There may be more detail in your photos than you think

Sometimes you may be happy with a photo – perhaps a flash photo of friends, or a photo of a bird against the sky, like here. Flash pictures often show the people in the front row just fine, but the ones in back are dark and hard to even recognize. Photos of back-lit subjects might make nice silhouettes but are a little too dark to show all the detail.

Cameras do a marvelous job of taking the work out of photography, but you can improve the photos more often than not after they come out of the camera.

Here is a photo of a hawk. The sun was high in the sky and what we see is the shaded side. Not a bad photo you might say – considering the luck in getting it.

You can see the red tail feathers and nice detail in the wings. The camera did a pretty good job.

The dark areas, almost black in this shot,  may contain more detail than is apparent when the photo is seen on a monitor or even printed as is.

Windows Live Photo Gallery makes it easy to improve your photos. Clicking Auto adjust lightened the dark areas a bit – it was a good improvement.

The manual adjustments can make it even better.

Photo Gallery, in the Adjust exposure panel, has four sliders and also two histogram controls.

Brightness affects the whole photo and makes it either lighter or darker. The Contrast control can make the dark areas lighter and the light areas darker or vice versa.

The Shadows control only affects the darker areas, it can lighten them or make them even darker.

The Highlights control works similarly but affects the lighter areas.

For this photo I set the Shadows slider almost fully to the right to lighten the dark, the shadow, areas.

The histogram shows the distribution of the pixels from full black on the left to full white on the right. The vertical scale shows the relative number of pixels of that shade. Note that in this photo of a hawk against a blue sky there are two humps or curves. The low, spread out curve on the left shows the pixels of the hawk, the big spike is the blue sky.

There are two sliders below the histogram. The left one lets you set the black level. Slide it to the right and every pixel that is to the left of the indicator will be set to black. The right slider lets you set the white level. Every pixel on the histogram that is to the right of the indicator will be set to full white. The nice thing is that once these settings are applied, the pixels between the slider settings will be spread out over the full range from black to white.

For this photo I moved the white level slider a ways to the left. There were no pixels there, so I did not turn any areas into chalk white. The effect was to spread the pixels out, lightening the photo and the sky.

There is no best setting for any of these controls, just play with them until you are happy with the results. I click Revert to original quite often to permit me to start all over.

Enhancing your photos is fun to do. It is even nice when your friends say that you take good photos.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Technorati Tags: photography,digital photography,digital pictures,Windows Live Photo Gallery,Photo Gallery,exposure,adjust exposure,brightness,contrast,shadows,highlights,histogram,enhance photos,improve photos

Fun with Food – pictorially speaking

Someone else started posting photos of food, the pictures looked so appetizing that I just had to wade in. Let me start with the menu:

Let’s set the table.

The photos here are just for fun. As such no elaborate efforts were employed, not even a tripod. When flash was used, it was on-camera flash, with just a paper napkin as a diffuser in one of the shots.

Mind you, my dear reader, Café Ludwig is a blog, not a place to eat, so, no reservations, please.

 

How about spaghetti tonight? With a pleasant little chianti? Or maybe a chicken curry? Just a sandwich, perhaps? Or a “hurricane” dish – pantry food!

Oh, my, I used the same placement in two photos. Microsoft Word 2010 “Picture Tools” to the rescue:

The Background Remover needed just a little help around the plate – maybe a couple of minutes at most were spent on “lifting” the plate. A rectangle shape with a texture fill serves as the new placemat.

Using Picture Tools provides so many artistic effects that I couldn’t help playing with my food:

How about a couple of posters for Café Ludwig?

 

Ready for dessert?

Just one “fruit-on-the-bottom” pudding – all these artistic affects – you have also seen a version in the banner at the top. Microsoft Word 2010 shares these “Picture Tools” with Excel 2010, and PowerPoint 2010. Always handy when you want to play around with your photos – or your food. The banner was made only partially in Word, the capital letters were customized in Paint.

Bon appétit !

