editing digital photos

Photography Tip - Screen should be the brightest light source in the room

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Your computer screen should be the brightest thing in the room when editing digital photos. This is my editing setup as seen in the middle of a sunny afternoon.Editing digital photographs in a consistent environment is the key to getting consistent results.  When editing  photographs during the day, I make sure that my computer screen(s) is the brightest thing in the room.  I close all the blinds tightly and even let my eyes adjust to the ambient light before starting to edit.  This way, if I continue to edit photos from the same set at night, the results will be consistent.  Not only does editing photos in a bright room not allow one to properly see contrast, etc, it also means that if you edit another photo at night in a dark room it is very likely to turn out different.  

So when editing photos during the day be sure and close all the window blinds and make sure your computer screen is the brightest thing in the room.

Ferrari F430 Spider Digital Composite Tampa Florida Car Photography

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This is actually a yellow Ferrari F430 Spider converted to black & white and put on a digital background in PhotoshopFor some reason I got it into my head yesterday afternoon to finally edit this photograph of a yellow Ferrari F430 Spider that I had lingering for almost a year.  I have posted other shots of this particular car actually, but this shot I guess I did not like as much.  My motivation to edit it now was because I envisioned cutting it out of its original background and placing it on a half black half white digital background as seen in the above image.

Original image used for the above digital manipulation of a Ferrari F430 Spider - Tampa Jet Center - Nikon D300 f/11 ISO 200 7-exposure HDRThis is the original HDR image made from a bracketed 7-exposures.  What do you prefer?  The black & white Photoshop edit or the original HDR image?

Resize photographs to exact sizes with Photoshop for best online presentation on Facebook & Linkedin

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What is the final step in editing digital photos that you will display online?  Resizing.  This is a very simple thing to do, but very important for presenting your photographs online in the best possible quality.  Just uploading full resolution images is very rarely the way to go for a number of reasons.  One is that it takes up a lot of space and many websites do not allow large file uploads.  Secondly, who knows what kind of recompression and resizing websites use in presenting your images.  This is why every single image you see of mine online has been exactly resized in Photoshop to the best possible size for the location it is displayed on.  

In the above screenshot you can see the Photoshop Image Size dialogue box.  The Mac keyboard shortcut to get to it is: OPTION-CMD-I or you can go into the menus:  Image --> Image Size.  I use pixel count to resize my images.  Every image in the blog section of my website (you are looking at it now) is resized to 600px on the width maximum because that is what fits within the body portion of the blog page.  Photoshop will keep the height in proportion automaticaly when I type in 600px for the width, see it chose 399px for the height in the above example.

There is no loss in image quality when resizing in Photoshop, which is why I use it for all my images.  If I just let Squarespace (my content management system) resize a much larger image for me, that will eat up my alloted storage space much quicker and worse, may not display my photographs in maximum quality.  There could be pixelating resulting from poor resizing.

In the headshot example above, each one is 250px on the width.  The image on the left shows what can happen if a smaller image is stretched to a larger size.  A lot of detail in the image is lost.  The headshot on the right was resized from the original photograph to exactly 250px and looks like the full resolution image in detail and quality.  The same poor image quality can result if you upload a huge image then compact it into a much smaller space.  This has happened with past headshot clients actually.  Most website profile photos are only about 200px on the width, which is the case for popular networking site Linkedin.  So when the client uploads their full resolution headshot (2000px or larger) and Linkedin tries to squeeze that into just 200px worth of space, the image will look horrible.  In the case the client did not have resizing skills, I sent them a 200px version of their headshot.  

Facebook is a photograph displaying disaster.  They remain the only site that degrades image quality that I know of.  It is preposterous that they do it when no other photo intensive site does.  Still, it is an important place for me to show my work so I do upload my photos to it.  Even though I resize my images in Photoshop to Facebook's exact required dimensions, their resampling engines go to work on my images reducing their image quality.  

Since adding the feature to display a cover image to a Facebook profile, I have seen an increase in strangely sized and proportioned images on Facebook.  The exact dimension required is 851x315.  Nice even numbers you can remember easily right?

So how can you resize your photo to fit a Facebook Cover image space and minimize the image quality reduction Facebook will apply to the image anyway?  Load the image in Photoshop, choose the Crop Tool, and enter in the pixel dimensions of 851x315.  Select the area of the photograph.  Since 851x315 is a strange proportion, you will almost never be able to fit your whole photo in that area.  Once you crop the image to the right ratio, you still have to resize it.  Then go into Image Size as described above and type in 851 for the width.  Now you can upload a photo that will fit perfectly into the Facebook cover image spot, but you will notice the quality reduction applied despite this.

Snow Leopard Photoshop edit removing cage fencing from photograph

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This week one of my former photography students, Betty, contacted me about editing a photo she made that she really liked, but had one serious flaw.  She told me she wanted to be able to make a print of a photograph of a snow leopard she had made, but.....there was facing across the entire image.  She asked if I could remove it.  Upon first looking at the sample she sent I thought no way, at least not in a way that would look good.  However, I often think this initially when looking at a challenging photo edit and after some time my brain starts to formulate some possible solutions.  Still, there was one fatal part of the photo that could not be fixed, the cat's right eye.

Lines and blemishes over and across simple surfaces are usually not hard to correct, such as the case with the wires goings over the fur of the leopard.  However, anything over eyes basically provides an unfixable problem.  After some thinking....my solution?  Copy the cat's left eye, mirror it, and just put it over the problematic right eye!  

