Digital photography - Image editing tips.It is impossible, in this day and age, to ignore this aspect of modern photography whether dealing with scanned or straight digital images. In the early days the main use of this facility was merely to improve or “enhance” your image to produce a more pleasing hard copy “photograph”. The disadvantage of slide photography was always that the slide was the slide was the slide and if you got it wrong you were, to all intents and purposes, stuck with it. Now, however, you can even have digital images, scanned or otherwise, reconverted to slide so there is now an opportunity to “enhance” some of those slides that, at the time, were lacking in some respect. This is especially useful for anyone who is a user of slides or giver of old style Slideshows as you can now upgrade your presentations without having to switch to digital projection with all that entails. The above mentioned disadvantage of slide photography was, however, not all one sided. Knowing that you could do little to alter your final slide image was tremendous incentive to make sure that you got it right in the first place. Yes, shutter speed and aperture variations could be covered by bracketing, but composition, cropping or removal of unwanted objects were all but impossible to remedy. The danger of today’s photography is that it can all too easily include an element of “never mind I can put that right in Photoshop” and that can lead to sloppy work. Yes, you should certainly use and consider all the tools at your disposal, including subsequent image editing possibilities, when taking a shot but try to avoid letting future enhancing potential lead to rushed and careless photography. Remember it is far easier to edit a good image than an “iffy” one. Which leads on to what, for me, has become the Boogeyman of modern photography and that is the amount of computer time involved. It is no longer just about taking pictures. Today cameras and computers seem to go hand in glove. It was bad enough at one time when you seemed to spend one day a week taking your shots and then six days a week in the office trying to sell them. Now it seems as though you spend the same one day a week taking pictures but now followed by seven days of editing and then the same six days, or more, in the office trying to sell what you have produced. The world’s going to the dogs! Still on the subject of time there is another “carrot” that I often hear offered and that is to the effect that “at least you can check and delete your mistakes as you go”, as if this takes any effort and skill that you may lay claim to out of the equation. This is blatantly misleading, to be polite, and a “crock of something else” to be realistic. If you, in fact, try this “as you go”, the first reality that you come up against is that, unless you are totally different to everyone else in your approach, you will end up taking vastly more shots in digital than you ever would have done with film. Because of this, and the sometimes frantic nature of photographing highly motile Wildlife subjects, there is often little or no time during actual shooting to do more than cast a quick glance at a histogram to monitor your exposure values. This means that any checking and deleting in the field will have to be done after the action is over and, by that time, you are like to have a sizeable number of shots to look at. If you are going to check them in any great detail then, apart from the potential waste of valuable shooting time, you will need a bag of spare batteries. Additionally, with field editing, you will come up against a second harsh reality and that is that the image portrayal on your camera back or storage unit is not good enough to justify making irreversible decisions to delete anything other than the most outrageous and obvious of “cock ups”. If there is a shortage of shade, or an abundance of sun, you are likely to scarce be able to see your image display anyway. Best to get a few extra memory cards and leave your deleting till you can get home and check things out on your computer where at least you can see what you are doing! This, of course, leads on to the Boogeyman I mentioned above – the computer time involved. This is exacerbated by two principal factors. The first is that you now have a superabundance of images to edit because of the increased number of shots you have taken. The second is in actually deciding exactly what to get rid of. With slides, in the days before “in house” scanning and enhancing became a practical proposition, it was relatively straightforward. If the slide wasn’t right then it was wrong, and that was often the end of it. Now, however, you will find it much more difficult to decide. Firstly there will be the obvious discards – like your shot of the perch where a stunning dragonfly was when you started to press the shutter release but wasn’t by the time it triggered, and glaring and obvious exposure and movement problems. These are easily dealt with and, in practice, you will probably surprise yourself by how few of these there are. Once you have achieved a reasonable degree of proficiency the numbers of out and out horrors that you take are often quite small. Equally easy to deal with are those shots destined to become Front Page or Centre Spread of the “National Geographic” where that innate expertise, that you have long kept hidden from the world under a proverbial bushel, has finally blossomed forth – surely as a sign of things to come! Unfortunately the reality is that there won’t be many of these either but those that there are can be immediately filed away for later attention – if you can bear to wait that long! In between these two extremes, however, is a huge grey area. Gone are the days of the clear cut decision making that pertained in the days of film when you could either use it or not as the case may be. Software programmes now are so comprehensive that many slightly lacklustre shots can be salvaged and turned into something quite worthwhile. This is especially so if you are only after 6 x 4 or 7 x 5 prints at which size many minor faults are apparent to only the most discerning eye. Even these shots are not too time consuming at this stage, as you quickly become proficient at recognising them and can file them accordingly. No, the headache is all the rest. With the virtually unlimited potential of what you can do to an image in any half decent enhancement programme you will find that an incredible number of your shots will contain at least one, if not more, redeeming features that “just might” be useful at some future date. The ostensibly easy answer to this might seem to be to hang on to them all just in case you one day want to use “that top left-hand corner!” However there’s no such thing as a free lunch because now you have to decide where and how to store all these “maybe’s” so they don’t clutter up your workbench. You can hardly store them in your main computer otherwise, if you are a prolific picture taker, it will soon become full – no matter how much room there seemed to be when you bought it! Spare hard drives are now a viable option and probably offer the easiest retrieval or, of course, you can burn the images to disc. If, like me, you are a bit of a magpie, then you will have to come up with a system that suits your own particular circumstances. Whichever storage route you decide to go, do give it careful thought because, whatever initial decision you make, with all its potentially inherent pitfalls, you are likely to have to live with it for years to come and so it will pay to get it right, or as near right as possible, in the first place. Image storage on overseas trips, in particular, can be a headache. I download images onto an Epson 40 gig storage unit at the end of every day’s shooting and make sure that I have enough memory cards to get me through even the most successful of days without having to delete along the way. That’s fine as far as it goes but I shoot RAW and JPEG simultaneously and, on my camera settings, this gives me roughly 40 images per GIG or, in effect, about the same as one roll of film would have done. This puts my storage unit capacity at the equivalent of about 40 rolls of film. Not a lot on a decent trip, especially in view of the increased number of shots I now, in keeping with most other digital photographers, seem to be taking. Whilst I am not always in reach of mains electricity nevertheless, in practice, on most trips, then at least every few days some form of civilisation rears its head so I can make a beeline for the nearest socket. I am loathe to have to carry a laptop with me for downloading or disc cutting as, apart from its size and weight, it, and of course my storage unit and cameras, are very “nickable gear” in some locations. This is a risk that is sometimes unavoidable if you want to be where the action is and, to minimise its threat, I try to stick to gear that I can carry on my person. I usually wear two lightweight camera jackets giving me an inordinate number of pockets to play with. If you have a laptop with you then, in reality, it usually gets left at whatever your base is during the day due to the impracticality of having to shin up trees and clamber down gullies with it and the rest of your equipment. This unattended period is when it is most likely to “get took” with “walkabout fever”. I have partially overcome this problem by buying a disc cutting gadget that fits in my pocket and cuts a disc from a memory card. It is both mains and battery operated and enables me to cut discs regularly. I normally make two copies, one to be mailed back to the U.K. at the earliest opportunity and the other to stay with me. It is really just a “belt and braces” option in an attempt to minimise the potential loss of my work. My theory is, without being too dramatic, that even in countries where you can be relieved of your equipment at gunpoint, and there seem to be an increasing number of these, then there is always a chance of at least saving or getting your images out one way or the other. |
