Developing a Photography Workflow, the Basics

A Cowboy's Wife — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 04:05:45 +0000

Establishing a work-flow for processing your images can speed the editing up a great deal hence saving you time to do other things you love.

I recommend the first thing you do is back up your photos. Don’t do it later, do it now and I recommend backing up to a DVD or to an external hard drive.

The most obvious thing to do once you’ve downloaded your photos to your computer is delete the ones that are no good. You will have a few, perhaps many not so flattering photos so go through and get rid of the ones that will be too much work to edit. This can include out of focus, poorly exposed, and not so pretty facial expressions. Toss them out and never look back!

Color adjustments come next. This is where you’ll want to check your levels, contrast, saturation, etc. If you don’t know how to do all this manually, simply trying using auto levels & auto contrasts. Many times it can make a significant difference and improve the quality of the photo.

This is the time to do any extra editing you want like blurring, dodging, and burning. After this, you can use sharpen.

Now save your photo. I use Photoshop so I like to save as PSD and JPEG. After you have saved your photo, you can crop or resize to your liking. I always do this after everything else just in case I crop too much or resize too small. I know that I have the original processed and saved so there won’t be any need to panic if I mess up.

Printing to Paper

There are many factors that affect how your image will turn out printed to paper vs. printed to web. It all has to do with RGB, more pixels and other fancy jargon. In a nutshell, the higher resolution images result in higher quality prints. To give you an idea, here’s the recommend resolution for certain print sizes.

• 1 megapixel 640 x 480 4×6
• 1.x megapixel 1280 x 960 4×6
• 2.x megapixel 1600 x 1200 4×6, 5×7, 8×10
• 3.x megapixel 2048 x 1536 4×6, 5×7, 8×10
• 4.x megapixel 2372 x 1804 4×6, 5×7, 8×10
• 5.x megapixel 2560 x 1920 4×6, 5×7, 8×10

Here are the minimum resolutions recommended:

• 4×6–640×480 pixels
• 5×7 –1050×750 pixels
• 8×10–1500×1200 pixels

Not all of this will apply to everyone, but what’s great about establishing a work-flow, is finding out what works for you and what steps you can add or avoid for the process to run smooth. Every photographer is different and once you set up a routine, you’ll be able to backup, edit, manage, save and even print your photos in not time.

Editing Grainy Pictures and Cloning

A Cowboy's Wife — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:15:05 +0000

I recently had a guest post on my food blog from Maternal Spark. Well, actually it’s a republished post of Butterfly Cupcakes with a little photo editing. I’m getting pickier about the photos that go on my food blog and not that hers were bad but they were a bit grainy and there was a distraction.

With this simple tutorial, you’ll be able to fix those grainy pictures and use the clone stamp. First, the grainy stuff is called noise. This is usually caused by using a high ISO which is whole nuther topic to get into and we won’t do that today;) The clone stamp does just what it says. It will clone what you have selected. I will be using the FREE paint.net program because I know that most of you probably can’t afford software like Adobe Photoshop. Hell, I can’t even afford it. It was given to me! But if you do find some awesome budget software somewhere, please do share!

With this cute little butterfly cupcake picture, I needed to reduce the noise so that it wasn’t so grainy and I wanted to get rid of that line because it distracts from the cupcake itself. I also cropped it closer to the cupcake so that you focus on the cupcake and not the napkin or plate so much.

Here’s the orginal photo:

First, let’s reduce the noise and get rid of the grain. After having your photo opened up in paint.net, you’re going to click on:

* EFFECTS, NOISE, REDUCE NOISE

Now some numbers will come and you can change it to suit your liking. I don’t mess with it, I leave it at default because I’m lazy and hit OK.

Here is the side by side comparison of what kind of impact reducing the noise makes. Can you tell the difference? The right side has had the noise reduced.

Okay, so you see that horizontal line? It aggravates me and takes away from this adorable little cupcake so I’m gonna get rid of it! This is where the CLONE stamp comes in. You click on the little stamp first. Then you find the part of the picture that you want to use to cover up that line. I want it to match the wood so I’m going to clone as close to the line as possible to get a perfect match. I do this all the way to the end. I don’t just click one time and use the same color all the way because the wood color doesn’t match all the way across.

You are going to hold down the CTRL key while you left click on the part you want to clone.
Then you are going to let go of the CTRL key and just do a regular left click over the line or part you want to camouflage.

This is what it should look like.

I did this all the way across the photo and for those small in between spots, I zoomed to make it easier. That’s all there is to it! It’s very easy to do and here is the final result.

Here they are side by side. I cropped, reduced the noise, and cloned a little to get that line out of there.

A Cowboy's Wife » photo editing

Developing a Photography Workflow, the Basics

Editing Grainy Pictures and Cloning