It worked better than I thought it would.  To add some differences I removed some reflections in the "new" right eye along with a few changes to the upper eye brow area.  I will not say removing the rest of the wiring was easy or simple, but those edits were a much more straight forward technique of first using the healing brush and then the clone stamp tool to clean up any lingering obvious edits.  Photoshop CS5 was used for these major lifting edits, as I call them.

After removing all the wiring I then applied my normal digital editing workflow to the image to produce the final, fully edited photograph above.  So the next time you think a photograph is impossible to fix in Photoshop, give it a few minutes and maybe a solution will come to you.  Or, send the photo to me as I offer digital photo editing services of all kinds.

Photography Tip - replace a busy background with clean sky Corvette Photography

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This Corvette is real, and the sky is real, but they were not really photographed together.

I went to a Corvette car show in South Straub Park this past Saturday mostly to meet the owner of the above customized Corvette.  I first photographed his car back in November.  He was not by his car at the time and only by chance found my photograph of it.  Since then I have been in regular contact with the owner, Bobby, about possibly doing a full shoot of his Corvette.  That still has not happened yet, but at least on Saturday I got a chance to go see him and say hello.  

This is the original image as made on site at a car show in St. Petersburg FloridaI have written several times that shooting cars at car shows often results in less than desirable images, if you want the focus to be on the car itself.  This case was no different as the trees in the background compete for the viewer's eye just as much as the Corvette.  The solution for a busy background?  Replace it with a better one!

Corvette cut out from the background using Photoshop Quick Select ToolIt was pretty straight forward to remove the Corvette from its background using the Quick Select Tool in Photoshop.  I kept the grass foreground as seen above.  I was careful to of course not select the inside of the window so that too could be part of the background replacement.

The replacement background used in the composite image.I went into my photo archives to look for a suitable replacement background.  Using actual objects is rather hard to do as proportions can be very difficult to match (car looks giant, buildings look tiny, etc).  A sky background is usually a good and easy replacement background subject.  I used one I made of Sunset Beach on Treasure Island, Florida.

The new background slipped right behind the Corvette, window included.Then it is just a matter of slipping the sky background layer behind the Corvette layer in Photoshop.  I positioned it taking into consideration cloud placement.  I did not even need to cut out the sandy beach part because that is all hidden behind the Corvette.  The above image is the final composite photograph which allows the viewer to focus on the Corvette as the subject.

Motion blur added to a more advanced edit of the Corvette composite image

After getting a composite image I liked, I experimented with even more Photoshop editing.  I added a motion blur to the grass and a radial blur to the tires to create the illusion that the Corvette is speeding along on the grass.  I darkened the window and put in a silhouette of my own head to show a driver inside to help complete the motion illusion.  What do you think of the motion shot?  Is it convincing or not quite there yet?

Ferrari 458 Spider in yellow on white background St. Petersburg Florida Car Photography

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Selected crop & edit of a Ferrari 458 Spider photographed in St. Petersburg FloridaGoing through my unedited car photography archives, I found this straight on view of a yellow Ferrari 458 Spider.  It was originally photographed at the Grand Prix Gala inside a office building's lobby (see below).  The background was of course busy and full of people.  To put the focus on the car itself I decided to cut it out of its original background and place it on a digital white background.  Below is the digital photo editing process for making the final image.

I cropped the Ferrari above its bumper to give it a kind of peaking up at the viewer look.  

Digital Photo Editing Lesson with Stacy - prom couple before and after

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The past few weeks I have been teaching former Morean Arts Center photography student, Stacy, how to develop a Mac digital photo editing workflow.  She is new to Mac as well, so I have been showing her some of my top tips for using OS X as efficiently as possible (hint, use Expose every day).  She also got the same apps I have so she could learn my exact photo editing workflow which starts in Aperture 3, then Color Efex Pro 3, then finally Photoshop CS5.  

Stacy made this photo of her daughter and her boyfriend on their junior prom night.  No flash was used, only natural light.  Here is the process for how the photo was transformed:

Aperture 3 workflow:

  • white balance slider increased toward cooler (blue)
  • shadows slider increased
  • mid-level contrast slider increased
  • dodging brush used on all skin areas

Color Efex Pro 4 (she has 4, I use 3):

  • Polarization filter applied
  • Pro Contrast filter applied

Photoshop CS5 (approximate steps):

  • Quick Select Tool used on all skin areas
  • Dodge Brush used selectively
  • Healing Brush used for blemish removal
  • Clone Stamp Tool used for more complex blemish removal and slight skin softening in general
  • Dodge Brush used in highlights mode to brighten eyes & teeth
  • Clone Stamp Tool used to lighten under the eyes
  • Quick Select Tool used on water
  • Contrast adjustment made selectively to water
  • Quick Select Tool used on sky
  • Highlights adjustment made selectively to sky
  • Saturation adjustment made selectively to sky
  • Unsharp Mask filter applied

None of these individual techniques is advanced.  To a properly trained Photoshop professional they might even seem crude.  However, what each technique lacks in complexity, the complexity comes from knowing when and how to use each one to accomplish a photo retouching goal.  At each stage of editing the photo looked better.  Through experience it can be learned how to keep adding yet another stage to one's editing workflow to make a photograph reach its full potential, or in some cases, save a photo that would otherwise be culled.