Creative Silence Blog

Archive for the ‘Photo Editing’ Category

In photography, exposure is controlled by a variety of things–the size of the lens opening, the film speed, and the duration the lens remains open taking the picture.  In digital photo editing, we can adjust exposure further, with the Brightness and Contrast controls.

Brightness, as the name implies, is the amount of light in the picture.  The longer the lens was open and the wider the lens aperture, the brighter the resulting picture will be.  Every photo editing program will have a Brightness control.  Changing the brightness setting will adjust the colors of the pictures as if the photo was taken with a wider or narrower aperture.

However, increasing the brightness can cause the picture to look washed out.  This is where Contrast comes in.  Contrast is the range of dark and light in the picture–the spectrum between the darkest and the brightest regions of the picture.  Changing the contrast will make the brights brighter and the darks darker, which will counter-balance the changes made by the Brightness control.  Brightness and contrast are generally used in tandem in most photo editing projects.

In most projects, it’s rare to have a photo that needs overall brightness and contrast adjustments.  What’s more common is to have a picture that needs adjustments to small areas.  For example, a dark cityscape against a bright blue sky, or a portrait with sunlight behind the subject, would likely be ruined by changing the overall brightness and contrast.  These pictures need smaller, focused adjustments.  In the old darkroom days, the only choice the photographer had was to dodge or burn.  With modern photo editing programs, however, he can use a Lasso selection set, and then apply Burn, Dodge, Brightness, Contrast, or even Levels and Curves adjustments, to only those parts of the picture that really need it.

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There are so many different file types to choose from, like RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG.  Which one is right for you?

RAW is the internal file format for many digital cameras.  Photographers like to shoot in RAW format because it doesn’t get any processing in the camera, allowing them to adjust things like white balance and exposure after the picture has been taken.  The main disadvantage of RAW is that it’s proprietary, so every brand is different and not all formats can be read by photo editing software.

JPG (or JPEG) is a compressed format, and one of the most common types used on the Web.  Keep in mind that saving into JPG will cost some of the quality of the picture.  The good news is, in most cases, you can’t tell the difference between the original and the compressed JPG.  If you’re going to email pictures or post them to the Web, this is the format to use.

GIF is a much older format than JPG, with nowhere near the power.  GIFs can only have 256 colors.  However, GIF is a great format for images with large areas that are all the same color.  GIF is best used for logos and line-drawing images.

Think of PNG as a newer, more powerful GIF.  It has many of the features that make GIF useful on the Web, without the 256 color limitation.  PNG is also a “lossless” format, which means you don’t lose quality when you convert your picture to PNG.

TIFF is another lossless format, and one of the most common.  If a digital camera has an option besides RAW or JPG, it will be TIFF.

Photo editing programs will generally have their own format, as well, like PSD for Adobe Photoshop and PSP for Paintshop Pro.  These are great for use with the programs, but not for archiving–if the software world changed, you wouldn’t be able to read your backups anymore.

While Burning and Dodging are listed as tools in most photo editing software, they are digital versions of techniques originally developed by darkroom photographers years ago.

Burning is a trick for getting more detail out of a section of a picture.  The photographer makes his print normally, and then masks off a large section of the print, usually with his hands.  Then, with the light blocked, he adds a bit more exposure time to the print, so that the area that wasn’t masked gets more exposure.  Dodging, on the other hand, involves using a small piece of paper or cardboard to block the light from a section of the photograph.

Burning, then, means adding extra exposure to some element of the picture, while dodging is less exposure.  In general, this is different from the Brightness of a picture because brightness is applied to the entire picture, while burning and dodging are only applied to areas of the picture.

Photoshop, as an example, offers tools for Burning and Dodging.  You can adjust the size of the “brush” and apply it to any part of the image, and the program will lighten or darken the area, just like a classic burn or dodge would have.

Both techniques are used for “balancing out” a picture.  For example, if a landscape or cityscape turns out perfectly, but the sky behind it is overexposed (looking like a big white blob rather than the normal blue and white of sky and clouds), then dodging the sky will reduce the exposure, and hopefully bring the color back down to a normal level.  If the sky exposed in the perfect shade of blue, but the windows are too dark to stand out from the buildings, then burning the windows would help to expose them better, bringing out more detail and clarity.