First I’m going to tell you a word that pro photographers, and serious amateurs, know: chimping. So you’ve just taken a picture and you look at the preview screen. (Who can resist, right?) That’s called chimping. Why? Maybe you didn’t get the shot you wanted. But just maybe it turns out that you got what you were after, or even something better. You get all excited and shout, “Oooh, oooh, oooh!” You sound like a chimpanzee, and you’re chimping like a pro!
You don’t need much help with the latter, but most often what you get is the former. If you use a point-and-shoot camera (P&S), or if you have a big black camera that is set on ‘green box,’ your camera is making adjustments for you, and it doesn’t always get it right. And if you shoot RAW (I always do), then the camera makes no adjustments because you intend to make those adjustments yourself, and the dim picture is a feature, not a bug.
There are a couple more adjustments I can show you another time, and they might make your images pop even more. But today we’re just focusing on the dynamic range.
I’m assuming here that you are starting with a jpg (the file extension from a P&S or green box), that you know how to transfer the pictures to your computer, and that you have or a willing to get a photo editing program. The one that comes with your computer isn’t able to do what I did with the title picture, so you need to find, download, or buy something with a little more capability. For almost everyone, you don’t want to spend a lot of money, because this is just about 0.001% of what the program will do, or less, and unless you want to do some pretty fancy stuff, you probably don’t want to part with some serious cash. I’ll discuss further down in the diary what programs I know about.
I wrote this diary once, then looked online and decided that my 15+ year-old processing software is pretty dated, so I’m starting over. On the other hand, once you’ve spent the money, or downloaded the freeware, you can be assured it will work, like, forever. My programs work exactly as they did 15 years ago, so if you can find an old disc, get it.
(If you need help transferring your picture to your PC or Mac, or laptop if that’s what you have, ask in the comments.) I have no idea how that will work if you’re trying to edit on a tablet, and I’m sure it won’t work on a phone.
First, open your picture in your photo editing program. I have both PhotoShop Elements 9 and its big brother PhotoShop CS5, but I do almost everything in Elements, so that’s what is in the pictures.
Your workspace will look similar to this:
At this point, you absolutely must save this picture with a different name. Otherwise, you’ll eventually click “Save” and overwrite your original picture. Never do that. You may want to go back to it. The different Save options are also under File.
You’ll see the same blow-out effect with sparkles on water. Don’t worry about it; it will add to the drama of the picture.
In the example above, you can see how the bird stands out in a 3-D effect; that’s because OceanDiver’s camera has a somewhat shallow depth of field. How much of the picture you want to be in focus, and how much background blur, is an artistic choice that some cameras will let you make, even at the P&S level.
But if you shoot RAW, you will get a different workspace, both in PhotoShop and in Elements.
What if what you’re working with is a more powerful program, like the real PhotoShop?
PhotoShop Elements 2021 is $69, and available everywhere. And I’ve seen Elements 2020 for $49, and that’s just fine. It’s about 75% of PhotoShop, and probably all you’ll ever need. But really, if you can find an old disc somewhere where they sell old software (or try asking on Freecycle) you can definitely go back as far as Elements 5 and do all of this. Or an old version of PhotoShop, if you have the hard drive space.
There are other programs, although they don’t have the support that Adobe products have, meaning they don’t have a gazillion how-to books or YouTube videos or plug-in software.
GIMP, for instance, is free. It’s disadvantage is that it’s huge, it takes up a lot of space on your hard drive, and it has a steep learning curve without all the extra help. It also works only with the RGB profile and not the CMYK, so it’s not as good for printing.
LightZone has some editing features, and it’s also free, but it works with RAW also, not jpg.
Paint.NET is completely free and does have Levels capabilities, and more editing tools.
You can explore online to see what will work for you. What you don’t want to do is pay a monthly licensing fee, which Adobe charges for a lot of its products, unless you’re a pro and always want the latest.
And here are a few more before/after:
And here are a couple more, courtesy of OceanDiver:
Photo editing won’t fix everything. If the picture is blurry, it’s blurry. If you asked too much of your lens and the subject is too far away, it isn’t going to turn into a close-up. But my secret isn’t a lot of expensive equipment. Yes, I have a big black Canon, but I could only afford a consumer lens, 55-250, which I bought for about $100 refurbished. If you have a P&S, learn its limits, and then see if you can push right up to the edge of those. Most of the pictures I see posted here are fine, they just need to be touched up a tiny, tiny bit. Go for it. I’d really like to see what everyone can do.