Stephen Ingraham (who?)
the unofficial site for birders and digiscopers using Zeiss equipment.
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Post Processing for Digiscopers Part of the magic of digital photography is that the file that comes out of your camera is more like a negative than it is like a print. With some relatively inexpensive (even free) software, you can adjust and enhance your images in ways old-fashioned “dark-room” photographers could only dream of, and that make “slide film” traditionalist shudder.
Ethical Considerations: Let me say upfront that there are those who feel that “enhancement” should be kept to a minimum, and some who feel that enhancement of any kind is "cheating". Most of these folks don’t object to cropping and resizing, and maybe a little sharpening, and even a little exposure adjustment…but anything beyond that is, at least as they see it, "misleading", if not downright "dishonest". My own attitude is that the final image should be true to the subject and to the situation. If adjustments are need to recapture what you actually saw, or to overcome a technical limitation, then I can't see how they do any harm. If adjustments are made to show something you didn’t see, and would be unlikely to see, then you should probably give the image a name that indicates that it has been manipulated for effect. I plan to cover all the basic image adjustments you might make: exposure, color, contrast, sharpening, saturation, cropping, and resizing. If enhancements are made, and by that I mean changes which affect the actual content of the image…adding elements that weren’t there, or taking out elements that were…or something as extreme as putting the bird against a new background…or using any of the “paint effect” filters…then, again, your title should, imho, indicate that the viewer is looking at a manipulate image. I call them “digital creations” or “digital confections”. I do, on occasion, remove an element of the image or add something to show the bird to better advantage. I will show you how you can remove a branch that might be in front of the bird, or distracting background elements (the two most common problems, after exposure issues: not surprising considering that a lot of our birds are perched in trees and brush) and how you can push a distracting background “out of focus” to highlight the bird. It is also possible to save a marginal composition by adding a bit of background to one edge or another of the image. I don’t feel that is any more "cheating” than cropping is, and I will cover how to do that. For those who might want to move in the digital confection direction: we will look at combining elements of multiple images into one. I did ask the other members of digiscopingbirds@yahoogroups.com to contribute their tips and tricks, and any that aren't covered in the general tutorial will be included at the end in the "Tips and Tricks" section, with credit to the digiscopers who contributed them.
Image Editing Programs Most of the techniques I am going to show you can be done in almost any image editing program...but each program may have its own way of accomplishing the task. Just assume that anything I show you can be done in the program you are using, until proven otherwise, and go in and find a way to do it. Also, there may well be two or three different methods of doing the same basic thing, even within any one of the programs. I will show you how I do it, and may mention other methods. I tend to go for quick and simple when it works, over other choices. The programs I am going to specifically cover here are: 1) Photoshop Elements. (most of this will apply pretty directly to the full Photoshop version if you already have that.). If you don't have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements already, then you might want to purchase Elements (PhE hereafter)...it is inexpensive and has the most comprehensive feature set of any imaging program on the market. Version 4.0 for the PC and Version 3.0 for the Mac are similar. Both have a host of other features besides image editing: cataloging, creation of everything from postage stamps to html galleries and slideshows, etc. etc. If PhE has a failing it is that it tries to do too much, and can be a bit bulky at times. The editing and browsing (cataloging) modules could be better integrated (they were in previous versions). Still, it is a powerhouse. 2) Microsoft Office Picture Manager: this is a simple program that comes with Office (at least on the PC, I am not sure about the Mac version). It is my "Swiss army knife"...the tool I call up when I just want to resize an image, or crop it, or make minor exposure adjustments. Quick and dirty. If you have it on your hard-drive, chances are, unless you specifically set your preferences otherwise, it is the program that will open when you double click a jpg. 3) Picasa II: a free program from Google, available by download, that has some of PhEs cataloging and browsing features (it catalogs your whole hard-drive, looking for images in the folders you select), and a more comprehensive set of editing tools than Picture Manager. Most of the tools are very intuitive and easy to use...changes you make to the image are stored in a separate file from the image, and do not appear unless the image is opened in Picasa. There is an option to save the images with the changes you made to disk under another name, but, so far, I have not been able to figure out how to save the sharpening effects. That is a shame, since the Picasa sharpening filter is one of the best I have ever used. All the other the other effects appear to save just fine. This is a program for digiscopers on a budget (or who just spent $2500 on a digiscoping outfit and are tapped out). Its major attraction is its price. 4) Paint Shop Pro.: I downloaded a trial copy of Print Shop Pro (now a Corel product) when I started this article, since others had recommended it, and, after a day of messing with it, bought it. It is very inexpensive (especially after the trial download, when you can "activate" the trial version you already have for $60), and it looks like anything you can do in the PhE image editing module, you can do in Paint Shop Pro (PSP) just as well and just as easily. In fact, PSP has some routines and filters that PhE doesn't have. The "high-pass sharpening" filter in particular is good and the Remove Object tool, which replaces an extended selection with content from another area of the image, is very good. The "smart image fix" seems to work better than the equivalent "Auto Correct" in PhE (maybe it is just "smarter"). PSP still has the "fill flash" filter, which I often used in PhE v.3, but is missing from PhE 4.x, plus a sampling of digital camera specific filters...remove digital camera noise, clarify (restores contrast...especially effective for digiscopers), and some distortion filters that automatically remove common lens distortions. It also has an integrated browser (not Corel Photo Album, which is a separate, stand alone program, but built right into the editor, similar to the old browser feature in PhE). All in all, a valuable addition to any digiscoper's image editing toolbox. 5) I know that there are other popular image editing tools out there: I see ACDsee mentioned often . I did downloaded a trial version, but was not impressed with its feature set, which did not seem much more comprehensive than Microsoft Picture Manager or Picasa. ACDsee users who read this tutorial might want to submit additions or corrections as needed. Email to sing@zbirding.info and I will be happy to include them in future versions (with credit as credit is due). My real goal, however, is to give you enough of an understanding of what you are doing when you make adjustments, of the principles behind image enhancement, so that you become "program independent"...so that you can figure out how to do whatever it is you want and need to do in whatever software the world throws at you, now or in the future. That means I am going do a lot of "background" work here. If you don't want to know, just skip to the "how to" sections for the program you use and go to it. |
