Digital Photography

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Digital manipulation of images can be fun, but can also be a big pain in the ass. I have over a thousand photos taken with my Olympus digital camera...trying to sort them AND clean them up is really taking me a long time. Want to see the work involved?

Digital imaging:
Digital manipulation of images can be fun, but can also be a big pain in the ass. I have over a thousand photos that I have taken with my Olympus digital camera...trying to sort them AND clean them up is taking lots of time and patience. Most people just resize and crop their images and then post their pictures online. I tell you...you owe it to yourself to spend a little time to tweak your images.

Those of you who own digital cameras are probably asking "why bother?" Well...digital image manipulation isn't always about cutting your friend's face and sticking it onto a supermodel's body. Sometimes its about the subtle tweaks that are needed to make an image "sizzle". Take for instance this pretty standard picture that I took in the interior of BC with my Olympus D-360L Digital camera.

Ok big deal...nice photo, but the image isn't really "alive". It doesn't seem to have that sizzle I think I would have, if I had taken this same shot with Fuji Velvia film in my Nikon SLR. To take this picture further, I need to modify it with software such as Photoshop.

Ok much better. So what did I do here? Well I didn't do anything really drastic--just simple adjustments. First I had to bump up the saturation to make the colours jump out, and then I bumped up the contrast. Sharpened a little and now you have the final product.

Hmm that was fun. Lets do another one. Even pictures that seem pretty saturated in the beginning can almost always be improved. Take a look at this shot I took of a condo in Port Moody, BC.

I took this photo near sunset, and I was disappointed with the digital capture because the lightning isn't as dramatic as it was that night. Well lets run it through the software adjustments...

Ahh...much better. Well those were two sunny days, how about overcast days? Well, even overcast day photos can be tweaked for more punch.

Tweak the saturation and hue a little and presto you get richer greens. Sharpen it up a little and you got this baby. Now considering I have over 1000 pictures, doing this to each one(even the select few that I like) would take forever. It is time consuming, but certainly worth the effort.

Posted by Dave at October 09, 2000 01:07 PM