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With
the Photographic Competition coming up in December I thought that
it might be a good idea to look at how you can improve your photographs
with a few simple techniques.
All
photographs be it digital or film need a few tweaks here and there
to improve their presentation. If you send you’re film or
digital card to a professional processing laboratory, the tweaks
are done automatically and not necessarily how you might want
them.
Graphics
packages come in all shapes and sizes and are very often bundled
with a digital camera, scanner or even new computer. It is more
than likely you all have access to one. I am sure there are even
a few shareware or freeware packages around. One source is off
magazine cover disks. Very often a previous version is given away
free. So if you are in need – look out for one of these.
They are often very good value. PaintShop Pro was free up to version
4.
The
techniques that were applied during the presentation are all fairly
general and should be available on all packages although they
may be under a different name. You may have to go looking around
the menus to find them.
The
software used for this presentation was Adobe PhotoShop CS and
is a real heavyweight in the world of graphics manipulation and
comes with a price tag to match, rolling in at around £450.00.
Other very good budget priced packages include PhotoShop’s
baby brother – PhotoShop Elements 4 at the very reasonable
price at around £70 and PaintShop Pro X coming in at around
£100. Older versions will be cheaper.
The first technique we looked at was picture cropping. The crop
tool, as its name implies, is used to improve the picture composition
and get rid of unwanted distractions around the picture edge.
The crop tool is very simple to master and you can soon remove
the unwanted clutter around the outside of the picture or just
pick a section right in the middle to keep. By simple control
of the crop tool you can enhance the picture by improving its
overall composition and impact to the viewer.
Cropping
is an extremely easy tool to use but do remember to always work
on a copy of your image. Once a picture is cropped you may not
be able to go back if you are not satisfied. In fact, you should
always get into the habit of working on copies of the original
whenever you do any graphics manipulating. That way any over manipulation
is not irretrievable.
The
second tool we looked at is known as the Levels Command. In PhotoShop,
the Levels command allows the user to ensure that the picture
contains a full range of tones, from shadows through to highlights.
This tool will allow you to boost the contrast of a picture. All
pictures probably need a little boosting and with a little experimentation
a picture can be transformed from a flat lifeless image to one
with punch and drama. Who said you need a polarizing filter!
Finally
we looked at image resolution – this is all about resizing
the image. As you know, a picture is made up of tiny squares called
pixels and the more there are, the more detail there is in the
picture. A digital camera will record a fixed quantity of these
pixels and the sensor in the back of the camera governs this.
For example, a 6 megapixel camera creates an image approximately
3000 x 2000 pixels in size.
Now
that’s a lot of pixels and they are known as the image resolution
and usually expressed as pixels per inch or ppi. The quality of
your picture depends on the number of pixels that you squeeze
into every inch of the picture and there are a few general guidelines.
Most cameras have a processing default value and you will probably
find that the image has defaulted on screen to 72 ppi. For our
example 6Mp camera, this will produce a picture around 41.6”x
27.7”, which is huge in most peoples book. These figures
are achieved by dividing each axis length in pixels by the number
of pixels required per inch (ie 3000 / 72 = 41.6).
Now
that is fine but the picture will look very blocky and the quality
will be pretty grim. There are a number of recognized print standards
depending on what the finished image is required for. If you want
high quality images that are glossy magazine standard –
then you require a resolution of 300 ppi that will reduce our
picture size to 10”x 6.6”. For a picture that will
be framed, something in the region of 150 – 200 ppi will
give very acceptable results and by doing our little calculation
we arrive at an image size of 15” x 10” at 200 ppi.
If you are only going to view the image on screen or send it over
the Internet 72 ppi will suffice.
All very heavy stuff but regardless of the camera’s sensor
size, the quality of the finished article always depends on the
number of pixels you pack into every inch. All very well if you
have a monster 6Mp digital camera but smaller cameras with 3Mp
will produce high quality pictures that are smaller in size.
If
you want larger pictures, then it is possible to add more pixels
to the image. This is known as resampling and by a series of complex
interpolation routines the graphics package guesses and invents
adjacent pixels to bump up the number available. Be careful, as
there is a trade off with image quality. Best results are obtained
where the image contains continuous tones such as photographic
landscapes. I have created many A4 size pictures from a 3Mp camera
with no discernable drop in quality.
I hope these few techniques have been of help to you and we look
forward to seeing all your masterpieces at the competition meeting
in December.
Dave
Robb
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