Shooting in digital provides many advantages over film. In the era of 8GB and 16GB memory cards, we have the ability to shoot literally THOUSANDS of images without ever having to be concerned about “wasting” film. That having been said, many of us expect perfection right out of the box. As your skill grows, you will find more and more that you can literally print right off of your data card at your local photo store or the corner Walgreens. What about those pictures that aren’t good enough to make the cut? No big deal. Delete them.
Whoa! Wait. Not so fast. Photographs capture moments in time. Moments that often can’t be replicated. Don’t be so quick to trash your ‘less than stellar’ images. Take some time to brush up on your post production skills. Go through all of those images that fell through the cracks, or just weren’t good enough to send down to the lab. Find ones that mean something to you and see what you can make out of them. Digital photography blurs the line between photography and digital image creation. Take advantage of that. Let’s take a below average picture and see what we can do with it.

This is a photograph of my daughter and her cousin sharing a “BFF” moment. Not a particularly good shot. Nikon D1x, 105mm, 1/80th sec. ISO 400. The image was shot in the shade on a harshly sunny day, no fill-in flash. All in all, a totally ordinary shot… except for the fact that it’s one of those moment’s that you would like to
remember. Let’s see what we can do to make this something we can set on the piano, and not leave at the bottom of that junk drawer in the kitchen. Yes, THAT junk drawer. I know you have one. Don’t feel bad. I have several.

The exposure could be tweaked a bit, but lets see what we can do about cropping the image for effect, first. Your photography teacher is always yelling, “Bigger is better!”, and “Fill up your frame,” so let’s take that to heart, and see what we can do with that.

Much better composition, but starting to get a bit blurry. If there was any major problem with the Nikon D1x, it was that 5.4 megapixel sensor. This would still make a perfectly good 4 x 6 inch print, one that would look great in that frame that you happened to pick up last week on the end-cap at Target for three bucks.

No big deal if we can’t do too much after this. We can open it up in our image editing program, and see if we can bump up the sharpness just a bit. I happen to use both Photoshop CS3 or Bibble, depending on what I’m trying to do. There are freeware editors available as well. I’ll link to them at the end of the page.
The short version – I opened the image in Photoshop, and created a duplicate layer from the original. I highlighted the duplicate layer and used a high-pass filter to isolate the edges, and then combined the two layers with Photoshop’s blending option. After that, I touched up a few spots, and ended up with this image.
(We’ll go through the Photoshop steps in detail in another post… I promise.) Time spent using Photoshop… under 5 minutes.

There are some flaws, sure, but we did manage to create a nice image for personal use. Now all I have to do is find which junk drawer I put that frame into.

- Jim

Image Editors –
Adobe Photoshop
Bibble
GIMP (Freeware)

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