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Digital Photography: Shadows, Brightness and Contrast |
Now that you have your pictures, whether by scanner or camera, on your computer, what do you do to make them the best? Maybe you took care to do best with camera settings to get the pictures great. But they didn’t come out so well or maybe lost something in scanning. Your editing software should have a number of features that will help. If it doesn’t, it’s time to get another program. Personally I like Adobe Photoshop, as it is ideal for nearly all imaging needs from web, to print, and beyond.
The first thing in image editing, 16bit images allow finer control than 8bit ones do. If for some reason your image is in a 8bit format, read your software documentation on converting it to 16bit (or higher even). In the end, if you still need 8bit images, convert it back with the touchups done.
So the photo you took has a great picture, but the background is way too dark. This is what you call underexposure. In Photoshop there are a number of simple methods to clear this up. First might be auto-levels (under the menus as: Image->Adjust->Auto Levels). Try it after opening the image and see how well it does. If it doesn’t offer any improvement you may want to undo (menus: Edit->Undo). On the other hand if it gets it just right, you may already be done here. If it could use more improvement, the next thing to try is Contrast/Brightness adjustments (Image->Adjust->Brightness/Contrast… To be able to adjust this, be sure that the “Preview” button is checked). You will have Brightness and Contrast sliders that work pretty much like the same controls on your TV set do. You will find other features under the Image->Adjust menu that after practice and some study will enable you to do much more cleaning up your photos.
With overexposed colors, you may want to use the Hue/Saturation features, as well as color levels.
Another point to remember with any computer graphic editing software, it’s run on computers and they don’t necessarily see the photo the way us humans do. Some features will do things in ways that we don’t like. Again, practice, and playing around in the software you have will help you to know what to do when you need to. Some of the programs out there do pretty good automatically. Others require more manual intervention on your part.
While the above example was with Adobe Photoshop, most other programs will have similar options and do it in about the same way, only differing in how well their automation does. Another popular program out there is Photo Deluxe Image Manipulator. With this one you would want to select the brightness and contrast commands. Again you will get sliders, and similar functionality in the main image window.
Other aspects of Photoshop that can be useful is its extended selection facilities. You can select specific parts of the image and just work on those. The most useful tool for the beginner may be the “Magic Wand Tool” as it can select areas based on their shade and color, and is real useful for selecting complete objects in one click. It does have a few settings, again practice and reading the documentation on it (as with any software you may use) will help you to get the greatest use out of it, and more efficiently in the long run.
Efficiency may be the one thing in the long run you will judge your image editing software. 5 minutes each on 1 or 2 photos may be 10 minutes. That’s 500 minutes on 100 though. The software that gets your touchup needs done the fastest is the one you will eventually want. Everyone is different so don’t count on what works for someone else, working for you too.
Many of the programs, including Deluxe Photo, don’t give you the same sophisticated features that Adobe Photoshop offers, though many are pretty useful just the same. Some may very well have features you won’t find in Photoshop. Though they may be one feature and lack many others. More than one tool doesn’t hurt either.
You can also add a number of shadow effects (as well as borders and much more) in most of these programs (Photoshop included). It’s best to work on copies of photos, that way you have the original high resolution ones as a backup and make yet another copy. That and you don’t hurt your originals while learning.
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