Găsiți următoarea book favorită
Deveniți un membru astăzi și citiți gratuit pentru 30 zileÎncepeți perioada gratuită de 30 zileInformații despre carte
Photographic Image Enhancement and Workflow
Până la Julian Cremona
Acțiuni carte
Începeți să citiți- Editor:
- Crowood
- Lansat:
- Apr 22, 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781785005626
- Format:
- Carte
Descriere
Informații despre carte
Photographic Image Enhancement and Workflow
Până la Julian Cremona
Descriere
- Editor:
- Crowood
- Lansat:
- Apr 22, 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781785005626
- Format:
- Carte
Despre autor
Legat de Photographic Image Enhancement and Workflow
Mostră carte
Photographic Image Enhancement and Workflow - Julian Cremona
Index
Introduction
Recently, film has enjoyed a period of renaissance. Enthusiasts and professionals like the specific tones and colours of certain films, although that can now be recreated using software on digital images. Then there are those who want the experience of the darkroom, to go through the intense labour of creating the tangible product with materials and have the thrill of seeing the photograph appear before their eyes. Rather like vinyl records for audiophiles, film remains a niche area for photographers for many reasons but not least because digital is more immediate, easier, and less expensive. The latter is an arguable point as with enjoyment comes the need for more equipment, although for direct running costs digital photography has to be cheaper. The environmental cost is generally less, too, as processing chemicals, not to mention the inhaling of the fumes from amateur darkrooms with poor ventilation, are eliminated. Perhaps the most significant benefit of the digital image is the ease of enhancing the photograph not just on a computer, tablet or smartphone but also in the camera itself.
A phrase commonly bandied about in the photographic press is to ‘get it right in the camera’, meaning if you are careful enough you should not need to enhance the image as it will be perfect straight from the camera. Luck can play a big part in this, as well as high levels of photographic experience. Fundamentally, understanding your camera inside and out is a prerequisite for this to occur as if you are struggling to find the right button for controlling the exposure or correctly focus, there is a minimal chance of getting it right. At the moment of firing the shutter there is a great deal to think about: what is the ideal light; where do you focus; what is the exposure; what is the best composition; is the viewpoint correct; how do you ensure sharpness and avoid blur? Inevitably there will be numerous times when getting it right in the camera was not an option.
Birds flying over a rainforest at dawn; enhanced in Lightroom Classic to bring out detail in the foreground and misty mountains behind. In addition, the landscape photo was cropped to a more dramatic portrait format. 1/320th second at ƒ8, ISO 200, photographed with a 200mm lens.
Most photographs need a little help but some need a complete rescue package to make them successful. Ultimately, it comes down to circumstances. If the conditions are perfect, such as light and preparation time, you may well be about to produce a great shot that requires no further assistance and is suitable for immediate printing or uploading to a social media site. There are many occasions when this is not the case, especially if your camera is set to produce RAW images, which means that you will need to process the files in software on a computer. All of these issues will be discussed in this book, including the use of RAW files, and the various controls that software provides to enhance your photographs. Note the word ‘enhance’ used here; the book is about improving the images that you produce and not the manipulation of the photograph. There is a subtle difference, but what is manipulation?
The moment you bring the camera up to your eye to take a picture, you have started the process of manipulation as you choose the viewpoint for your photograph; choose what to include and exclude. Photographers have very different ways of considering what manipulation means. You imposed your style on the scene from the outset and therefore have effectively changed the image to the way you think. The street photographer Elliott Erwitt rarely crops any photographs, whereas wildlife photographers invariably do. There are a great many photographic competitions these days and each has rules about manipulation and enhancement. There have been some fairly high-profile disqualifications in recent years as winners were accused of applying cloning or merging two different photographs together after the event, or even using stuffed animals in place of living ones.
Digitizing Film. A is the original scan of a forty-year-old 35mm slide transparency. Note the dark foreground and over-bright sky. As well as dust there is a blue chemical patch near the middle. B is the restored and enhanced image. Whether a digital image or a digitized scan of film, it is possible to enhance and improve photographs.
Photography, like all art, is subjective with very diverging opinions. This book discusses ways to improve aspects such as the colour, exposure, detail and composition. It does not set out to recreate the image by adding extra trees or hills in a landscape, or turn a single bird into a flock. That would be to substantially change the content and, in the author’s view, manipulate rather than enhance a photograph. In the following pages we might want to remove something that distracts from the main subject or maybe change the sky from dull grey to blue, but that is about as far as we go. Primarily, the book concentrates not on professional images, but those you might typically take on holiday or of the family; photographs taken from a vehicle or a short visit to a tourist site. The professional can take time to check sites out, devoting time to planning and waiting for the shot.
Neither is this book a guide to Photoshop. There are plenty of specific software guides available elsewhere: here we take a different approach. In fact, chapter 2 looks at what alternative software is available for free as well as to buy or on subscription. Where this book tries to be different is by analysing photographic problems, recognizing what needs to be done to make an enhancement and then dealing with it. We will cross-reference different software packages, looking at particular benefits, and in some cases look at specialist programs that help to sort out specific issues such as noise. Note that at the time of writing the information was correct, but changes occur rapidly in the world of photographic software.
Life is rarely simple. Returning home with your camera is not just about opening your chosen software package and starting the enhancement. There is a series of actions that need to be carried out from the moment we sit down with our camera through to final viewing. This sequence is better referred to as our method of workflow. There is no single catch-all workflow program, you need to develop your own based on what is right for you. We all have slightly different ways of doing things depending on our priorities. Some actions will be common to all workflows, such as downloading the digital files to the computer. But even here there will be method differences on how and why people will do this. Are RAW and JPEG files treated the same and when is the right time to back up the images? We will look at all of the actions necessary and construct a basic plan so that you can begin to develop your personal workflow.
Digital images are wonderfully flexible. Once taken they can be displayed in any number of ways, including being printed out on paper, card, canvas and T-shirts. Of course, the image may have been derived from film that has been digitized by scanning. This will be highlighted in more detail in chapter 3. Using film is therefore just another action in the workflow program, as having digitized the photograph it will need enhancement. Rarely will a scanned image be really good straight out of the scanner. In this regard the book is important for any photographer, whatever the medium used.
Chapter 1
Understanding the Digital Image
The year 2000 was momentous for a number of reasons. In photographic history it marked the peak of the use of film, with approximately 85 billion photos taken. Whilst film usage has been in steady decline ever since, many millions of films were used in the last few years. However a conservative estimate of the number of digital photographs created in 2017 exceeds a trillion, with many sources placing the number significantly higher. Much of this rise has been due to smart-phones with new models invariably marketed for the in-phone camera more than any other feature. Unlike film, with a tangible material to work with, the digital image is a binary-coded computer file and how it looks depends on many factors, not least the display screen. Before looking at the enhancement of this digital file, understanding the properties of it is fundamental.
Fig. 1.1
A wide-angle lens on a mirrorless camera was used to take this photo from an airliner landing at Houston airport. Shooting through the multi-layered window reduces the quality of light and colour. Enhancement has restored these to provide a good tonal range and sharp detail.
PIXELS, BITMAPS AND RESOLUTION
Fig. 1.2
A tiny portion of a computer monitor with the mouse pointer for scale. Also shown is a small part of this that has been enlarged to see the individual pixels made up of three parts: red, green and blue. Note the wide variation in brightness/tone.
If our digital image is broken down to the smallest possible element that can be controlled and altered, we find the pixel. The term is derived from the term picture element. The number of pixels in an image is referred to as the resolution and is set within the camera. The higher the number, the better quality of photograph that can be printed out and viewed, although this only applies to a certain level of enlargement and even then, this has caveats that we will look at separately. Resolution is measured in two dimensions, width and length. For example, 3,000 pixels across by 2,000 pixels down multiplies to give a resolution of 6 million or 6 megapixels. This is often abbreviated to 6 MP.
Even if two photos from two different cameras have the same resolution they may not be the same quality, especially if one is a phone camera and the other is a DSLR. This is down to sensor size. Compact cameras and phones typically have small sensors, around 6.17 × 4.55mm. Micro Four Thirds cameras have dimensions of 17.3 × 13mm, an APS-C sensor in Canon DSLRs measures 22.2 × 14.8mm, with full frame sensors at 36 × 24mm. Medium format cameras like the Hasselblad have sensors of 53.7 × 40.2mm dimensions. These different-sized sensors may not necessarily produce a significantly higher resolution of pixels, but large sensors can accommodate larger photosites. These are the light, sensitive spots that create the signal to produce a pixel, and larger photosites will produce a better quality of pixel than a small photosite. With identical resolutions, a larger sensor will have bigger photo-sites and hence better light-gathering capability. All things being equal (which they often are not) this should produce better image quality.
What do we mean by better quality? Large pixels have a better signal to noise ratio; noise can be a problem, as we will see, and it refers to random colours and oddities in the pixels which we want to minimize to produce a smoother and more detailed image. Additionally, the dynamic range will be better with large pixels as they can take on more photons of light to have a wider range of brightness to dark pixels.
Pictures composed of pixels are called bitmap files and as they are enlarged, so they take on a blocky appearance. In this regard they have a finite level of enlargement. By contrast, there are computer files that are infinite in their enlargement. These are vectormaps and instead of pixels the lines are created by mathematical algorithms so no blocks will appear. Software programs that edit vector maps are predominantly used by design professionals dealing with line drawings.
Fig. 1.3
Monitor resolution. Screenshot of FastStone Image Viewer on a 3MP monitor, 1920 × 1080 pixels.
A bitmap image is displayed on a computer monitor according to the size defined by the resolution of its screen. Additionally, the software that displays the photo may have to stretch or shrink the image to make it fit. Monitors have a certain resolution and this is usually the prime feature affecting their cost. An HD screen, fairly typical on laptops and basic monitors, will be 1,920 × 1,080 pixels. A look inside the settings of the computer display will quickly confirm the resolution. In this instance the maximum number of pixels the screen can show is 1,920 across. A common image resolution of APS-C sensors found in DSLR and Compact System Cameras (CSC) is 24 MP, that is 6,000 × 4,000 pixels. The image, then, has more than three times the pixel number across it than the display can show and so software will need to reorganize the picture to reduce the size to fit. Likewise, if the image is only 800 × 600 pixels (as often found on websites), to fill the screen software will have to expand or interpolate the photo by inserting pixels. As can be expected, the latter example will not produce as good a picture as the former, with more pixels to play with.
Fig. 1.4
Monitor resolution. Unlike Fig. 1.3, the monitor resolution is much higher at 3200 × 1800 and although the thumbnails are smaller, more are visible. The sizes of thumbnails can generally be changed to suit. To maintain the size of the text and other features it is possible to set this in Settings within the operating system.
There are several consequences of this information. Unless you need all those 24 million pixels you could quite happily get away with far fewer to display on a computer. A 6 MP image would look just as good as the 24 MP version on the HD monitor. There can be advantages to reducing resolution, for example, if you run slide shows. Lower resolution images will give smaller file sizes and small file sizes will mean that less storage space is required. You may think this is insignificant but as time goes on, after a few years of digital photography the storage of photos can become a real headache. Additionally, small files take less time and processing power for the software to expand them to fill the screen. High-resolution images can slow down slide shows, although this will depend on the computer processor and memory. Digital projectors are just another form of monitor with resolution and display issues. In the final chapter we look at monitor calibration and how to ensure that colours are correctly displayed.
When working on your photographs within editing software, a very useful tool will be to zoom in and out of the image, changing the display for a close or wide view. With zoom controls there will be different options, such as ‘Fit to screen’ and different percentages. Fit to screen scales the entire picture to be seen within the window. In the case of the 24 MP image with an HD monitor, clicking ‘Fit’ will represent around a 30 per cent scale and will probably display that at the top of the screen; 100 per cent will enlarge the picture so that you are looking at the exact size of the image. This is a useful view as it is easier to check if the photo is in focus. Higher percentages such as 300–400 per cent enable a magnification to view almost to pixel level.
Why do you need a higher pixel density than the monitor can display? Printing large photographs, for one. Also, you are not always sure what your monitor resolution is likely to be like in the future. Ultra HD or 4K refers to screens with 3,840 × 2,160 pixel resolution and they have been around for a while, 8K resolution of 7,680 × 4,320 is already available, if currently rather expensive. These higher than HD densities of pixels can produce superb-looking, smooth images, although not always practical and projectors lag behind desktop screens by some margin. The practicality comes when using some computer programs because as the monitor resolution increases, the computer has to scale up windows and other components such as fonts and typefaces. With some software this does not always work, with low pixel density icons displaying smaller and smaller as the resolution increases. The general compromise of what is considered the ideal monitor is a 27in QHD at 2,560 × 1,440 pixels. Ultimately, before buying a new monitor check the reviews online as well as trying them out for yourself. There is also a benefit in having dual screens with the main screen displaying the editing software and a second one to the side displaying another program. This is especially helpful when trying to compare two images. Probably the most important reasons for your images to have a high resolution is if you hope to print them large.
All bitmaps have a default physical size for printing that is set within the image file by the camera. This can easily be changed at a later stage, in the computer. Early digital cameras had a large size by default that has changed in recent years. There are two phrases to look out for in the image information: pixels per inch (PPI) and dots per
Recenzii
Recenzii
Ce cred oamenii despre Photographic Image Enhancement and Workflow
00 evaluări / 0 recenzii