Dino Saga 080106 _ More Photo Editing | FerrariChat

Dino Saga 080106 _ More Photo Editing

Discussion in 'Corbani's Corner' started by John Corbani, Jan 4, 2008.

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  1. John Corbani

    John Corbani Formula 3
    Honorary Owner

    May 5, 2005
    1,153
    Santa Barbara, CA
    Full Name:
    John Corbani
    #1 John Corbani, Jan 4, 2008
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 7, 2017
    Dino Saga 080106 _ More Photo Editing

    Last week was Light. Now to Shape. No matter how hard you try, a handheld shot is likely to be tilted. When you try to fit that shot into a large rectangular frame, verticals should be vertical or obviously tilted for dramatic effect. You have to be careful in distinguishing tilt from perspective distortion. Tilt is checked at the center of the picture, direct from the camera, before any cropping. Horizon should be horizontal, Telephone poles and building corners should be vertical. Use Rotation first.

    Now you want to look at Perspective. Building details near the edges of the picture are the critical features. If the camera was not exactly level, edges will converge/diverge. If this will be a problem, fix it now, before cropping. You can squeeze or expand either top or bottom. If the correction needed is large, squeeze one and open the other. Keeps proportions better. Same technique if problem is horizontal.

    Now you can Crop to final frame. You are still working at camera resolution so you have to be able to hit aspect ratio right on. I made a little chart, H and V, every 100H. 4 x 3 ratio. Automatic with a Spreadsheet. Taped it to my monitor.

    At this point you can play with Color, Contrast and Brightness. You are getting close now and the only real editing steps left are clean-ups. There is always a stray leg, a lens flare, a pot hole, graffiti in the background. There is always some spot in the picture with the right color and texture to cover up the problem. Clone that area to fix the bad area. If edges are involved, set donor mark on the edge. Magic. No one will ever know.

    During all this you have been zooming in and out, working up to 4x and then coming back to 1/4X, full frame. Details are really clear at high resolution and pretty lost at full frame. You are going to have the picture displayed at Internet resolution, 800 pixels wide. Typical monitor resolution is 1024 pixels wide. If you have higher resolution, that’s fine but you will get a smaller picture. 800 pixels, no matter what size the monitor pixels are.

    When you reduce your shot, lots of detail is dumped. Sharp edges are reduced to a soft grey band. You don’t notice this when editing but the folks who see the final shot can’t zoom in to admire the detail. You can’t add the detail back but you can Sharpen up the edges. This brings out all the detail that remains and the final picture looks better than it did when you were editing. You have to use your judgment as to how much Sharpening is enough so you need a tool that is flexible. Rob limits the size of .jpg files to 293 Kbytes. Sharper pictures are larger pictures. If you bump the limit you will have to selectively Sharpen or Blur. Large areas of gravel or sunlit leaves are size problem areas and are generally not critical. Blur them gently, save the file again and see what you get. Turns out that Rob’s limit is generous. I have only busted the limit once and that was by 2 Kbytes. Blurred some bushes. If you don’t fix, FChat will not accept your upload.

    Hope to see lots more pictures, great ones, in the New Year. Plan to do my share!

    John
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