How to turn your rough diamond photos into gemstones

You take your camera to your child's cricket because it's an important game and it would be lovely having a photo of the team triumphing on the day. The game is tense but suddenly all comes good and magically you are in the right spot at the right time, you take the photo and can't wait to get home to print it and send it to the other parents.

You get home and disaster - instead of a gem, your photo is a dud. Or is it?  To explain how to get the best of your photos,  this article will show what had to be done to a cricket photo to make it a 'keeper'.

Fixing your photos can be done in a variety of programs including Photoshop Elements, Picasa and iphoto. Whatever your chosen application, fixing photos is an easy five step process.

1. Decide what's important and crop out what's not.
2. Delete distractions from the cropped image
3. Fix the scene's white balance and colour
4. Fix the scene's brightness.
5. Sharpen the image

As evidenced below, this approach can be applied to any photo, from landscapes to group photos:

A Group photo before cropping, adjusting white balance and colour, brightening and sharpening 

A Group photo after cropping, adjusting white balance and colour, brightening and sharpening 

A landscape before cropping, adjusting white balance and colour, brightening and sharpening

A landscape after cropping, adjusting white balance and colour, brightening and sharpening 

Hopefully the above examples have convinced you that miracles can be achieved with your photos. So to help you with your own images, I'll explain how I have applied the five step process to improve a cricket photo.

Untouched image

Step 1: Crop the image  

 In the above photo the wicket keeper has caught out the batsman but you would never see this unless you peered closely because the image doesn't draw your attention to the wicket keeper. This is because there is too much irrelevant information in the photo such as the bare earth in the foreground, the white cone in the left middle ground, the blue bag in the right background and the cars in the left background. To remove these distractions you need to use the 'crop' tool in your chosen application which will result in the following image

 

Cropped image

Step 2:  Delete distractions from the cropped image 

Thanks to your cropping, you no longer see blue bags, cars and bare earth so you ending up seeing a lot more of the wicket keeper. You could obsessively delete anything other than the wicket keeper, beginning with the mother in the pink sweater sitting in the chair but sometimes background items give the image context. What doesn't, in my view, is the white cone to the right of the bowler so I'll delete it using the 'healing' or 'clone brush. Deleting this small object will make an enormous difference to how the viewer perceives the photo because the eye tends to go to the brighter parts of a photo and not in this photo automatically to the wicket keeper whose face is dark due to  his complexion and his helmet shading his face. 

Cropped image with local healing to remove white cone

Step 3:   Fix the scene's white balance and colour

The photo is drab because it was taken on an overcast day so colours look dull. 

To make it more interesting, you need to fix the white balance of the photo. White balance  is the process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo.  Proper camera white balance has to take into account the "color temperature" of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light.  Our eyes are very good at judging what is white under different light sources, however digital cameras often have great difficulty with this.

 To fix white balance, with the 'white balance' tool click on a neutral colour. In this photo, clicking onto the white shirt of the bowler works wonders as demonstrated below.

Cropped image with local healing to remove white cone and white balanced.

At this stage you should also consider the overall colour of the photo - increasing the saturation will give the photo more 'kick' as evidenced in the photo below.

Cropped image with local healing to remove white cone, white balanced and increased colour saturation.

Step 4:  Fix the scene's brightness

The photo still looks drab because of the flat lighting so you should play with the 'exposure', 'brightness' and 'contrast' settings (in that order) until the photo becomes punchy. There is no right or wrong way to do this, just small adjustments until the image looks better and remember, there is only so much you can achieve with a photo (you cannot turn night into day).

Cropped image with local healing to remove white cone, white balanced, increased colour saturation and adjusted brightness.

If your application has localised adjustments, you want to brighten the cricket ball and the wicket keeper's face to make the viewer's eye go to them (remember the eye prefers brighter parts of the photo and the wicket keeper and the cricket ball are having to compete with the white cricket shirts, trousers, socks and shoes. 

Cropped image with local healing to remove white cone, white balanced, increased colour saturation, adjusted brightness and localised brightness on cricket ball and wicket keeper's face.

Step 5:  Sharpen the image

The final step is to sharpen the image - too little and the image will be soft or 'mushy', too much and the image will be pixellated or 'scratchy'.

Cropped image with local healing to remove white cone, white balanced, increased colour saturation, adjusted brightness, localised brightness on cricket ball and wicket keeper's face and sharpened.

In conclusion, with a little patience, you can turn rough diamonds into gemstones following the five step process above.

Using your DSLR beyond the P mode - Introduction - Part 1 of 4 part article

You bought your DSLR because you wanted more than a point and shoot camera but faced with a plethora of options on the camera’s command dial (A, P, M, S......) and wanting to play safe for important photos, you opt for the P or Program mode.

But this irks you as the camera sometimes gets it wrong and you never quite know when a great shot will turn into a blurred or out-of-focus disaster.

