Month: May 2025

Digital photo editing beginners often misunderstand what the Sharpening tool can do for a photo.

The first thing to remember about Sharpening is this. It doesn’t matter how good your photo editing program is, you cannot fix what wasn’t already there. No amount of sharpening is going to fix a bad, fuzzy picture.

If you can’t fix a bad picture, then what’s the point of sharpening at all? The answer to that question lies in how a digital camera or scanner actually takes a picture.

The human eye can see an almost infinite number of shades. Unfortunately, a digital camera can’t. It has to reduce the incredible variety of shades it sees into a collection of dots of solid color. You can’t have a pixel that’s navy blue on one side and sky blue on the other. The camera has to analyze where two colors touch, and then it has to “guess” at what color the dot in between them is really supposed to be. Most of the time, it’s going to be some average shade between the two colors. This fools the human eye–because we see that averaging as fuzziness. Raw digital photos often look just a little bit out of focus.

Sharpening the picture is meant to correct for the guesswork that the camera had to do. The photo-editing program analyzes the borders between colors, and makes them stand out again. Nearly every picture that comes out of a digital camera would benefit with a little bit of sharpening.

You have to be careful not to over-sharpen, however. If you zoom in very close, you can see where the sharpening program puts a lighter bit of color between the two shades, to make the border stand out. If you sharpen too much, these light lines will become obvious and distracting “halos” in your picture.

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One of the most common problems in photography is the demonic transformation of the Red Eye effect. It comes from using a flash in a dimly lit area. Since the subject’s pupils are wide open, there’s nothing to prevent the light from the flash travelling all the way to the far back of the eye. It bounces off the retina, picking up the signature reddish tint along the way, and returns to the camera. Presto, instant demonic possession. Dogs, cats, parakeets–even spiders–are all targets of this strange demon that seems to only haunt portraits.

Some cameras have an added red-eye reduction mode, though their solution seems a bit strange. When this camera mode is turned on, there are not one but two flashes for each picture. The first one is a pre-flash, half a second before the real one. The point of the pre-flash is to trigger the pupils to shrink, reducing the chance for red-eye. Unfortunately, it doesn’t eliminate red-eye, it just tries to lessen it. and worse, if the subjects don’t know about the pre-flash, there’s a chance they’ll blink or turn away between flashes because they’ll think the picture has now been taken.

Once red-eye gets past the camera lens, your only real option is to try to correct it with your photo editing program. Without a program or filter specifically designed to correct red-eye, you’ll have to fix it by hand, by zooming in until the red-eye effect almost fills the screen, and then painting it away, pixel by pixel. If you’re lucky enough to have a red-eye correction button, then fixing red-eye is often as easy as clicking on the outside of the pupil and hitting the Go button. The program will insert a circle that’s mostly black into the area covered with demonic red eyes.

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In the world of marketing digital cameras, megapixels seem to be the beginning and end of a camera’s power. Like a computer’s RAM and hard drive, “the more, the better,” and all of the other features of a camera fall by the roadside. But there’s more to a photo than the megapixels.

The quality of the lens, for a prime example, is a much more important feature than the pixels. A poorly built lens will take all the power out of the camera, because a fuzzy picture is still fuzzy, even at ten megapixels.

Once they’re out of the camera, megapixels are a reasonably good guide to how large a print you can get out of them. Since pixels are actually “dots,” if you enlarge the picture enough, the illusion will be broken–and the individual dots will become obvious. The more pixels, the larger you can expand the picture before the dots become visible.

As a general rule of thumb, four megapixels is perfect for 5×7 prints, but generally not much larger. There are exceptions, but they depend mostly on the subject of the picture, and not the megapixels of the camera. While a three megapixel image will look great on the computer screen, printed at 3×5, or maybe even printed at 5×7, the dots will be really obvious if the picture is blown up onto a highway billboard. Five megapixels will make for a great 8×10 print.

When it comes to enlarging pictures, photo editing programs do not have a very good track record. Shrinking a picture works very well, but enlarging is a lot more difficult–because you can’t just make the dots bigger. The program has to Interpolate–that is, it has to guess at what color the new pixels have to be. There are programs specifically designed for enlarging digital images, but it’s still a fairly new technique.

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“I’ve heard a lot of confusing stuff about JPGs. Some people tell me they’re perfect for online photography, and other people warn me that when I convert my pictures to JPG, I’m going to throw away most of the quality of my picture! I don’t want to ruin my pictures, so should I be using JPG?”

There’s a grain of truth in both sides of this question, actually. Yes, JPG Compression does throw out information in your picture. The good news is, most of the time, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference.

