Category: Post Production

Free noise reduction plugin for the GIMP

By John Watson
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GREYCstoration pluginI’ve been using the GIMP image editor (also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program) (also known as the wonderful, open source, free photo editor with the awful name) a lot lately. Version 2.4.2. I highly recommend a second look if you haven’t tried it recently. The newest version has vastly improved controls for cropping and selections, a foreground selection tool, a healing tool, and better brush management among other enhancements.

But one thing my stock GIMP install didn’t have was a decent noise removal filter. That is, until I downloaded and installed the GREYCstoration plugin. Installing it is as simple as downloading and dropping the plugin into the GIMP plugins directory. Restart GIMP and you’ll find a new menu under Filters | Enhance | GREYCstoration.

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Quick Fix for Cluttered Backgrounds

By Elizabeth West
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Despite all that has been written about keeping the background of your photos simple, that goal is not always achievable. Sometimes your subject is in a place with a busy background everywhere. Or perhaps the subject is doing something that you don’t want to interrupt by walking around the person or requesting that she or he move to a different location.

I have found a very quick solution for such cases. Take the picture you want and then work on the background in Photoshop or another image editing program. First, I crop such images to remove part of the background. That alone makes the background somewhat less intrusive. But often I don’t want to eliminate it entirely; I merely want to de-emphasize it. One quick fix is first to blur the background slightly and then to adjust the saturation of both background and subject.

My brother PeteRecently, my brother came to visit. He and another friend of mine had an animated conversation in my kitchen. These were two very large guys and their expansive gestures and expressions really captured my interest. I grabbed a camera and took a whole series of pictures of them holding their conversation in my cluttered kitchen.

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De-clutter Your ‘pictures’ Folder.

By Ray Davis
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As part of a Christmas present I recently found myself spending a sizable chunk of my evening searching through seemingly endless folders on my laptop trying to find photographs of a friend’s son. In the end I just downloaded the photos from my Flickr account. My computer filing system is a mess, to say the least!

For those of you out there who may be similarly organisationally-challenged here is a brief guide to a simple work flow to help prevent the image chaos I’ve ended up with. It’s going to be my New Year’s resolution to try and stop just dumping DCIM folders onto my desktop and actually implement something like this!

1. Edit as you download.This requires a little bit of brutal honesty towards your photographs. The idea is to get rid of the shots you are never going to look at again before they even begin to take up space on your desktop. Keep photos of family and friends (even the technically bad shots might prove useful for blackmail in the future!) but be selective about other shots. Ask yourself if you aready have a better shot of the same view/landmark/object.

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Photo book buying guide

By Ray Davis
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Last year I worked for a family with two wonderful children and when I left I wanted to make a photo book for them with some of the hundreds of photos I’d taken during the year. Well, things got chaotic as I packed up my life to move 3, 429 miles across the country, and in the end I simply didn’t have time to chose the photos, upload them to a suitable website, order the book, and wait for it to be delivered.

The idea came back into my head recently as I was thinking about Christmas gifts and this time I was just about organised enough to pull it off. But, man are there a lot of website offering photo books out there! So for those of you who might be looking for a quick comparison of prices here’s the little table I made while I was searching for the best deal.

Company

Book Size

Cost

Shipping

Other Info

Shutterfly

12×12

$54.99
for 20 pages

$1.50/extra page

$9.99

25% off
extra books if you

order more than one.

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Black & White Is the Key to Better Color

By Michael Fletcher
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Lately, I’ve found a great way to use black and white to improve my color photographs. So, you say, that doesn’t make any sense, right? Well, I understand your confusion, but it’s really quite simple. What I mean by this, is you can convert your photo temporarily to black and white and perform some editing to make your photographs more appealing in color.

sunbathing.jpg

This is a photo I took at Hanauma Bay in Oahu of a lady sunbathing. It’s a nice photo. I’m actually fairly happy with how it turned out. I had taken it a couple of years ago, so I though I’d try reworking it using my black and white trick.