So what to do? Should you have bought a more expensive camera that presumably has a more reliable P mode? No - the answer is to transfer decisions from the camera to you and this four part series of articles will  explain how to make this transfer process as painless as possible.

First of all, what is the P mode? Your camera is blind to the world and has to make a lot of assumptions about it including how much light is out there, where to focus, how fast your subject is moving and the ideal depth of field (or how much in front and behind your subject should be in focus e.g. 2 metres in front and behind the subject or. as much as possible). Switching your camera to P mode means the camera has to make the best ‘guestimate’ it can for all these unknowns.

Why does the amount of light matter to your camera? Think of your own eyelids and how each of your eyes has an iris. When it’s a very sunny day you tend to squint and your irises expand to protect your retinas. Conversely, in a gloomy room, you open your eyelids as wide as possible and your irises contract.

Your eyes irises and eyelids vary the amount of light because your retinas like a certain amount of light to register information - too little light and your eyes only see limited information, too much light and your retinas are overloaded and you see nothing. Your camera’s sensor is the monocular equivalent of your retinas - the place where information about light is registered, and just like your retinas, the DSLR’s sensor likes an ideal quantity of light. Unlike your eyes, your camera has no eyelid or iris to regulate the quantity of light. Instead the camera controls light by varying the shutter speed and aperture.

Two new terms, shutter speed and aperture, deserve an explanation. Think of a shutter as a primitive eyelid for your camera, primitive in that the shutter is either open or closed and cannot be anything in-between. When you take a photo, the shutter temporarily retracts so light can come through the lens and register on your camera’s sensor. The longer the shutter retracts, the more light hits the sensor. In a bright room, you only want the shutter to retract for a short time or the sensor will be overloaded. In a dark room, you want the shutter to retract for much longer to give your camera’s sensor enough time to register the far dimmer light. The typical shutter speed is 1/125th sec which means the shutter temporarily retracts for a tiny fraction of a second but most DSLRs' shutter speed ranges from 30 seconds to 1/4000th of a second. A later article in this series will later explain why you would want to vary shutter speed.

Now you know what a shutter does, where does aperture fit in? The aperture is the iris of your camera. It is physically part of your camera’s lens, it is usually octagonal and it restricts light by expanding and contracting.

Unlike an iris, an aperture has a ratings system e.g. f5.6, f8, f11. What does this mean? The ‘f stop’ rating simply explains how much light is let in by the aperture using a scale where f2 lets twice as much light as f4 as f5.6 lets twice as much light as f8 which lets in twice as much light as f11.... This is a confusing scale - just remember, the smaller the aperture (e.g. f4 instead of f 11), the more light is let in.

In summary, a DSLR controls how much light registers on the camera’s sensor by varying the size of the aperture and by varying the time the shutter retracts. It stands to reason that different combinations of shutter speed and aperture will result in the same amount of light reaching the sensor.

For example, if your sensor needs a shutter speed of 2 seconds and an aperture of f8, if you double the shutter speed to 4 seconds (which will let twice as much light in), then you need to change the aperture from f8 to f11 in order to halve the amount of light let in by the shutter.

Before you worry about what combination of shutter and aperture to use, you need to work out how much light is required by your DSLR’s sensor. Cameras have built in light meters to measure the prevailing light condition but they have to make an assumption about how much light is being reflected from the objects you want to photograph. Why? The camera’s light meter measures light that is being reflected from your choice of subject and the general environment around your subject. However, the camera’s light meter cannot know the reflectivity of your subject matter so it has to assume that overall, your subject reflects as much light as a light grey (known as “18% gray”)  piece of paper and this assumption works for the majority of subjects.

To understand why this assumption isn’t always appropriate, imagine three tennis balls, one is white, one is grey and one is black.

Let’s assume the white ball is three times as bright as the black ball. In other words, the white tennis ball reflects three times as much light as the black ball. Now let’s imagine what your DSLR assumes when you aim your camera at the white tennis ball. Does your camera assume it is a black tennis ball in a very bright room, a white tennis ball in a very dark room or a light grey tennis ball in average lighting.? Faced with these three options, your camera assumes the tennis ball is light grey, whether it is in fact white, black or grey.

In order to make a white tennis ball a grey tennis ball photo, your camera will underexpose the photo i.e. it will speed up the shutter speed from say 2 seconds, to 1 second so that the sensor is only exposed for half the time it should be.

In order to make a black tennis ball a grey tennis ball photo, your camera will overexpose the photo i.e. it will slow down the shutter speed from say 2 seconds, to 4 seconds so that the sensor is exposed for twice the time it should be.

If this is all a bit too theoretical, think about photos you have taken that were incorrectly exposed. A classic example is snow - instead of pristine white landscapes, your pictures have dull ‘sooty’ snow because your camera didn’t know that the scene’s overall reflectivity wasn’t light grey but much brighter so it exposed the focus to make your snow light grey!.

The next article will explain how to choose the ideal combination of shutter speed and aperture.