Photoshopping in Picasa
Photoshop is $700. Picasa is free. You definitely get your moneys worth – but for most of us Picasa is “good enough”. Welcome to my primer on how I can use Picasa in a pinch to clean up portraits at my local camera club shoots.
This is Picasa:
This is some photographer during a test shot. My camera has a few dust spots (or hair) either on the lens or the sensor. The file was shot in JPG but RAW can be modified as well.
Crop using the first option in the “Basic Fixes”. Too much white space on either side of the subject.
Straighten if your photo needs it. Just push the slider left or right. Little explanation is needed:
Red-Eye Reduction: Picasa is pretty good at finding it – but portraits rarely need it when you’re not using on-camera flash.
Retouch: Use the Retouch command to get rid of any dust spots or wall blemishes that detract from the photo. It’s also a god-send for getting rid of acne, scars or even wrinkles. Don’t get carried away though or it’ll start to look like a cover of Cosmo. Click first where you want to get rid of the dust spot. Then click another part of the (clean) wall to clone/retouch. Don’t like freckles? Get rid of those as well. Zoom using the slider at the bottom.
After hitting Apply, you’re now looking at a photograph that can viewed by a client. A few other settings I can play with to give the photo a little more “pop”:
Add Highlights, Fill Light and shadows if you didn’t have the correct camera settings when you took the photo. Definitely something you should correct on-set when you have the lighting, but mistakes happen.
Also if your White-Balance is off, try finding something in the photo that should be white and setting that as your base. Select the Eye-dropper (under the Color Temperature slider) then select something that should be perfectly white. It should correct the colour balance. Otherwise just play with the “Colour Temperature” sliding it to the left or right if your photo looks to warm (orange) or cold (blue). On a portrait, the colour balance should be Flash and rarely am I fiddling with temperature.
Otherwise I don’t touch the Effects menu in Picasa. To each his own though.
Lightning Flashes
Last night at the Meadowvale Photography Club, we opened our collective new purchase – a lighting set consisting of two powerful flashes, two not so strong stands to hold them up plus some odds and ends to make them work.
Almost immediately it became apparent one flash wasn’t working. Carefully going through the manual (not helpful) and trying different ways to set the flash off (using the test button and various cameras which we confirmed worked, swapping out parts) we established the bulb must be shot. It was a great reminder about how even the simplest photo shoot can end in peril with just a minor equipment failure.
Now with even more members than ever, we can have multiple lighting stations and models to shoot. Next month we’ll have Ashley back and hopefully others. Our first studio model shoot of the year!
- Send Andrew ideas for external shoots
- Model shoot for Dec 9th, 2009 at old Meadowvale Townhall
- Send Arun your photos if you haven’t already done so
- Leslie St Spit shoot this Saturday
- Butterfly shoot – but it has to be 7am. Let Andrew know if there’s interest
Accessory 101
No, this isn’t about clothes or fashion. I’m talking about the nifty Asus netbook that I’m using. Pretty much every digital camera has an LCD screen on the back to show the photo you took. The BIG screens these days are about 3”x3”. They’re limited by the camera size, expense and weight but the difference between last generation 2”x2” seems enormous. But what about a 10”x6” screen instead? Impossible? Not with my little netbook.
It’s just not the coolio factor. My netbook works really great. First, it’s light – a mere 2.4 lbs or 1.1kg. My camera and flash might outweigh it. Second – its SD card reader is about 10-17x faster than the one on my desktop. Taking a 5 minute break while on a photo shoot, I could copy them over and show them to the model before they went home… if I wanted to. Third – it runs Picasa or Adobe Elements (barely) should I want to analyze photos while waiting on a train.
Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not perfect. It’s rather small to use as your only computer. But it’s damn close. And at $290USD fit’s not even my most expensive accessory. It’s a $290 netbook with 1GB of ram and 160GB of hard drive space, and it’s a great way to backup your photos. Buying a devoted backup hdd-with-reader-plus-LCD screen seems quaint in comparison.
I still need to colour profile the LCD screen (or figure out any colour casts) to start fixing the white balance/exposure settings on any photos I take, but I’ll get the bugs worked out. I promise.
