Shedding a Little Light on Eric's "Father & Children" Photo...
Hi Eric - I hope you don't mind me taking the liberty of playing a bit with your photo - I just used "Picassa" software, which you can download free from Google - it actually doesn't do a bad job in a lot of cases, and it might be useful for you until you get a fancier piece of software.Anyway, Picassa has a "fill light" control - a little slider that you can move and see the effect before applying it to the image. I used that control plus the "sharpen" tool
What do you think??
Best regards,
SteveR
posted by SteveR at 7:04 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Thx for lightening up the photo Steve. I need to check things out on Photoshop before posting them. The series of photos I posted last nite were a lot darker than I liked.
I gotta get used to this posting stuff.
Eric
Eric, generally, the image is not "finished" or "completed" until you post-process it, much like the traditional film to print process. Think back to your darkroom days, how often did you tweak your print until you got it just the way you wanted it.
The consumer grade P&S cameras are tuned so that the average non-photography hobbyist, casual viewer will be happy with the image straight from the camera to the minilab. Those cameras deliver highly saturated, pre-sharpened, and well exposed images right out of the camera. By tuning them this way, you can sometimes also encounter poor white balance, blown out highlights, and other effects that you cannot "fix" in post processing even if you wanted to.
More advanced cameras like all dslr's, and many prosumer models will dial back all that in-camera processing to give the photographer more control, but these images almost always (100% for me) require post-processing.
As for this image, the sharpening really helped, but it's at the limit because the original shot was just a bit out of focus. Also, the background was lightened too much, it needs to be burned to reveal a little more detail and to balance the contrast a bit more.
It's still a nice composition though.
--WT
Forgot to mention... Nice job, Steve, demonstrating that even with simple tools, you can make a vast improvement in the image.
--Warren
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