Five Photo Fixes

Often people see a picture and don’t see what went into it, that is understandable and not as bad as those that throw pics away if they are not “perfect” from the camera. We all strive to get good shots, but sometimes circumstances do not allow it. That’s why it is good to know a few simple things to help enhance that pic that is to dark, to pail etc.

If you have PhotoShop you most probably seen the wonders that seem to endlessly flow from those that use it on what seems like everything these days. This won’t cover any of those, we will simply show you fundamentals and practical use for nearly any picture.

Photo touch-up people all have their own technique but what I like to do is walk my pictures through what I call “the five fingers” or “handful” that comprises of the five most common photo tools.

There is not really a real right and wrong but generally you do the “Brightness and Contrast” first (like the thumb) and “Sharpening” as a last (like the pinky) if at all.

The Fab Five are: Brightness and Contrast, Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Sharpening. You can find most of them in the Image adjustment’s drop-down menu. There are “Auto” ones too that work for some well lite pics but a a rule I try avoiding them as it is really “one shoe fits none perfectly” and can teach you to not learn the actual process that I will walk you through now.

I chose this picture, though not the best it does have some story (the man looking at the book, girl waiting for her balloon hat), and also a big lighting problem as I did not have a external flash, limited space, I could not go back any farther, and indoor lighting that even with my lens filter and indoor settings on my camera hit a miss on this one. All hope is not lost when PS is just a click away.

Firstly I go to correct the light, if you don’t do that first all the other steps will be off as they take from your light and dark elements in the picture.

Go to Brightness and Contrast and move the sliders till you get the desired look, to much will add spots (called noise) and ruin your picture.

Next I usually do Hue and Saturation, though Hue is hardly ever tampered with and in this case I will use the Lightness slider there as well.

Next we take it to Levels

In here you will find these mountain-like scales, by sliding the triangles on the bottom you can adjust black gray and white, in this picture we leave the white alone. You’ll notice the dropper tools on the bottom right, I do not usually use them for this step but will come into play in the next two. If you screw it up there is always undo in the form of holding down the ALT key and refreshing back to where it was.

Then open Curves that looks like this,

Now go to those three droppers and I usually start with Black, then White, and then Gray last. Click on the dropper and then on the point of the pic that should be that color, with gray you have to try around a bit to what looks best for your prescription of the picture i.e. not to much yellow, red etc, just a clean gray. I drew lines to show you where I sampled in this particular picture, black from her sweater, white from the sign and gray from the shadows. This is one of the last steps so you should already have a preseption of the final picture, not to hard and not murky either.

Lastly we will take it to sharpening, many times this is done just as an afterthought but it is real important that if you think it could use some sharpening that you don’t just go to Sharpen or Sharpen More but that you go to Smart Sharpen where you can custom it for your picture. Sharpening must be subtile not drastic.

now it should look like this,

Adjust the Amount slider, the Radius is hardly used as it is to hard a step for pictures like this. You can grab and move around the preview picture, find a spot in your picture that has lots of detail to monitor the effects and make sure it is not to hard or noisy, click OK for the last time and look at the finished result.

This is how mine turned out in the end compared to the original.

This is all done without ever using a brush, layer (though it would be good to make one first or back up the original some how or any PSing effects or manipulations. The basics of photo clean-up are right here in five simple steps. If you never learn anything else in Photoshop if you get these steps down and walk your pictures through them you will have a vivid and clean presentation book, website or newsletter that will make every picture be noticed, and at their looking up to their potential, guaranteed!

Step 10 Percent

Have you ever had a picture that was great but when you added it to a print project or newsletter and you saw it again it was all pixilated and wrecked?

Well this is the perfect solution. Perfection does not get much better and simpler then this, I put it here under “advanced” as we have software scripts but it is just as easy for the layman Photoshoper to do manually as well.

Say you have a picture you took that that is fantastic for a cover A5 or even A4, or a poster but it is only a few hundred kb file so you say, I need a better 8 MP camera or I’ll never amount to any good printing quality pics. Not any more, all you need is STEP 10%!

The great guys over at NoBs introduced me to this magic potion tool and it really worked. I had a great picture once that I wanted to add to a Internet photo contest but they had a size limit that my good pic fell short of, thankfully I know about this trick so I just stepped it twice this way till it got up to the size without losing quality and they accepted it.

While planning to introduce this technique we did our own test for GOT, I knew it works for me but before I give it to our readers I really wanted to be convinced and run it through an ardent watertight test. I took a 2mp image that was only 752 kb and dimensions 1232×1632, with a print size of only 5×7 inch (13x18cm) it had great detail but handicapped for size, or not? Was it trapped to remain locked to the size of a average photo print forever? Check out these facts for yourself.