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Technorati Tags: photography,digital pictures,Windows Live Photo Gallery,Live Photo Gallery,Word 2010,Microsoft Word,Microsoft Excel,Microsoft PowerPoint,Paint,art effects

 

Screens and dirty windows in front of your camera lens

Sometimes the conditions for taking pictures are very marginal but the photo is a must. Such was the situation recently for me. We have not had any rain lately and even the deer that live around our neighborhood were getting desperate. It was after dinner when a doe wandered to the bowl of water I have sitting our for the chipmunks and small birds. It was unusual and I wanted a photo. The only view was from a window with a heavy screen. There was a good deal of light falling on the screen from a window behind me.

Here is the result. The exposure was 1/15 sec , f/5.6 at ISO 1600. Marginal at best. Note the histogram, nothing on the black end as the illuminated screen provided glare and nothing on the high end as it was dark and there was not enough light for a hand-held exposure. My lens was as open as it goes at the zoom setting I used.

Those little controls on the histogram are the salvation for shots like this. I moved the bottom one up to just were the histogram curve starts and the top one down enough to brighten up the photo. A little bit of added contrast and a small boost of  color saturation was all, I did not crop the photo.

Much more acceptable, don’t you think? As a record of the event it will serve just fine. I only managed a few exposures. Our guest only stayed for a long drink and then scampered back into the woods. Maybe I should have told you, this drinking bowl is in our front yard! You can see a little more of the lawn in the parting shot.

The moral of this story is this: Don’t let screens, veils, or dirty windows stop you. Even in impossible situations, take the photo. Then use a bit of processing magic to bring out the picture.

 

Technorati Tags: Photography,Windows Live Photo Gallery,photos,digital pictures,editing,histogram,how-to

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Keeping copies of original photos

Those of us who remember the days of film cameras still have those “negatives” in mind to keep and guards as the originals of our photos. Digital photography does away with that. Enhancing and manipulating of pictures is so easy even us senior adults can do it. That brings up that question “should I keep a copy of the image as it came from the camera?”

For most of us the answers is “Yes, at least for a while”. In our enthusiasm for bringing out the best in an image it is easy to go overboard and ruin it instead. That’s when it is necessary to step back to an earlier version, or maybe the original.

Windows Live Photo Gallery makes the going back easy. There is a control, “Revert to original”, that removes all edits and restores the photo to the starting condition. Live Photo Gallery doesn’t undo the edits, it keeps an original for us. When an edit is made it makes a copy of the original image and saves it in the “original photos folder”.

So, all’s well – end of story? Not quite.

By default Live Photo Gallery keeps originals permanently. Photos take up a good deal of storage space. If you are an avid photographer, it wont be long and that “original photos folder” will be stuffed full and take up a lot of disk space. Indeed it is possible to run out of available storage space and bring your computer to its knees.

Live Photo Gallery can be set to discard the originals after a period of time. That is probably a good strategy. Keep the originals long enough to make sure that you are satisfied with any enhancements, then let them get discarded.

The “Originals” tab in the “Options” dialog allows a number of settings from one day, to one year, or the default “never”, of when to move the originals to the recycle bin.

My own preference is to set this to “One week”. This gives me plenty of time to come back and to change my mind about the corrections I applied.

In case you are curious, the originals are stored in an out-of-the-way location inside your user folder. When you view the contents there by way of the “Go to original photos folder”, Windows demurely hides the actual location behind just an “Original images” label. See the illustration above. You can see the full location description by just clicking on the label in the address bar.

Some of us just shudder thinking that some time in the future we might want to redo the edits in a different way or with a more powerful editing application. What then? Being paranoid about the possible loss of my “precious” photos, I make a copy of the originals as they came from the camera and put them into a backup system. This is one of my routines before I even look at the photos. The important point here is that such archiving is done on separate media.

Should you keep copies of your originals permanently? You should at least give the question some careful thought.

 

Technorati Tags: Photography,digital pictures,Windows Live Photo Gallery,keeping originals,photo editing

Different Views

We all have our individual approach to taking pictures. Seeing another photographers work can be instructive as well as enjoyable. This note is an introduction to just such an opportunity.

The blog “Two Cameras – Two Views” shows side-by-side examples of different interpretations of the same subject.

For the story behind that blog, please see my post “Shared blogging with Live Writer” in “the other corner”.

 

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer,blogging,shared blogging,photography,digital pictures,seeing pictures

 

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, how-to, Windows Live Writer, blogging, shared blogging, photography, digital pictures, seeing pictures

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck