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Salvaging a photo [1]
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Date: 2023-01-08
Welcome to the January 8th edition of Street Prophets Coffee Hour, the place where politics meets up with religion, art, science, food, and life. Come in, have a (warm!) cuppa, take a cookie or three, and sit with us.
I wore out a film SLR and wore out my first dSLR (a Canon D40). I’m doing my best to finish off my Canon 7D now. I prefer taking pictures in Canon’s Camera Raw rather than JPEG, which is what you get with a P&S (point and shoot) camera, although my big black camera has the option to set it at JPEG and turn a hugely expensive instrument into a P&S. With a P&S, the camera makes adjustments for you, hoping to make what you see in the preview box (and eventually on screen or in print) pretty much look like what you saw that moved you to take a photo in the first place.
Camera Raw doesn’t do that. It records as much data as it can but doesn’t do as much processing, so sometimes what you see when you first look at the image can be soft or muddy looking. This can happen in certain lighting conditions, too, like a lot of clouds. (And sometimes that’s because of the settings I chose; I don’t always blame the camera.) This is a picture I took where I probably didn’t set everything right in the first place, and the camera didn’t make any adjustments for me. Either way, this picture needs to be discarded—or fixed! Follow along and see what I can do with this less-than-ideal photo. I have the big PhotoShop CS5, but I really do most of my work in a very old version of it’s little brother, PhotoShop Elements 9.
When you open a Raw image, you get this window. If you’re working with a JPEG, you can still choose to open it as Raw. You won’t get as many choices but you can still do a lot. Why do this? Because, unlike Photoshop or Elements (or whatever program you use) this is lossless. You’ll still have all of your photo data after working in this window.
So this photo preview is soft and cloudy. Can it be salvaged? Look at the triangle in the upper right as I work and see how it changes. At first it’s very compressed, meaning not much dynamic range in the display.
I moved the “Blacks” slider a bit, and the “Contrast” slider a lot. Hmm. Those usually work miracles but not this time. They helped some, though, so I’m leaving them.
The “Clarity” slider helped even more.
You’ll see I left the temperature and tint sliders alone. You can try those and see if it makes a difference for you, but it didn’t with this picture so I went back to “As Shot”. Instead, I went to the “Saturation” slider at the very bottom. The cloudy look is about gone. Now I’m going to another adjustment panel. Right under the color triangle, I chose the triangle indicating sharpening.
This is more arty than scientific. Try out some of those sliders. There wasn’t much visible noise but the “Color” noise slider helped a lot. Now I’m ready to open this in Elements. Choose “Open Image” from the lower right corner.
Now I’m in the photo editor of Elements. Everything that happens here will cost you some of your photo data. From the top, choose “Enhance” and from the drop-down menu choose “Levels.” It has its own triangle, showing the range. This picture is still too light, so on the far right of the top slider, move it in closer to the big triangle. Watch the window to see what effect it’s having.
I moved the far right slider in quite a bit and nudged the center slider a bit to the right. The outside sliders determine the dynamic range of the photo, and the middle one controls the lightness/darkness of the midtones. And I’m about where I want to be with this picture. Now I need to work on composition, so I’ll crop the picture.
This is the artistic choice. Do I want the flowers framed this way?
Or do I want an even tighter focus? If you are trying out cropping, don’t ever crop and then re-crop. That costs you data. Go to the “Edit” tab on the top ribbon and select “Undo Crop.” Then try again.
It came a long way, didn’t it?
There are a number of programs you can use to do photo editing. I will never upgrade PhotoShop because I have CS5, and after CS6 Adobe quit selling PhotoShop. You now have to lease it by the month. It cost a lot back when I bought it, about $700, although I got it as an upgrade from Elements 5 so I only paid $300. Elements now runs about $100+/-, but there are always specials. It has about 75-80% of the capabilities of its big brother. GIMP is open sourced freeware but there is a learning curve. It’s compatible with the add-ons for PhotoShop but you need to purchase those. It doesn’t have the supporting books, either. PhotoShop has a zillion how-to books plus a lot of online tutorials. But as you see, I can do a lot with that 15 year old Elements program, so if you find an old disc, don’t be afraid to buy it.
Want to talk about printing? Walmart is cheap, and you can stand there and wait while it’s done. And—ugh! They calibrate their machines when the service person comes to add new ink, so not very often. Colors fade and darken over (not very much) time. Costco, now, is a different game. They calibrate their machines daily. If you have a monitor that’s higher end and can be calibrated, they’ll send you the data to match, so what you see on your screen is what you see on their paper. And yes, there are still old-timey printers, if you want the real deal on quality archival paper, just in case you are selling your prints for hundreds of dollars. I’m fully digital, myself. I rarely print, and only for someone else.
Is anyone interested in how to turn a snapshot into a studio portrait?
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