To make the test even harder we used just a detail of the small image, about 30%, and took it 10% steps ten times. to compare we took the same image and did it deliberately the wrong way and just made the image from 100% to 200% in one jump and this is the difference. Not only in retaining quality but the file is clearer and larger dimensions enabling use for a large size print job, like if there ever was a need for a donkey dental ad.

Quality test

File size test

Not only does it make your image better, but the image is nearly 20% larger then the original making it much more versatile for projects. These three pictures are scaled down proportionally.

There will probably be few times you need an image more then a few steps bigger so 10 times is really the edge, or is it? We ran it twice or 20×10% and ended up with an image nearly 40 inches or one meter on the longest size, (that’s a big image!) and it had still pretty sharp detail. Ten times should be more then enough for most any print job, and then some.

This is not a fix all, if your image is junky, it will just magnify the junk!

To make it easier for you all we made a script action for PS (CS2 or higher, older versions not sure, but you can let us know) just download and import it into your “Photoshop actions” folder in your Photoshop program files.

Download Action

This will take your image 20 times at 5% increments, our programmer thought it would be better, but really not much of a difference, and you can then “undo” a few if you want it less times, or make your own action yourself, but that should help you get started to great picture enlargements the right way.

To do just one time and see what it is like just go to image size and instead of cm or inches select “percent” and add 10 to the 100% and “OK”, and do again as many times as you like/need.

Eyeshot a Fowl

A great practice for early photographers is photographing birds. I know you are thinking, “I could never make that perfect “national geographic shot”, and your right for good reason, mostly for lack of giant sports/wildlife photography lens the length of your forearm. But don’t worry or give up there is a lot you can do with a decent camera with nature and moving animals to have fun and take good shots.
If you happen to live by a sea, lake or shore of some kind there is always birds of different sizes and speeds and so much to take pictures of.

The nice thing about it is (particularly seal gulls and birds that dive in water) is that you do not need to be a rocket expert to set up an interesting pic, as like in hunting with a shoot gun if you pull the trigger you are bound to hit something. The same is true for photographing birds in this way, the only question is what. The only problem will be them doing it how you want them to and not having one land in front of your shot.
If you have the opportunity to set your ISO most sites recommend 400 though if you have gliding birds you might not even need that or faster wing-beating birds, dragonfly’s, humming birds and the like will require more, you don’t want them to look stationary but you don’t want them blurry either. I’m sure your camera manual can help you with that. If you do not have time or patience for that I suggest gulls, swans and the like. When I go “bird hunting” it is just to sharpen my eye/hand skills with “moving targets” kind of like a camera drill, just five-ten minutes and a few dozen shots at a time and then I’m on to something else. Just relax on a rest day or work break at your park, seaside or lake and take shots and see at home all the busyness of the birds you’ve gotten. If nothing else I’m sure that problem that was on your mind will feel lighter and less taxing, as you blast the birds away, frame by frame.

Bird drill includes such things as:
Following moving objects
Frame a picture with moving objects
Keep your horizon centered
Avoid sun fur as you swing following a moving subject
Capturing quick timeless moments

1st GOT Challenge

Accepting contributions for the first ever Got Challenge (Your not against anyone, only challenge yourself  how far your willing to go, and original/different you can be then the predictable norm). Best one makes cover!

(See the terms and rules first here.)

Main Theme
Evangelism “…they received the Word with all readiness of mind” (Acts 17:11b) We want to see people reading the Word from witnessing (not posed holding a tract or book), be original, stealth and artistic. Best pic gets selected for the cover!

Secondary Theme
Kids with cameras (either of taking pics or with a camera, what the next generation of photographers looks like today)

Send contributions to: gotphotography (at) gmail.com

Photo Journalism vs. Photo Documenting

I love photojournalism, I might use that term broadly. It might not be always things that are a news item to others but the undisturbed documenting of an event, particularly involving people as subjects or sub-plots or situations raw and unscripted is a very powerful form of communicating language. Honestly I tire of those posed shots for the camera that merely document and say “I am here, because you can see me here smiling”, rather then “I am here, and this picture tells why without me having to say so in words or a text box below”.

I have a big camera and it goes “click” every time I take a picture, so it is a real challenge to get people in that “quite zone” where you see the picture later and say “I wonder what they were thinking”. I do not have a fancy mega zoom lens (only 28-80, for those that understand that) so I’m relatively close when shooting, with pocket cams with a 12x zoom used about half way might be comparable, it’s close, not as close as I used to be “in people’s face” when I had a small camera but that “click” startles the subject many times and so I only have one take to get it right. When people pose, as nice as it is sometimes to see everyone smiling it can come off in genuine or forced and just a documented shot at an event rather then the more art worthy photojournalism.

