The More You Gimp
Photo editing is fun, just not as fun as doing it with film, but here is what I did to make it awesome.
So, we start with a pleasant photo of a nice scene, however even at ISO 80 on a CCD there is noise on the image, so we strip the noise out with neatimage!
Oh look, here is neatimage, make sure you download yourself a copy, it is free for personal use. also make sure you download the noise profile for your camera, people make them and upload them, so chances are yours is already up there.
So now I’m left with this. not that you’d be able to tell on facebook, but now there isn’t any noise in the photo. So now we move on to play with the photo to make it look better.
The common problem with most photos is that cameras can only see 7 stops of light, which means eiither you lose the shadows or you lose your highlights, this is a problem, because the human eye can detect 14 stops of light and that leaves a lot to be desired. As I learned yesterday, newer cameras will make multiple exposures to catch both ends of the field and put them back together, which if you really want to know, makes me grow a rubbery one inside. However we have to do this the “hard way” digitally. focus on an area you want to change the overall contrast and balance of, such as the clouds with your trusty wand, and copy it to a new layer. you can do this in either the gimp (free) or photoshop (annoying).
Now you must open the color menu and find your levels option, I prefer to work with all of my colors at once at first that way I can get a good grasp on the required image brightness and contrast without washing the image out or making it look like a TV floating across my bedroom at night with no probable cause.
As you can see there are a lot of gaps in the histogram, if we were dealing with the whole image, which is what I usually do unless the “Skye” is being a bitch to handle. I usually bring up the left scroller either to the beginning or partially through the lower end of the photo to get the areas I want black, black. and then I bring the right scroller back to where I want what should be white, white. Then if the overall contrast of the image still seems a little without depth, which it almost always does, I then adjust the center scroller to the right, but you have a mind of your own and will ruin your photo without my help.
when done, you can open up levels again and tweak individual color layers if you so desire. in this case I felt that the feeling of the road’s pinkness was lost, so I bumped up the contrast by 10% of the red value to bring it back, without making everything else which I finally got looking rich and alive… pink…. of course you probably want to make sure you’re no longer playing with your cloud layer.
and then finally you will be left with an image that looks like this. If you are saying, it looks no fucking different to me, then you have no appreciation for color, and should de-friend me so I don’t have to do it for you. Otherwise you can see it brings a bit more joy to the photo you took. Also, it makes people think you are Professional Photographer, even though you are probably just a poser. Just a tip from a Professional.