JPG Compression works under the assumption that if two areas are almost exactly the same color, the average viewer is going to see them as the same color. If the entire area can be saved as one color, that’s a lot less data to be stored in the file, and the compressed version becomes a lot smaller. Smaller images are important for both emailing and loading web sites.

As an example, JPG compression might take a black shadow thrown against a very dark grey background, and remove the shadow, so that the entire area is roughly the same color. This is over-simplifying, of course. The end result is that fewer individual colors translate to a much smaller file.

The danger with JPG is when a picture is compressed multiple times. One of the worst things you can do to a picture is to save it as JPG three or four times in a row, because each save will compound the quality lost. Just like a fax that gets forwarded or a photocopy of a photocopy, the quality of the picture will suffer. After a couple of rounds through the JPG program, it will be obvious where it decided to save space. For this reason, when you’re editing your photos, always start with a lossless format (like PNG or TIFF), and don’t convert your image to JPG until the editing is done.

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There are so many different file types to choose from, like RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG. Which one is right for you?

RAW is the internal file format for many digital cameras. Photographers like to shoot in RAW format because it doesn’t get any processing in the camera, allowing them to adjust things like white balance and exposure after the picture has been taken. The main disadvantage of RAW is that it’s proprietary, so every brand is different and not all formats can be read by photo editing software.

JPG (or JPEG) is a compressed format, and one of the most common types used on the Web. Keep in mind that saving into JPG will cost some of the quality of the picture. The good news is, in most cases, you can’t tell the difference between the original and the compressed JPG. If you’re going to email pictures or post them to the Web, this is the format to use.

GIF is a much older format than JPG, with nowhere near the power. GIFs can only have 256 colors. However, GIF is a great format for images with large areas that are all the same color. GIF is best used for logos and line-drawing images.

Think of PNG as a newer, more powerful GIF. It has many of the features that make GIF useful on the Web, without the 256 color limitation. PNG is also a “lossless” format, which means you don’t lose quality when you convert your picture to PNG.

TIFF is another lossless format, and one of the most common. If a digital camera has an option besides RAW or JPG, it will be TIFF.

Photo editing programs will generally have their own format, as well, like PSD for Adobe Photoshop and PSP for Paintshop Pro. These are great for use with the programs, but not for archiving–if the software world changed, you wouldn’t be able to read your backups anymore.

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Imagine returning home from the family reunion, camera in hand, and waiting for the printed pictures to come back. After a delay of at least hours, sometimes even days, the prints arrive, and in the most important picture–the family reunion shot–not only is there an ugly glaring neon sign in the background, but the tripod was off-balance, with one leg resting on a rock. The entire crew seems to be seated on deck chairs on the Titanic, threatening to slide off the far left edge of the photo.

Don’t worry, there’s no need to call the entire family back for another reunion to re-shoot the picture. What this photo needs is a bit of cropping and straightening.

Before photography went digital, both cropping and straightening were done in the printing process. The printer would add a mask or frame to the picture to enclose only what he wanted to appear in the picture, and tilt (or just cut) the paper as necessary to make sure there was no cruise-ship leaning effect.

In today’s digital world of digital photography and editing software, it’s much easier to fix this sort of problem. Scan the picture into your computer, load it into your favorite paint program, and it can be fixed in minutes.

First, most photo editing programs have a grid or reference line feature. With a perfectly straight line to measure against, rotating the picture back onto dry land is child’s play.

and second, cropping comes naturally to photo programs as well. Draw a box around the family–but not around the ugly sign–and crop away. Be careful not to chop out any important details, like Uncle Vinnie’s ugly toupee and Aunt Marge’s red slippers. and don’t forget to save a copy of the original, in case you need to do this again someday. Then, email the corrected image to everyone who posed.

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Cloning, in digital photography, has absolutely nothing to do with sheep. Unless, of course, you want to use the cloning tool to turn an image of one sheep into a whole flock of them.

The Cloning tool is used to copy one part of the image into another area, or even into another picture entirely. If your beautiful picture of clouds at sunset is ruined by the ugly electrical wires running across them, it can be fixed. The wires can be painted right out of the picture by using the cloning tool to copy small bits of the clouds around the wires over top of them.

This technique can be time-consuming, especially if there’s a large area that needs work. It’s also very easy to do it badly, with results that clearly look like they were cloned. Remember to click on different areas of the picture to be the source of the cloning tool, because if you don’t, you can easily get a tell-tale pattern in the texture of the image.