Some examples from carnival shoots I did that shows examples of each.

Same settings with the not posing (top) and subjects posing (bottom), which tells a better story without words?

Donors want to see conditions on the ground maybe even more then proof that their items were distributed. If you are willing to take the stuff up to a remote location in South America, Africa or a mountaintop village where you are they want to see what it is like, they are often busy people and do not have time to come along on such trips. These people will be impressed that you took the time and interest to take some pictures of the area and conditions the recipients are living in and tell a more genuine story or the trip then pages and pages of happy faces posing for the camera that honestly many donors are getting leery of as being “staged” photo-ops.

Conclusion: We need both, perhaps if you take a more journalistic one first i.e. a poor kid just received a Christmas gift package as he is in the element, click, and the moment is over then get one of them smiling showing you he’s happy for it to take to sponsors, putting a human face on the kid deed. Thus you have one spontaneous moment and one documented moment.

Journalism pictures at a rural village for a minority group. I had a old pocket cam for this trip, nothing fancy.

Documenting that we were there, and items got distributed.

Mission Impossible: A Drive By

Naturally everyone looks for the perfect settings to take pictures; but what when conditions are not right, you can’t set up a tripod, wait for perfect cloud cover and all? Many people stop taking pics, but to me that is when the fun begins and it is great exercise for being ready and kinda “paparazzi style” in just holding the camera steady and firing to see how it comes out later. I do not recommend this as a real art form but it is a good way to get practice and see the results, I was bored in a car coming back from a road trip and took the opportunity to test my timing and came up with a neat little sequence. I’m most happy with the steadiness of hand I got locked into that shows with most of the baseline level.

It also shows the hazards of this with the wires, tree stumps, window glare, etc that are unavoidable, but in the end I’m glad I got one shot out of it and this picture set.

Click on this thumbnail for a larger view.

Application: Well, hopefully not to many church pics, but it is great in taking picture sets of your kids at play or facial expressions firing away (thought I still primarily advocate setting up a picture traditionally rather then relying on chance) taking pics while you hope to capture just the right one. It can also can be applied to CTP pics and the like provided you are not needing a flash and blasting someone with high powered flashes without a bounce flash, reflectors and all that studio stuff most people don’t have.

Try a drive-by or walk-by today and see what happens, and send them here for me to post for others to see.

Go Live and Personal

We’ve all had times when you are at an event or show and you are asked to take pictures, usually someone goes to the back of the room and gets the whole room with heads in the foreground and little people on stage. While you might need one like that to document the show and size of the audience to get good action shots you got to be with the action. I’ll use this example when i was asked to go take pics at a recent CTP show, it was a small room with 30 some people and a local TV camera so I stood slightly off to the side to get the story, which in this case was a clown show with audience volunteers and props. One sequence went like this.

opening act, clearly showing the faces of those involved.

This one shows the act in progress

Now I bring a third person into the picture as a spectator

Now the plot unfolds and the spectator is there to give us a live verdict…

Another successful show!

Even when the pink hanky turns into panties, personalities pictured are priceless!

Timing is Everything

While quality and content are the cornerstones of photography timing is right behind if you want to catch the moment that might never happen again. I have a chronic case of picturetitus, I rarely am not seen with a camera. When I first started out with a little Aiptek camera, it fit in nicely in my pants pocket and I took endless pictures with it. My current camera needs its own shoulder bag but it still comes with me. The more chance you have the camera the more chance you have that it will be with you when you need it especially those “blue moon shots”.

Here are some examples: (click to enlarge)

This was a real timing challenge as we were just watching the tourist donkeys when this one started to get a cranky and started shaking his top and bottom lips before spitting at us.

This pic is really simple but was a challenge as the camera was old and slow and i heard the plane coming but could not see it till it passed the wall and had to be ready. I had other things to do and did not have all day to wait for planes to fly over so I only had one chance and took it.

This is pic that shows odd moments you can capture if you are looking and ready.

Tip: Always be ready to take a picture

Trick: know your camera, even if it is old and slow, know by how much. If it takes 0.20 seconds to load the screen, get it started sooner or leave it on more when taking pics or while anticipating a “moment”.

How to be Macro anyhow!

