going to teach you how to do all of these phases because the technique will vary depending on what editor you have, but we will guide you through how the process should work at a high level and what each step will accomplish for you. The best sequence of actions to take in optimizing a digital image is probably this:
- Examine the image carefully, looking for anything that's a defect (dirt on the lens or CCD, for exmple), an unwanted reflection or red-eye, or a small object that's intruding into the shot and distracting you (overhead wires are a favorite). You'll want to use your editor to remove them.
- Use the editor's color, lightness, and contrast tools to adjust the overall image appearance to the most natural level (or to the unnatural level you like).
- Increase the "sharpness" of the image using one of several sharpening tools.
- Provisionally save your work at this point, if you're going to multi-purpose the image.
- Size and format the image for each of the uses you plan for it-print, email, etc. You'll start each process with the version of the image you saved in Step 4 above.
We'll take each of these steps in order now, in a bit more detail. Remember, you'll need to consult the manual or help file for your editing software to find out how to perform each of these steps in your particular product.
Fixing Problems in an Image
Many otherwise good snapshots (digital and otherwise) are ruined by some little thing. A good example is a big dot on the end of the subject's nose, caused by a gnat landing on the lens (or on the subject). Others are ruined by a reflection, red-eye, or some trick of light. In the old film days, it was difficult or impossible to fix these things. With digital, it's easier.
First, we've got to separate little problems from big problems. A little problem is a spot, or dot, or blob. A big problem is a tree, a person (maybe you'd like your ex out of a shot). The reason is that you need a different approach depending on just how much of the picture is impacted.
If you have a little dot/speck problem, most photo editors will let you use a tool called a "clone stamp" or "rubber stamp". This tool works by lifting a piece of the image from one place and stamping it down in another. The trick is to find a place in the image where there's a good sample of what should be under the defect, lift it with the stamp, and deposit it where the image has a problem. You should adjust the size of the stamp to be just a bit larger than the size of the defect, or use a small stamp and take several whacks at it. In effect, you're painting good stuff over bad. You have to work carefully, both in selecting where you got the "good" sample from and how you stamp it onto the new area.
Full versions of Photoshop have a better tool called a "healing brush". It works the same way as the clone stamp, but it does a better job of blending in the new textures. Try both tools; one will work best for any given situation, but not always the same one.
For a big problem, clone stamping would take too long and it would produce a kind of unnatural texture. To fix a big problem like a tree growing out of someone's head, you have a couple of approaches that might work.
Approach number one is the "select and paint" approach. Photo editors have various tools to select a piece of the image to work on. One way is to carefully draw around the edge of what you want to select, using what's often called a "lasso" tool. Another way is to touch the area with a "magic wand" that then selects adjacent pixels of the same general color as you touched. Again, try each of these approaches a couple of times to see what works for you. When you have something selected, you'll generally need to "expand" your selection a few pixels to get rid of transition color (leaves on the tree growing out of your uncle's head, for example). When the faint dotted area that marks your selection is covering what you need covered, you're ready for the painting step. You first sample the color of the sky (using our tree example), and then paint over the selected tree area using that color. Get a sample of sky from nearby so the shades will match.
Painting works only if the background behind the object is a flat uniform color. If it isn't, you need to replace the offending object with something that looks like what would be behind it. That process also starts by selecting. The trick is to find another spot in the picture that contains suitable background, select it, copy it, and move the copy over the offending object. For example, you might find a nice piece of sky with fluffy clouds, copy it, and use the copy to obstruct the tree we've been using as an example.
The "copy" kind of fix is done by creating a copy of a piece of the image and then moving that copy so it's covering the offending object. Just doing a selection and copy doesn't actually create a copy, though. You'll need to be careful and paste the copy in (if you're using Windows, the keyboard combination "Ctrl-C" and "Ctrl-V" copies and pastes). If you forget to paste, you'll move not a copy of the area you selected but the area itself, leaving a white hole!
Obscuring junk with a copy of something good works best if the copy is about the size of the junk you want to remove. In some photo editors, you can accomplish this by first using the lasso tool to select a rough area that includes the object you want to remove, and then using a command (in Photoshop it's "Select>Transform Selection") to move the selection outline around on the image till you find a spot where it would select the right kind of background, then copying that area and using the copy to blot out the distracting object.