Cloning is also useful in other ways. Imagine two pictures of the same family portrait. In the first, Grandpa is yawning. The photographer saw that, and shot a second one, but he didn’t notice Junior sticking his tongue at his sister in the second shot. Rather than throw away both pictures, the photo editor can take the smiling Junior from the first image, and clone it over the ugly one in the second photo.

Cloning is one of the most common tools used in photo faking, just as the family portrait example shows. One recent example is Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj, who was was fired by Reuters. He was caught using a cloning technique on his pictures, making battle damage in the 2006 Isreal-Lebanon conflict look much worse than it really was.

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While Burning and Dodging are listed as tools in most photo editing software, they are digital versions of techniques originally developed by darkroom photographers years ago.

Burning is a trick for getting more detail out of a section of a picture. The photographer makes his print normally, and then masks off a large section of the print, usually with his hands. Then, with the light blocked, he adds a bit more exposure time to the print, so that the area that wasn’t masked gets more exposure. Dodging, on the other hand, involves using a small piece of paper or cardboard to block the light from a section of the photograph.

Burning, then, means adding extra exposure to some element of the picture, while dodging is less exposure. In general, this is different from the Brightness of a picture because brightness is applied to the entire picture, while burning and dodging are only applied to areas of the picture.

Photoshop, as an example, offers tools for Burning and Dodging. You can adjust the size of the “brush” and apply it to any part of the image, and the program will lighten or darken the area, just like a classic burn or dodge would have.

Both techniques are used for “balancing out” a picture. For example, if a landscape or cityscape turns out perfectly, but the sky behind it is overexposed (looking like a big white blob rather than the normal blue and white of sky and clouds), then dodging the sky will reduce the exposure, and hopefully bring the color back down to a normal level. If the sky exposed in the perfect shade of blue, but the windows are too dark to stand out from the buildings, then burning the windows would help to expose them better, bringing out more detail and clarity.

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In photography, exposure is controlled by a variety of things–the size of the lens opening, the film speed, and the duration the lens remains open taking the picture. In digital photo editing, we can adjust exposure further, with the Brightness and Contrast controls.

Brightness, as the name implies, is the amount of light in the picture. The longer the lens was open and the wider the lens aperture, the brighter the resulting picture will be. Every photo editing program will have a Brightness control. Changing the brightness setting will adjust the colors of the pictures as if the photo was taken with a wider or narrower aperture.

However, increasing the brightness can cause the picture to look washed out. This is where Contrast comes in. Contrast is the range of dark and light in the picture–the spectrum between the darkest and the brightest regions of the picture. Changing the contrast will make the brights brighter and the darks darker, which will counter-balance the changes made by the Brightness control. Brightness and contrast are generally used in tandem in most photo editing projects.

In most projects, it’s rare to have a photo that needs overall brightness and contrast adjustments. What’s more common is to have a picture that needs adjustments to small areas. For example, a dark cityscape against a bright blue sky, or a portrait with sunlight behind the subject, would likely be ruined by changing the overall brightness and contrast. These pictures need smaller, focused adjustments. In the old darkroom days, the only choice the photographer had was to dodge or burn. With modern photo editing programs, however, he can use a Lasso selection set, and then apply Burn, Dodge, Brightness, Contrast, or even Levels and Curves adjustments, to only those parts of the picture that really need it.

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The best Wildlife photography will always show a crystal-clear animal against a blurry background. This is done by using just the right combination of lens, aperture, and shutter speed, and really helps to make the subject stand out. If a background of branches and leaves were as sharply focused as the bird in the foreground, it would be very easy to lose the bird in the background “noise.”

You can use photo editing techniques to achieve the same effect.

Load your picture into your favorite photo editing program. Using a selection tool like a “Lasso,” select the foreground image, the “animal” that has to be set off from the “leaves and branches.” Once it’s selected, “Invert” the selection. Most photo editing programs have this option. In effect, it means “swap the selected areas for the unselected ones.” By inverting, you’ll select only the background of your image. If your program has the feature, you might also consider Feathering your selection. This helps to break up the outline of the selection, so that it doesn’t have such a sharp edge to it.

Once the background is highlighted, use a tool called Gaussian Blur. This is a specific type of blurring routine designed to imitate the blurring that happens in traditional photography. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the settings, but remember that a little bit of blur–leaving the background out of focus, but recognizable–is better than a lot.

A related photo technique is called Panning. Focus on a moving object, like a racecar, and keep the camera pointed at that object as it goes by. Done properly, the racecar will be in focus, while the crowd behind it will be blurred. This kind of blur is called Motion blur, or sometimes Radial blur. Using Radial instead of Gaussian will make your subject appear to be racing past the background.

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