NewsU.org – Learning for Free
To improve aspects of my photography, I’ve been checking out some of the free courses from NewsU for photojournalism courses to analyse what makes a good photograph. It has been educational – I recognize some of the contest winners (well their photos anyway – Obama running up the stairs for instance) and some photos are just spectacular.
Even when you’ve got the camera in your hands, you still need to look for the one that’ll make the most impact.
DPS Advice
I just read this off of Digital Photography School – http://digital-photography-school.com/do-you-have-too-much-camera-gear
1. Keep a list of what you use and don’t use during a photo shoot.
At the Bovaird photoshoot I used (plus my 50mm and 18-55mm lenses):
a) Reflector + tripod to hold reflector
b) my 55-200mm VR lens
c) SB-400 flash backed off slightly to underexpose + rechargable batteries
At the Fall Colours photoshoot I actually used (though I had tripods, reflectors, monopod, reflector plus my 50mm and 18-55mm lenses):
a) my 55-200mm VR lens
b) SB-400 flash backed off slightly to underexpose + rechargable batteries
2. Push the limits of your existing gear. Good advice.
3. Focus on adding knowledge, not gear, to your camera bag. Better advice.
In: Portrait Photography, Uncategorized
My Favourite Lenses
Ah lens envy. Every photographer has it. Every photographer has another lens they’d like to own, should they be asked. Unfortunately equipment is cost-prohibitive, so most folks can’t afford every one. There are lenses that stretch any budget at $25k each, and weigh too much to be carried around. Camera manufacturers (or sellers like Futureshop and Best Buy) are now providing ’suggested lens kits’ at a reasonable cost, including a short telephoto (55-200mm) and a short zoom (18-55mm) to cover all the bases.
I didn’t get one of those. I bought my lenses in stages, after the ‘need’ presented itself. First the 18-55mm kit lens. Later on a whim, I purchased the 55-200mm telephoto. Not too long ago, I completed my group with a fast 50mm F1.8 for those low light situations. I consider these the basic lens kit that satisfy most of my needs (for now).
Sometimes, cameras come with the 55-200mm lens or something else (18-70mm, 18-105mm or 18-200mm). Though I’d love those other ‘kit’ lenses, at this point they wouldn’t add anything to the focal lengths I already have, nor are they much faster to warrant the extra cost. The recent Nikon addition – the 35mm F1.8 would be great if I didn’t already have the ‘nifty fifty’ 50mm lens or if my camera didn’t have the internal auto-focus motor like the D5000, D3000, D40 or D60.
Some shots are ‘off-limits’ or require flash. I have no awesome fast, long lenses (like a 70-300mm F2.8 for $2,000) and some day I might pick up its slower macro cousin (70-300mm F4-5.6 for $250 or the OS version for $600) when my kid starts organized sports. But until that day comes, I can summarize my needs as: 1) 18-55mm – wide angle shots of landscapes and cityscapes 2) 55-200mm – short telephoto for portraits and unobtrusive photography and 3) 50mm F1.8 – for low light situations or super-sharpness of action (like my daughter in a swing).
All of these will fit nicely in a camera bag without weighing you down or breaking your budget.
Unforgiven
I don’t normally run into confrontations while taking photographs. Most of the time it’s pointed at my daughter who seems mostly oblivious to it. But recently I’ve had to explore the rules and laws in Canada. I was looking to upload a few pictures taken of the Toronto skyline recently to a stock photography site.
Reading the site http://ambientlight.ca/laws.php made it clear that taking photos in any public space is allowed in Canada, however there are special rules governing Toronto. I had to make a few calls around to the Toronto Parks and Toronto Island before I got a straight answer. As long as I wasn’t coming with a ’studio kit’ or taking wedding photos, I was fine. The same photos could have been made in a boat two yards away. I actually suspect I was at the waterline – technically not private or park land, but alas it doesn’t matter.
The point is, know your rights. For non-Canadians I point to http://digital-photography-school.com/im-a-photographer-not-a-terrorist-how-to-shoot-in-public-with-confidence. It was a good read regardless, for those times you’re accosted by security guards and actual cops. I’ve heard more than a few stories of police officers forcing photographers to delete photos or confiscating cell phones in order to remove pictures of arrests and shootings.