With any of this type of fix, you have to be sure the edges of your new material blend with the old. That's easiest if you use soft edges on the stuff you're copying. When using the stamp, softening the edge of the area that's cut out for pasting later is done by manipulating how hard the "brush" that forms the stamp is. Use a softer brush to get softer edges. With the copy-and-move method, you'll need to use a command called "Feather" after you've selected the area you want to copy. Feather lets you soften the edge over a range of pixels-pick a smallish number for most applications-between about 4 and 10. You can also use a "soft" brush for the eraser tool to blur the edges of what you're pasting, but be careful not to remove so much the bad spot shows again.
When you do a copy-and-paste kind of fix, you'll notice that the pasted material seems to float above the rest of the image. That's because Photoshop puts it on a different layer. Layers are useful tools in Photoshop, but a little beyond beginner level. The only thing you should remember for now is that when you're done covering your offending object with a copy of something else, go to the "Layers" menu, and select (toward the bottom) "Flatten Image".
Making the Color Right
It's very common for people who have taken a digital picture to think ,when viewing it on the screen or on a print, that there's something wrong with the color or exposure. You hear things like "It's too dark", or "it's washed out", or maybe it's too blue, green, purple, or yellow. Sometimes that's not just a reflection of your personal style (sometimes it is, of course). Digital images can be over- or under-exposed and can also be shifted in color. Photoshop can't fix all of these problems, but it can often help.
There are a lot of ways to fix exposure and color, some of which take quite a bit of time. There are a few shortcuts that may help you out, so it's worthwhile to try them first.
If you're using Photoshop, you go to the Image menu and select the "Adjustments". If you are using Elements, go the "Enhance" menu. When you're there, you'll see some of the following options (how many will depend on which version of Photoshop you're using): Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Color. What you want to do is to click the "Auto" choices, in order, from the top to the bottom. After you click one, see if you think the image is better. Remember how much better your choice looked, then go to "Edit" in the menu bar and select "Undo". Then move on to the next "Auto" command, until you've tried each option available to you. If none of these made you even slightly happy, you'll have to try the harder way. If you think one option is just what you're looking for, you're done-pick that one and go on to the next section. If you think one of the results is better but still not good enough, go back and redo that one, then continue in this section to do more detailed adjustment.
Let's start with exposure. A scene may look too dark or too light, but you have to be sure that the image isn't really dark or light. Look for little symptoms, like areas of light that seem completely white and without detail, or areas of dark that are featureless black. Major exposure problems are pretty much impossible to fix with Photoshop or anything else, but it's usually possible to make shots that are just a tad off look better.
The first step in exposure correction is to learn to love a Photoshop tool called "Levels". In the full version of Photoshop, this command is found in the Image>Adjustments>Levels menu. In Photoshop Elements, you can find it in Enhance>Brightness/Contrast>Levels Either way, you click the command and you'll see a control box with a bunch of buttons and what looks like a black graph. That's called a "Histogram", and what it represents is a graph of the number of pixels in your image that have an overall brightness level ranging from pure black on the left to pure white on the right. The histogram shows a bulge everywhere that there are at least some pixels, and the bigger the bulge the more pixels are there. Where the graph moves downward toward the bottom and becomes a very thin line, or winks out completely, it means that there are no pixels at all with that lightness value in the image.
Some books (and people) will tell you that a "perfect" histogram is a kind of hump square in the middle of the graph, tapering off evenly to zero at each end. I've rarely been lucky enough to see one like this, and you probably won't either. Don't worry about how a histogram should look in the ideal sense, worry about how to make yours look better. To do that, you start by looking at the top and bottom ends of the histogram. At the left, you'll see a black button/slider at the bottom of the graph, and at the right you'll see a white one. The first question you have to ask is whether there's an area to the right of the black slider or to the left of the white one that shows no thickness, meaning that there are no pixels in that range. If you have that kind of "blank" area, move each slider toward the middle until the slider us underneath an area of the graph were there are at least a few pixels shown. When you've done that, you'll see the image itself will change in lightness and contrast. What you've done is to narrow the range of pixels that Photoshop has to display (moving the two ends closer means that the space between them is less), so Photoshop can display more fine detail on the part that's left. You've also changed the value of overall brightness. If you like the image now, you can quit and close the Levels control box.