I’ve had people come up to me and say that their snapshot camera is junk because “it can’t do anything but group shots”. They long for the kinds of macro shots they see on their desktop or Webshots program and think they could never do anything like that. Sure there is certain merit to that but as better tools help you and provide more range but you would be very surprised to see what you can do with “old betty” if you really want to.

One thing people get frustrated with when working with a snapshot camera is the lack of control of auto focus even on the macro setting (the little flower symbol on the camera dial) they tent to focus on the largest area (though no some are coming out with various sensor recognition) and in the case of most macros like a flower, insect or rain drop it will miss the subject and focus on the grass or sky rather then the little speck you want.

The way to counter that and, this I have to give credit to someone who told me of this and replaced many frustrating hours with rewarding results is the “half click” method. Basically you find the flower you really want to capture, make sure your camera is set to macro and hold the photo button half down, you should be able to hear the lens moving to focus. Now this is where innovation comes in, if you take the camera to a sold object, I’ve often used my camera case and focus in on the logo, (your hand works just as well) until it comes clear in your display, hold the button there and bring it over to the object you want to capture. Move the camera toward and away from the object till you see in your display that it is in focus with what you want, click the button down fully and presto, you got a shot. It will take some time and playing around till you get it down but it is really one of the easiest ways to push more on of a little camera with surprising results.

For this demonstration I borrowed someones very old “brick” Kodak camera 2.0 mp, 3x zoom (remember those days?) to demonstrate the point.

Click on images to see examples larger.

Step 1. Focus

Step 2. Take your picture!

Some other samples taken with this technique with another pocket cam.

Cookin’ Cameras (buyers guide)

People ask me “what camera should I buy”? I often reply, “How hungry are you”? Do you just want to take snapshots or do you really want to go somewhere and learn an art? Do you want fast-food or 5star dining? What are you willing to pay for? And if you can buy it, do you really need it?

I liken shopping cameras to picking a meal.

If you want a lot of different things at a good price, just something to fill that hole in your “snapshot stomach” then hit the buffet. There is great stuff there that is already “precooked” for you in a compact camera, don’t worry if you have a fairly new camera they are not like high school lunch slop or even a Golden Corral of cameras past that were poor quality, but rather a fantastic Chinese buffet or fancy hotel spread where you can jump from chicken leg to pasta to pastries at will and for one price. The chefs are getting better, the food line is getting more enticing and “healthful” all the time, read your camera manual again and I bet you’ll be surprised at all it can do.

However if you want a perfect stake cooked just to your liking by your favorite chef, your choice of appetizers, wine from the cellar, live music, or want to cook it yourself at your table fresh you have to go upscale a bit, but just like waiting for your food to get done personalized it takes time. You have to be willing to wait and pay more for this extra service in this case they’d be lens, filters, additional flash etc, to complete or round out your dinning experience.

There is another option that is getting increasingly better and that is the mid level “prosumer” cameras like Canon’s PowerShot S5 IS and many other brands that are coming out that have great features, wider lens etc then the pocket cameras. They really are the best if you are a serious amateur to still have your cake and eat it too. I liken them to fixing a nice meal at home, you might get some extras at the shop and use what you have at home and fix something nice for you and your Mrs. (or Mr.) without all trouble of going out to eat like having to travel, waiting for a table, tipping the waiter etc, and still better then going through a drive-through or ordering Chinese takeout or buffet. It might take more time on your end, but more fun and interactive being your own “chef” being able to add your own spices to the pot like adjusting ISO, metering etc. It’s a very comparable option technically for someone looking to “graduate” from the pin-hole but not have the time and interest to be a “career chef” like learning a pro camera.

One other obvious plus is that this range of camera comes with video options that are getting better all the time and like the Sony H9 that even has High Definition (HD) quality video clip availability enabling you to make good quality clips of CTPs and all that pocket cameras often have but at only at webcam-like quality. Of coarse it is not a full-option digital video camera, but I’m sure with a good eye and steady hand you could get some great clips with them now that memory cards are larger, and you can have the best of both worlds with these little machines that are also still much lighter and easy to carry around then even the entry level pro cameras.

Most of all never give up, whatever camera you may have, call on the Keys of Concentration and Focus and keep trying. Digital cameras provide a way to just take pictures and learn like never before, if it does not turn out just delete it, no more costly developments and snickers from the guy at the counter who saw your lousy pictures when he developed them. Just take pictures and have fun and learn from your mistakes. At first your photography may more often then not look like your first attempt at cooking, burned and over exposed, and you might be tempted like just calling for the pizza guy, but don’t give up, don’t cop out and get others to do it for you, develop the skill yourself at whatever level your at, baby steps lead to bigger things.