Thursday, November 18, 2010

A Synopsis of Part 6 of my Digital Nature Photography Book

The sixth and final section of my digital nature photography book is all about digital processing and how to use software to enhance your photos.  The first step in this editing process is to make sure that you have the ability to save the images you took out in the field so that they can be accessed on a computer later.  For the most part, 1-2 gigabyte compact flash cards will be fine for the average person shooting throughout a half day session.  More than one is suggested just so that you do not have all your images on one card in the event of a loss of data.  Once you are done shooting, you should offload the photos onto a larger storage device like a computer or external hard drive.  Both would be ideal just for the protection against unforeseen data loss.

The book next goes into the types of computers and software that have the ability to edit photos.  If you shoot in RAW format, this is where the photos can be transformed into standard TIFF, PSD, or JPEG formats that can then be edited for presentation.  This process allows the user to easily make corrections to color, brightness, contrast, remove imperfections, and make many more manipulations.  The book remarks that the standard and best image editing software is Adobe Photoshop.  As far as computers, the book arguably suggests that the most prominent brands are Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard.  The faster the processors (at least 1GB of RAM), the better it will be at easily making modifications to photos.  Again, it is very important to make sure that you have your photos saved to another storage device in case of unforeseen data loss.

Most professional digital photographers shoot in RAW format first and then convert them into standard formats later.  RAW format allows the camera to save the photo without any kind of camera processing or manipulation.  In order to edit these images, you must convert them to a standard lossless format of either TIFF or PSD.  Appropriate computer software is required for this, Photoshop CS usually doing the best job according to the author.  If you convert a RAW formatted photo to JPEG, you will lose some of the photo's data in compression.  The book next talks about the three color spaces.  ProPhoto RGB allows for immediate conversion.  This color space is excellent for fine-art printing and retains all the data needed to reconvert for other uses.  The next mentioned color space is Adobe RGB.  It was designed for conversion to CNYK color mode, used for high-quality commercial printing.  The third color space mentioned is Adobe sRGB IEC61966-2.1.  This color space is used mostly for web-posting.

The first step in actual editing of the image is usually to adjust the brightness.  Only minor adjustments in this area are usually needed if you first made sure that your exposure was within your camera's histogram.  If your photo originally depicts low contrast, you may want to increase the contrast to add more vibrant color.  One of my favorite features of Photoshop is playing around with the color saturation option.  Although it is a neat option, avoid over-doing it because it may cause the photo to become grainy.  Color balance is mentioned next.  For shooting outdoors, the camera's white balance is most effectively set to "daylight" which will require less adjustment in color balance on the computer than if the camera is set to "auto white balance".  The contrast utility is another feature that is fun to play with and see what you can do to make the photo unique.  In professional photography, the purpose of this utility is to make adjustments to present as much color as possible without modifying it in a way that deviates completely from the original scene.

Finally, I want to talk a little about some really cool creative features that can allow the editor to completely modify imperfections or add effects to the original photo.  Dodging and burning tools allow you to "dodge" out over exposed areas and "burn" in underexposed areas just like in the film darkroom.  You can use selective contrast to increase or decrease contrast on certain points in the picture instead of the entire picture.  Retouching tools, such as the healing brush and the clone stamp tool, allow the editor to add in desired items or take out/cover up undesired items.  If you are looking to get rid of a stop sign in one of your landscape shots, you can use the clone stamp tool to get scenery from the background to cover up the sign.  Likewise, you can use the healing brush to allow the program to intelligently take surrounding scenery to cover up the sign.  The final stage in image editing is to adjust the sharpness.  Image sharpening causes a loss of image data that cannot be reversed after saving it.  According to the author, the best sharpening utilities in Photoshop are the Smart Sharpen and Sharpen utilities.

Citations:

Fitzharris, Tim. National Audubon Society Guide to Nature Photography Digital Edition. Buffalo: Firefly, 2008.  

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