If you still think the image is too light or too dark, try one more thing. In between the black slider on the left and the white one on the right you'll see a gray slider. Twiddle this back and forth a little bit. Moving it to the right will make the image darker overall, and moving it to the left will make it lighter overall. By diddling with the middle slider you can adjust the overall lightness of the picture to a value that looks best.
When you have things as good as you can get them, take another look at the image. If you're happy, move on to the next section. If not, there's one more thing you can try.
Go to the Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation menu item. For the moment, ignore the Hue slider on top. Try moving the saturation slider a little to the right to make the colors stand out more. You can also move the Lightness slider just a little either way to balance the brightness of the image. If this doesn't work, your problems are beyond a beginner tutorial. Buy a book on Photoshop color!
Improving Sharpness
Before I start, let's get one thing straight. If you shoot a picture that's out of focus to any significant degree or that has a motion blur because you shook the camera or somebody moved, it's pretty much beyond hope. Fixing sharpness means bringing out detail better, not inventing it!
There are three basic ways to sharpen up pictures. One is using an oddly named Photoshop filter called "Unsharp Mask", and the other is using an equally weird-named filter called "High Pass". Only the last, "Sharpen Edges" seems logical. You'll want to experiment here, so remember to use the Edit>Undo to go back to the original state unless you've gotten the effect you want.
It's best to start off with unsharp mask, which is usually abbreviated as USM. This filter is good for increasing the detail/contrast that tends to get a bit washed out in digital photography. A little of this goes a long way. Go to Filters>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask, and Photoshop will open a dialog box. There you'll find three settings: Amount, Radius, and Threshold. Start with an amount of 70%, a radius of 1.3 to 1.5 (you can fiddle) and a Threshold of 0 to .2. See if you like the effect. If not, you may want to try increasing the amount (to as much as about 150%) or reducing it if you got too sharp. When you've got the best effect here, you can move to the next idea, but try to avoid going beyond an amount of about 70% if you're going to use other techniques along with this.
Sometimes you want more edge contrast without making the whole image look…well…hashy. For that, try Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen Edges. This will make the edges of things (distinct differences in color/brightness) harder. There's no adjustment for it, so give it a try. If you now like the image, you're done.
If you want really strong sharpening for something, you've probably got to move on to "High Pass" and this is complicated, so follow these steps carefully:
- On the right side of your Photoshop/Elements screen, you should see a "Layers" pallet docked. If you don't see a layer saying "background", click on the Layers tab till you do.
- At the bottom of that pallet is a series of icons. The rightmost one is a trash can, and next to it is a weird little double-box. If you put your cursor over it, you'll see that it's the "create a new layer" button. Don't push it! Just remember where it is.
- Click on the background layer and drag it to that button. This should create a layer called "background copy". If you get an empty "Layer 1" you pushed the button instead. Right-click on Layer 1 and delete it, then redo this step.
- Make sure that your background copy layer shows the "eye" and the "brush" to the left of the image, meaning that it's selected for action. If not, click on it.
- Go to the menu bar and select Filter>Other>High Pass. Wait till the high-pass window opens.
- Select a Radius value of 1 to start. Your image will be essentially a gray blob with little detail showing. You should just be able to make out the edges of objects, looking like they're embossed. If you see a lot of detail, decrease the radius by .2 or so. If you don't see anything at all, increase it a little, but don't go above 1.5.
- Push the OK button. Don't panic here because your image looks lost!
- Go back to the Layers pallet, and you'll see under the tab a pull-down menu that's preset to "Normal". Click on the arrow and you'll see a list of choices. These are the layer blending options. Part-way down, you'll see a choice "Overlay". Select it. Your image will clear up, and it should also look sharper.
- If you want to increase this effect, drag the background copy layer to the "create a new layer" button one or more times, and you'll create additional layers that intensify the effect. Be careful here; a little goes a long way in sharpening.
If you like something in between say two and three copies, adjust the opacity of the top one or two down a little from 100% to reduce the effect.
When you're done and you're sure you like the result, go to the menu bar and select Layers>Flatten Image. You're then down to one layer, and you're done with the fixing and tweaking part.
