chapter 309

Photo Enhancement

4/5/2013

image is everything

Top image is my Photoshop Elements edit of picture taken of a fabric seller snapped by a member of my photo club while on tour of Cartagena, Colombia, South America.

 For the sake of a more pure image from his original here, it was important to remove the pesky distracting background tourist. Not that all tourists are bad. The club appreciated it and so I gave a demonstration last night including 30 before and after shots from these "chapters" also demonstrating some cloning techniques in Photoshop Elements from my laptop with my Wacom pen tablet mouse replacement tool. The highend of these products can cost you $4000, but you may have already guessed I paid less than $50.

 After doing all the edits, then I recalled a similar image of daughter from 1985.

 I photographed the Manatees in Florida recently. This beautiful Sea Cow was shot in Florida by Paul Nicklen for the Nat Geo but the editors first had to reject about 50,000 other shots from his 3 month photo assignment. Tech note: shoot many, delete many.

Many snapshooters do not want to be bothered with editing (like my brothers) but you can make most photos better by doing so. The first step is culling, deleting the junky shots you have taken. Everyone should at least do basic lighting adjustments and cropping to greatly improve your collection.

Free is good: Google's Picasa 3 software is well regarded. Their Nik products Snapseed is a freebie app on iPad. On line tutorials from the manufacturers on Youtube are good.

Enhancement and manipulation are facts of life. The preeminent Ansel Adams most acclaimed photo "Moonrise over Hernandez ,NM 1947" is so manipulated that he turned light to dark.

A note about cameras: Most club members use high end multi thousand dollar and bulky digital SLR cameras but they acknowledge the high quality output and flexibility of point and shoot cameras. The Cartegena image above was taken with the non SLR but higher end $400 point and shoot Panasonic Lumix FZ200 camera. That's twice the price and twice the bulk of my Canon SX260HS but it can shoot in RAW format for interesting HDR manipulations.

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