Follow-up: The thing’s I’ve learned
I wanted to do my retouching on the photos I posted a couple days ago as quickly as possible. The temptation is to spend a lot of time on post processing, especially when you are “trying to prove a point” so I had to time myself. I decided to not take more than 5 minutes on either picture.
There’s not a lot one can do to correct the first image. These are the things I did:
- Red eye removal
- Crop tight
- Remove clutter from background with content aware fill.
- Clear a few spots from face.
- Warming filter.
Cropping in tight helps to get you more engaged in the image, but since this was a 4MP image in the first place, the cropped images is only really of a reasonable size to display on the Internet. I can’t make a decent print larger than a 4×6.
The second image I spent every moment of the 5 minute time limit and did:
- Brighten eyes
- Increased iris saturation
- Saturated pink shirt.
- Light skin smoothing (to reduce noise mainly.)
- Darken background using a curve adjustment.
- Add a warming filter.
So what do you think? Is spending 5 minutes on an old image worth the time?
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Oh the thing’s I’ve learned
Just because one uses a point and shoot camera, doesn’t mean they can’t take really great pictures. Let’s turn the wayback machine to 6 years ago and my Olympus D40. I had that camera, because film and processing cost a lot and digital was going to save me money. But sometimes I went photography brain dead because I could hit that shutter as much as I wanted and all it cost me was a few batteries a month.
This photo has several problems but not all of them can be corrected.
- Red Eye.
- Clutter in the background.
- Photographing downward instead of being on the same level.
- Not much in the way of composition.
All in all, this is a snapshot that only immediate family would care to look at. But the next image is much better.
This photo, taken a few days later, is much better and probably worth a bit of time to make a print that even people outside the family would enjoy.
- Nice and sharp.
- Catchlight in the eyes.
- On the same level.
- Could probably darken the background a bit to hide the person there. Might even make a great black and white.
Thursday I’ll show the adjusted versions of these images and list what I’ve done to make them better.
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Go back and fix the past
From time to time you need to go back to some of your old photos and see what a couple minutes with the new tools can do for them. Nine years ago I got married and honeymooned at Disney World. Since tomorrow is our anniversary, I took the first reasonable photo from the trip taken with an Olympus Point and shoot camera to see what it looked like.
Taking a close look at the image the color looks a little flat. It’s likely because it was an over cast day, and there was some noise in the image. So taking the editing capabilities of Camera Raw, I knocked out the noise, warmed the scene and added a bit more blue to the sky with a touch of negative clarity. All-in-all a much better image. If I knew then what I know now, I could have taken several shots from the same location and easily cloned out the people, so it would look like we had the place to ourselves.
What else can/should I do?
Take a Hike
In a couple of days I’ll be part of the Third Annual World Wide Photowalk. I’ll once again be a walk leader this year and I’ve chosen to use Tanglewood park as our backdrop this year. The only problem will be it’s going to be really hot so I’ll need a lot of water, ice and shade for all who attend. Each year I like to try to come up with something that’ll be a twist. Last year we did our walk at a winery. We got to do the full tour, have a tasting and photograph a bunch of grapes and a whole slew of other nifty things.
This year I wanted to make sure we could do some amazing photos. Tanglewood Park is wonderfully scenic, but what will make it better is having people to model and pose for the photographers. So I was shooting for at least a few and now I may have a small horde. This is going to be so much fun. There’s still time to register, you don’t have to be a “professional” to go, just enthusiastic about photography.
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Dragging the point-and-shoot shutter
This is a photo from 8 years ago. It illustrates a way of dragging the shutter on a point-and-shoot camera. One way to achieve this effect would be to turn off the flash. Turning off flash in low light situations causes the automatic settings to slow the shutter speed down in order to pull in enough light for a proper exposure. The slow shutter can cause interesting motion blurring. The trick here is to have something in focus as a contrast to the motion blur. It’s not as effective as intentionally slowing down the shutter but it can be effective. In this case the motion blur is probably an accident, but this image turned out pretty neat. Now if I just had a similar blur of someone bowling. That would have made for a much better photo.
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I Want Some Negative Comments
I have a little experiment I want to run. Here is a photo I made a few months ago in which I spent a reasonable amount of time post processing in Adobe Photoshop. I really want some negative comments on it. Please, fire away and criticize to your hearts content. I have removed the limits on the site so anyone can comment without registering and you can be anonymous. Of course it would be nice if you at least attach your e-mail so I can thank you for your participation. The comments will be moderated for offensive language, but other than that I will pass them through as-is. If you have something nice to say about the image, don’t. I just want negative comments on this one.
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