Saving Your Image
If you've put a lot of work into the steps above and you have a couple of things you'll want to do with the picture, it's time to save your work. You want to be sure to save it in a "lossless" form, without a compression technique that will give you an approximation of the image only. To do that, you'll either want to save in the native format for your editor (my recommendation; for Photoshop it's the PSD extension) or in the universal TIF extension. When you save the image be sure to add something to the filename telling you this is a fixed image. For example, if your original file was "C12_0034", you might want to save as "C12_0034_Fix021504.PSD" to tell yourself that this is the version of the image you fixed on Feb 15th 2004.
Don't save images that you're not going to reuse. You can go back to the "digital negative" you saved earlier if you need to, and your skills and tools will certainly improve over time. I don't save anything in "fixed" form any more unless I did a heck of a lot of fixing.
Preparing Your Image for Printing, Email, etc.
Most digital cameras these days are at least two megapixels. The average size of an image on a computer screen is about a half megapixel. Even if you wanted to do nothing with your pictures but look at them on your own computer, it wouldn't make sense to store them in the "edit" or "negative" form for that purpose, and it would take longer to display them. If you want to use an image, that probably starts with "re-purposing" it for its intended use, and that probably starts with resizing it.
If you open the Image menu item, you'll see (in Photoshop) the command "Image Size", or (in Elements) Resize>Image Size. Either will give you this complicated window divided into two sections. The top section gives the image dimensions in pixels and the bottom the document size and resolution. There are also some check-boxes at the bottom. Before we get messin' with them, let's go over what we plan to do.
Each image use will have an ideal "size", and what you need to do at this point is to get your image to that size. Here are some basic rules (to which, as you get comfortable, you're likely to find a bunch of exceptions):
- Images you plan to send as attachments in emails or put on a personal web page should be sized to between 600 and 800 pixels in the largest dimension.
- Images you plan to view on your computer in a slide show should be sized so that the largest dimension of the picture is equal to the resolution of your monitor in that dimension. That means that if you have an image that's 2000x1000 pixels and your monitor is 1024x768, you'll want to change the width to 1024. If your image is in portrait mode (higher than wide) you'd size the vertical dimension to 768.
- Images you plan to print should be sized to between 150 and 300 pixels for each inch of print height/width. Use the longest dimension only in your calculations; a 4x6 print would mean 900 pixels in width, for example. Use the lower pixel-per-inch number for snapshot-like prints and the larger one if you want quality. Be wary if you end up with a number that's greater than the current value of width or height-you're trying to make a print larger than your image resolution will support and you may be disappointed in the results.
Whatever you decide for your image size, enter it in the appropriate box. You need to size only one dimension under these rules, because you want to be sure that the little chain-link button to the right of the width and height is set to lock the two in ratio. Set one value and the other one changes in proportion. If you accidentally uncheck this, by clearing the check in the "Constrain Proportions" box, you'll get a really distorted image.
If you're sizing for print, you want to enter the number of pixels per inch that you selected in step 3 above into the "Resolution" box in the Canvas area. The physical dimensions of the image will now change to reflect that resolution, and you'll see how big your print will be. See below if you are trying to get a particular size.
The other little box, "resample image" isn't important for this basic tutorial. Leave it checked with "Bicubic" as the selection for normal resizing, and go ahead and press the OK button.
When you resize your image with this little window, you DO NOT want to save it back under the same file name! You'll eradicate your original with a low-resolution copy. So before you go any further, you'll need to save this resized version, so you go to File>Save As and not just "Save". For your filename, use the "negative" name (C12_0034 in our example) with a suffix of something like "_600x400" to tell you what you did to the picture. But don't do it yet because you've got to decide what file format to use.
There are two basic ways to save a "for-use" image like this. First and most often used is as a compressed file with the JPG extension. The second way is in a lossless format, using either your editor's native format (PSD for Photoshop) or TIF. You'll probably want to use the latter only for stuff you're going to print at a large size.
When you save in JPG format using Photoshop or most other editors, you'll get a window that asks you to set the JPG compression options. For now, leave the "Format Options" at "Baseline". Look at the Image Options area of the window and you'll see a Quality level with a text decoding of what that number means, and also a slider. This is where you either make friends or enemies in creating email pictures, so pay attention; we'll assume that your use is either to email the image or to put it on a personal web page. Start with a number of 5 in the Quality box and see what it tells you for Size at the bottom of the window. You're looking for something no more than 60 KB, so if your file is bigger than that move the slider a tad to the left, and if it's smaller a tad to the right. When you've gotten it at about 60 KB, push "OK".