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Learning Photoshop

By Elizabeth West
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For more than a year, Photoshop was the bane of my photographic world. I wanted to learn it, but each time I tried, I came away feeling frazzled, inept, and not too bright. I just wanted to master the basics. Perhaps I could learn to remove small distractions from an image or brighten a dark spot. For example, I took a picture of a couple with their dog, and an upturned chair in the background made it appear as if the dog had horns.

Picture before PhotoshopPicture before Photoshop
Many of my friends could use this program, so I began with optimism. First, I took a class. The instructor cheerfully zipped though his list of topics, while I watched, listened, took notes, and tried to follow the steps on my laptop. That didn’t work, though, because while I took notes, I missed details, and while I was trying to find a tool or command, he was often moving on the next topic. I finished the class but recognized that I needed to find another way to learn the program.

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Converting Film Negatives to Digital with ScanDigital.com

By John Watson
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NegativesIf you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got a shoebox (or maybe even a slightly more elaborate storage system) full of old negatives from your film days. I’ve been casually thinking about scanning some of my old negatives and especially the negatives from my wedding to preserve them. Negatives can be stored for decades but I don’t store mine in anything near ideal conditions. In theory, digital images can be stored forever (assuming you’ve got a good backup process in place… you do backup your files, don’t you?)

The trouble with scanning negatives is that it’s cumbersome and, if you care about the quality, the equipment can be quite expensive. Your average consumer-grade desktop scanner with negative scanning unit will do in a pinch but it won’t match anything near the quality or speed of a dedicated negative scanning machine. And you’ve still got to deal with dust and scratches on the negatives which must be cleaned and inspected and… well, you get the idea. It’s a pain.

So I was pleased to hear about a service called ScanDigital.com (www.scandigital.com) which aims to takes all of the hassle and pain out negative scanning.

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Photo enhancement going too far?

By John Watson
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Before and afterThe Telegraph UK has an interesting article talking about how everyone from the kid next door to Hollywood celebrities are getting work done on their photographs.

The manipulation of photos is a given in the image-is-everything world of celebrity. Earlier this week, the Duchess of York appeared in Italian Vogue. With a tiny waist, sculptured cheekbones and a wrinkle-free face, she bore no relation to the frumpy Fergie who looked every one of her 47 years when papped out jogging recently.

The author theorizes that social networking services like Facebook are partially responsible. That users of those services want to look as attractive as possible to other members and that they are willing to pay to do so.

Personally I have retouched portraits of clients, friends and family. I think it’s possible to make flattering alterations without being false. Technique, camera angle, lighting, 12 megapixel clarity and a dozen other factors all contribute to images that may be technically “true” but neglect the fact that our eyes and brain don’t work that way. That human vision is colored by memory and attention and feeling. In a real sense, altering a photo to reflect that is more real than real,

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Anatomy of a photo edit: Our love is all of God’s money

By John Watson
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Our love is all of God's moneyI think that post-processing is an integral part of photography whether you are processing your own black and white prints in a smelly darkroom or using Photoshop. As my abilities as a photographer have improved over the years, I’ve found it more and more likely that I will shoot a photo with a particular final look in mind. That was the case when I shot this photo recently so I thought I’d share my editing process with you. If you like this article, you may also like my previous Anatomy of a photo edit: Ready in 3 minutes.

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Patches for Pictures

By Elizabeth West
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Recently I read an article about two new tools that are being developed to help digital photographers remove items from their images. Suppose you had taken picture of a great small town main street, but when saw the image you realized that three parked cars obscured the view and just looked messy. If only you could remove them! However, if you did, you would be left with a void.

Apparently, you are not alone. At least two teams are trying to solve this problem. One is developing a scene-completion algorithm that searches for a patch for your picture. It quickly scans thought a database of millions of images on Flickr, looking for images of the same subject, taken from the same position, with the light falling from the same direction. The algorithm narrows down all the choices first to 200 and finally to 20 or so. Ultimately, user are given a choice and select the one that looks best to them.

Another team is trying to create a library of clip art, taken from the Label Me library of images. This library could supply patches for missing picture parts.

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