My grandson was born right around the point where digital cameras first came on the scene. It wasn't long before I went out and purchased what, at the time, was a cutting-edge Kodak digital camera. File size was about two megapixels. It was not a cheap camera by any means although the quality of the photos - no matter what camera was used - was not as good as film in those early days.
The metering system wasn't anything near what they are today and the contrast range was also pretty limited. I took what I saw as a wonderful image one early morning, but it was very disappointing when I got it home on the computer. Perhaps I hadn't metered it properly (shooting straight into the sun is always dicey), but the image was way too dark and nothing like what I had seen.
The photo became a watershed moment in my learning experience with photo editing software. Instead of looking at the photo as a whole and trying to improve it, I attacked the problem by concentrating on levels of tone in the image. In other words, I would work on a smaller part of the image that was a particular level of lightness or darkness. I ended up adjusting eight different levels of tone separately to bring out the detail in the image.
This approach to improving the image is similar to radio and television before the digital age. Today, when you tune into a radio station and it fades in and out, there isn't anything you can do about it. But, in the old days of analog radio (oh, boy!) they had a tuner and a fine tuner. You could tune in the station with the tuner and bring it in more clearly with a gain knob called a fine tuner.
Working to improve a photo is the same idea. You can make one adjustment to a picture's histogram or curve and call it done. It will make a global change to the entire picture and most people let it go at that. BUT, you can also treat the image locally on problem areas and make an okay picture much better. That is what I did here and the final image is more like what I saw that morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment