This quick guide will show you some tips on how to get the most from your pictures, and because it is written by a novice like me I am sure you will understand the simpleness behind it....that is if you ignore the grammatical errors and enjoy this non proof read guide.
This guide is all about improving and has nothing to do with manipulating your photos i.e. removing branches, adding backgrounds. this is because of two reasons, reason one, I'm too stupid to know how to do that and reason two I feel (and this is a personal feeling) that manipulating the photo takes all the skill out of taking that perfect shot.
Now this is pretty much for people like me and hopefully you, someone who hasn't got the dough for a huge expensive setup for them spanking shiny photos, but instead opted for a cheaper output like digiscoping and have decided you'd like to 'pimp' those photographs.
Now for this neat silly little guide we are going to use one picture, this picture below to be exact, hope this helps.
Sharpen
Ah, sharpen, probably the tool everyone uses first and maybe like you (well definitely me) as you click the mouse on the filter tab you went for the sharpen option. It is much better to go to the unsharp mask, why?...just go with it, you can see results so why question it.
Now after web searching, googling and trial and error I think these settings work the best
If sharpness looks too noticeable I'd suggest undoing it and if the opposite press ctrl + F to apply it again until you get what you prefer and keep in mind the better your computer monitor the better you can see the sharpness at work. If you think you have over sharpened hit ctrl + z to undo the sharpness. You also might like to fiddle around a bit yourself for your personal preference.
Cropping
I do not tend to do much cropping for the simple reason of that I am happy with the position of most of my shots to begin with, I chose this photo in particular because it is a photo I would like to crop as to the left there is a big empty space with nothing happening in it so what we would like to do is get rid of it.
This is easily done by chose the rectangular marquee tool and highlighting the area you want to keep by holding down the left mouse button. Now with the area you want to keep highlighted go to the image tab and select crop and ta dah! I am not sure if there are any other ways of doing this but this is definitely the best way.
 |
| Cropping can help frame that perfect image. |
If you have troubles with your sharping technique I sometimes use this as a backup, I generally do not have noise appearing in my photos..well not much anyway but this can also enhance your photos and give it more of a clean sharper feel while being subtle. These settings are my much preferred.
There are other techniques which I will cover here but not in so much detail.
Contrast & Vibrancy
I do not tend to use these much as they fiddle with the original colours and with the current camera I have combined with the spotting scope, the colours I get are pretty swell not to be tampered with. Contrast & vibrancy are the two favoured and preferred methods to use, contrast in my opinion is fiddly and depending on the picture more or less could look better, too much or too less can ruin your picture and it is best not to go far beyond 0.
Vibrancy is similar to saturation and quite simply can warm your photo, I do not use this as I set my camera on the cloudy setting on the white balance, this makes the colours already warming and saves me on processing it afterwards.
Blurring
Blurring can be used to give the photo more of a depth of field, to me the best and very fiddly way to do this is to use the lasso tool and go around the image in focus, after you are done with this go to the select tab and click inverse, this will now have the background highlight, now you can go to the filter and use what blur you think looks best, I used to use gaussean blur but now I do not bother with blurring as I am usually generally pleased with the depth of field of my photos.
Chromatic Abberation
Now if you are having trouble with what is also called purple fringing, I have found this neat little trick that will work most of the time, for this you will need this and Extract the file and Send the location to the \Presets\Actions folder where Photoshop is installed on your computer. After that run Photoshop.
Now on Photoshop go to windows and select actions or alternatively you can press ALT & F9. This will bring up your actions window look for the one titled "purple fringe killer" click it once and beneath it there is a Play symbol hit that and away it goes a box will appear after the process, just click OK on that and done! To see a slightly more in depth guide click here.
Hope this helps you even a little, happy birding
No comments:
Post a Comment