Other quality settings are best for the other choices. If you're compressing your file for viewing on your own PC, you can select a 9 to 12 (the maximum) quality if you have a good monitor and graphics card, and a lot of space to store your images. Otherwise set it at about 7. If you want to print the image on your own printer, my recommendation would be to set the quality level at 9 or higher, or save in a non-lossy format. If you're taking or sending the image to a store or lab for printing, ask them what format to use.
The "Wrong Sized Print" Problem
A typical digital camera image has about a 4:3 ratio between width and height. A 4x6 print has a 3:2 ratio, and an 8x10 has a 5:4 ratio. The moral is that if you simply "print" a digital image you're likely to end up with something that's not a standard size and won't fit in an album or frame. So what do you do? It depends on how complicated you want to get. There are a lot of ways to print just a part of the image, which is called "cropping". Some can get you into trouble in print quality. I'll give you an explanation of a pretty fail-safe way with some limitations; if you want more than this, consult our tip on resolution.
Obviously, the first step is deciding how big your print will be and whether it's displayed in landscape or portrait format. For the easy method, we'll assume that your image is shot in the same mode (landscape/portrait) as it will be displayed. Now, divide your minimum print dimension (which would be 4 inches in a 4x6, for example) into your maximum. Save that number. Do the same with your image size (lets use 2000x1500 as our example). In these cases, you'd get a ratio of 1.5 for the print and 1.33 for the image. If you were doing an 8x10, you'd have a ratio of 1.25 for the print. Write both numbers down!
OK, here's the complicated part of this simple strategy. If the ratio for your camera image is greater than the ratio of the print image (as it would be if we wanted an 8x10 in our example), that means that your camera image is more oblong than the print you want, and you'll have to lose some of the image in the long dimension. If the ratio for the camera image is less than that of the print (our 4x6 example), the image is "fatter" than the print and you'll lose some in the short dimension when you print. That means that when you resize your image for printing, you'll want to size images the way we specified above (using the long dimension as the guide) for images that are "fatter" than the print, and based on the short dimension when images are "longer" than the print. When you run through the resizing as described above (using the right dimension as your guide), you'll end up with an image whose "Canvas size" is equal to your print size in one dimension and a bit larger than your print size in the other. Got it?
OK, now for the next step. Go to the File>New menu and create a new document. You want a transparent background, and a canvas size that's equal to your desired print size. Set the resolution to the same value for pixels per inch that you used in your sizing calculation. You'll end up with a little window with what looks like a checkerboard in it. Minimize this for now to get it out of the way, and go back to your resized image. Click on the title bar of the window to get the image selected and then go to Edit>Select All (or just press Ctl-A). Then do an Edit>Copy (or Ctl-C). This will give you a copy of your image. Now, go back to the new "checkerboard" window (if you minimized it, click on the second-from-right button to get it back) and either select Edit>Paste or Ctl-V. Your image will now be pasted onto that new window as a new layer. But here's the good part. If you click on the "Arrow" tool in the toolbox, you can now slide the new layer around on the canvas! That means that you can pick what part of the image is going to get cut off. When you have the composition the way you like it, flatten the image (Layers>Flatten Image) and go ahead and print it.
Don't Forget!
There are no photo-tips that can substitute for learning your own photo-editor's features. As I said when I opened this tip, you have absolutely positively got to make a commitment to learn to use these products that's proportional to what you expect to get from them. Buy a book. Play with your pictures and try different techniques. Haunt the Internet for other sources of information. That's why its important to get a product that has a lot of diverse information written about it. Buy something weird and you're on your own.
The biggest other thing to remember is be consistent. Digital workflow is a process that you have to design yourself to protect yourself and your images from mistakes. Save your digital negatives. Remember to undo something you don't like. Make your file names logical. You are going to make some truly astonishing mistakes with your editing. If you're smart, you'll recover, learn from them, and get better. If you're not smart and systematic, you'll get discouraged. Your choice!
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