Today, I’m going to show you some quick and easy ways to improve the quality of your digital photographs.
Let’s see if this will be a good topic. By the show of hands, how many of you have digital cameras? How many of you use the digital cameras on a regular basis? How many of you would like to improve the quality of your digital photos?
I see. Well, I think I can help.
Let’s get right to it. I like my digital camera because I can see the photos right after I take it and retake the photo if I’m not satisfied with it. I don’t need to waste good money printing out not-so-good photos. I don’t need for wait for the photos to be developed, because I can print them out right at home, on my home ink-jet printer.
I was going through couple of film rolls a week before digital cameras became popular and affordable. I was a pretty good photographer by that time already, and I was actually thinking of opening a side photo business doing events. I can tell you, my first experience with my digital photography was not very encouraging. Most times the photos came out looking dull, sometimes with a color tint such as green or blue. Some of them looked OK on my monitor but looked horrible when I printed them out on my ink-jet printer.
So I decided that digital photography was not for me, and went back to film cameras for awhile.
Then Three years ago, I attended an one-day workshop by a professional photographer on digital work-flow which really opened my eyes.
The term digital work flow refers to the multiple steps in digital photo-taking, and the secret to improving your digital photos is by understanding and following the digital work flow steps.
A simplified version of a digital work flow has four parts: setting the camera, take and review the photo, digital darkroom, and printing.
The first step is to set the camera. Unlike a traditional camera, a digital camera takes a bit more time to set up. First you will decide what mode to use, do you want full automatic? aperture priority? shutter priority? or full manual mode? Then the resolution, how big should the photos be? Then the image capture mode, raw or JPEG? They all have an impact on the resulting photo, but are not as important as setting the white balance.
White balance is a new concept only applicable to digital photography. You adjust for white-balance to account for the color temperature of the lights falling on your subject. Your eyes are very good at telling what white is in most situations, but your camera is not. It relies on you to make that judgment. Most people know about the white-balance setting on their cameras, but don’t know what it’s used for, and therefore automatically leave it on auto white-balance which means the camera will do its best to determine the color temperature of ambient light. However, digital cameras are not good at determine the proper white balance in many situations. Most digicams also have settings for sunny, cloudy, florescent and incandescent lights. Use these when appropriate. The best approach to white balance though, is to use a piece of white paper and calibrate your camera for manual white-balance like so.
Now that you’ve setup the camera, you are ready to take some photos. I will not cover photo taking techniques in this speech, and will elaborate on them in a later one. The biggest advantage of digital over traditional photography is the ability to review the photo right after you take it. You can decide whether to keep or retake it. Most people look at the image on the LCD screen, and it they like what they see they keep it. This approach works in most situations. A better approach is to evaluate a photo based on a histogram. The histogram is a simple graph that displays where all of the brightness levels contained in the scene are found, from the darkest to the brightest. These values are arrayed across the bottom of the graph from left (darkest) to right (brightest). The vertical axis shows how much pixels are found at any particular brightness level.
The histogram should accurately reflect the dynamic range of the photo. In most situations, a histogram should stretch out in the full brightness spectrum. A lopsided histogram either means the photo is underexposed if the pixels are all on the left-hand side, or overexposed if they are all on the right-hand side. Use exposure compensation to deal with under and over exposure issues. Look it up in your camera’s manual on how to do exposure compensation.
After a day of great photo-taking, now you can go home and relax right? Well, not quite. There is a reason digital photography saves you money, it’s because you as the photographer will also work in the digital darkroom instead of some clerk from a photo lab. The digital darkroom is where you make fine adjustment to your photos to make them ready for sharing and printing.
There are quite a few things you can do in your digital darkroom such as correcting color cast if the white balance was not set correctly, adjusting levels, cropping, and special effects. The two that gives you the most bang for the buck are adjusting levels and cropping. Some photo editing programs, such as photoshop element, can automatically adjust levels. This means the program will stretch the brightness range of your photo to fill the whole spectrum. It results in a contrasting and detailed photo. Cropping is important in a lot of situations. For instance, you may want to crop out bystanders and focus the photo’s attention on the real subject, you may also crop the photo so that it fits in the ratio that you want to print the photo in (4×6 or 8×11).
The last step is actually printing the photos. In order to print, you will need to calibrate your monitor and printer to match their color profiles. This will enable you to print photos that match the one shown on the monitor. The process is not simple and takes time. I suggest you look at the Adobe Gamma control panel to calibrate your monitor and import the color profile of your printer into your photo editing program to preview it. By the way, you can find color profiles of many photo printing services on the internet. For instance, you can download color profiles of your local Costco’s printers.
To summarize, there are a few things that you can do to improve your digital photography. First is to understand the digital work-flow and tasks involved. Then make sure that you pre-set the white-balance on your digicam, use histogram to distinguish well exposed photos from the duds, use auto levels to stretch out the brightness range of your photo, and calibrated your monitor and printers for WYSIWYG printing.
Life is full precious moments, and make sure you preserve them well with your digital photos.