Of Birds and Parks
I uploaded my first 18 photos to Fotolia last night and attempted to find my way through the maze of keyword requirements to finalize my submission. They have not, as of yet, been accepted though I’m sure I’ll get feedback soon either way. I noticed that when I searched using my keywords, a rather large selection of types of photos were returned. Somehow, pictures of hummingbirds found there way into ‘conservation park’ or ‘forest’ and I’m clueless on why this occured.
The cynic in me might think that photographers just upload every single dictionary word they can find in order to get their pictures included in every possible search. This is unfortunate. How do I get my pictures of ‘rocks and forests near lake’ to the top of the list? Ken Rockwell’s suggestion that, “if you can’t see why the picture is interesting as a thumbnail, it’s not interesting” is true. Potential buyers will scan through looking no further than the thumbnail.
Clearly this will dictate some of my composition decisions going forward.
Digital Processing – the Work
I’ve avoided taking photos in RAW format for many great reasons. 1) the files are bigger and take forever to copy to the computer 2) JPG is easily shared 3) JPG is quickly displayed by every photo editor known to man 4) there weren’t many free editors/organizers that read in RAW 5) Nikon does a great job of getting the picture right in JPG format if I do an adequate job of photographing…
Google Picasa does read in RAW format but for the D50 NEF – it’s just a little dull. The colours aren’t vibrant. Sometimes the exposure for the RAW is horrid. Picasa does a lot of great things well. It’s great for uploading and sharing to web albums like Flickr and Facebook. The thumbnail display is super fast. It continues to improve the easy editing like retouching (getting rid of skin blemishes, dust spots on the sensor or snot in baby’s noses), red-eye reduction and if I was using JPG entirely, I would never use anything else.
But I got my hands on Photoshop Elements – which I recommend you try the free trial. Picasa has spoiled me on a few things. In Adobe Organizer, the thumbnails are slower, the interface is far less intuitive, and the editor brings my computer to an absolute crawl… However a LOT of my RAW photos that would have died in the recycling bin in Picasa have been completely revived. For absolute vivid control around colour, Adobe’s RAW Converter is top of the line.
So when I’m in the field, and I know that I’m clipping highlights or I know I need a little flexibility when I get the shots home, I’ll shoot RAW and have some lattitude with Adobe Elements to save those few mistakes that I would not have kept before. And for those perfectly exposed, perfectly composed and perfectly shot photos that would have been great even as JPG? Well that’s what the Save As is for.
Two New Things
Contrary to various philosophies of the camera manufacturers, your photography will not improve simply by buying a new camera, lens or flash. If your composition, exposure and subject matter sucked before, it will probably suck after whatever purchase you’ve made. Investment in the craft will push personal improvement far higher than throwing money at it. Even sucky equipment has the ability to make great photographs with a little patience and skill.
What I love about photography is that I keep learning new things about my camera years after I bought it. For instance, almost every new camera out there has ISO speeds of between 100-3200. These ISO speeds are often crappy past 1600 but the camera makers offer them anyway. Ken Rockwell pointed out along with some guy on Flickr that a D50 can do the same thing – sort of. By underexposing an image at ISO 1600 by one or two F-spots, you can work the image once you get it home with the S-curves etc in Photoshop to push or pull the sensor (like they used to push/pull film) to extend the ISO on the D50 from ISO 100-3200. There will be more noise in the image – but that would be true too in the new cameras that offer the ISO 3200 (or 6400+). Taking a ‘free’ version of noise reduction software like Neat Image would improve it further.
Should I ever find myself out in the field without a fast enough shutter speed, this is definitely an option to try.
Second thing I learned: you can set the D50 to PRE for the White Balance. Take a photo (like aiming it at a 18% grey card or something pure white (OR just aim it directly at your light source if it’s not the sun) and from then on, your camera will use that white balance. Great for those lighting situations where you have no idea what kind of light it is and can’t quite seem to get a ‘balance’.
So now my D50 is now taking pictures just like it did before, but now I have no reason or goal to buy something new for the features my D50 already has.