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KEEPING A RECORD    Part 2

 

 

ADJUSTING YOUR IMAGE

 

As stated earlier, these notes are based on using the low cost Serif Programme, Photo Plus which will do everything you may require of an editing programme for around £10.

 

There are more advanced programmes available for nil or little cost, but generally they take some understanding.

Take care in choosing  your editing programme though. Some will undertake only ‘Automatic’ adjustments and those methods are pretty crude in the results.

 

First of all, the image.

 

I have selected a very poor photo of a pastel landscape which

was photographed in the picture frame on a grey day and resulted in

the image you see here

The picture is distorted from the angle the photo was taken,

(to avoid reflections from the glass).  

The image is over exposed and much ofthe colour has been lost.

It is - in fact - a picture I would not normally attempt to correct.

It will not produce a perfect result as the start point is too poor,

but for the purpose of this exercise, it will serve very well to show

how well a poor image can be recovered.

 

 

 

First of all I need to correct the distortion so that the four sides of the

image are at right angles to each other.

With the serif programme, I look for DEFORM which has a window

shaped icon near the top of the left side of the frame.

First I make the image smaller so I have room to work (Zoom OUT ).  

I select the window shaped icon and select the picture  part

of the photo.  I then depress the SHIFT and CTRL keys together

and using the cursor, drag the corner button on the frame

outwards.  I repeat this with the other three corners and adjust

them until the picture frame edges are in line with the edge of

the image frame.  

This is a snapshot of the scene on the monitor at this point

 

 

 

 

 

I now need to crop the image down so that we only see the actual

picture within the mount.  The crop icon is also on the left and looks

like two intersecting L shapes.  You drag a square over the image and

when you release it, you will find a darkened area .

This is the area that will be removed.  Once you have  adjusted this

to your satisfaction, you click with the cursor inside the frame

and you will be left with the landscape picture alone

At this stage, your picture still has very little colour or tonal contrast.  

 

The things to avoid here are the dreaded settings on most editing programmes -

CONTRAST and  BRIGHTNESS.

They do next to nothing to improve your picture.

 

What You need are LEVELS

(Not the Auto Levels, but the manual editing one)

and a manual setting for COLOUR BALANCE which enables you to adjust the amount of red, blue, yellow etc in the Picture.

 

You now need to go to an area called IMAGE / adjust which is found among the top row of settings ( file Edit etc)

Find LEVELS and click on it.  

You will get what is called a HISTOGRAM which I need to Explain.

The picture is transformed into a black and white image (greyscale) and each dot in the picture is plotted on to a chart which shows the number of black dots at one end and white dots at the other.  In this case most of the dots are grey and therefore appear in the middle

A Histogram is  the result and this histogram can be adjusted to correct the lack of strong lights and darks without changing the mid tones in the middle.

Drag the little triangles at bottom left and right of the chart,

Inwards,  and look at the picture that results.

Having adjusted the tonal balance of the picture so that our whites are now white and our darks are really dark, we have one more step to take,  we can look at the mid point in the scale and adjust that as well, using Levels, but my suggestion is that you leave that alone for now and concentrate on the basics of a simple sequence of adjustments

 

 

After that, we need to look at the actual colour balance of the picture.

I find that the photos I take and the scans I do, usually result in a ‘cold’ image where the blue ranges are strong and the warm colours are low in intensity.

There are usually a number of crude adjustments that can be made through most editing software, and there is a fine tune system using what are known as CURVES  which involve a fair amount of trial and error and practice to get right.  

 

Using the manual COLOUR BALANCE feature is mid way between the two, and the route I usually take.

You will see from this snapshot of the computer screen that the PhotoPlus software offers the standard choice of three colour sliders for balancing Colour.  The top pair are for  Cyan and Red so to warm up our picture we may decide to move the central slider control to the red by a small margin.

(say 10% maximum for a start )

I usually leave the middle control alone  

( Magenta / Green ) but you can try it out if you wish and see what results.  My final move is to slide the bottom control in favour of Yellow from Blue.  That brings the colour to a more sunlit look.  Obviously your picture may need adjusting otherwise.

 

So let us have a look where we have come from and where we have reached

The better the quality of the original photo or scan, the better will be the result of the adjustment.  In this case the original was really too poor to use, but I think you will agree the result is not too bad.

 

If you are now going to use the result as an example of your work, consider how the image is going to be shown.  

If you are going to show it printed out, you will need to check the print quality and colour balance with the

paper you intend to use.  If on a screen, the image must be balanced to the screen.  The two will not be the same and you may need to record the image in separate files.  Always compare the original picture with your adjustments and try to get the balance as close as you can.  Anyone using a photo or scanned image to submit an entry for Exhibition needs to be aware that should the picture be selected by the jury on the strength of the scan or photo and the original not match up when delivered, the Curator may well refuse to hang the artwork on the grounds that the entry was not truly representative of your art.

 

In the next part, I will look at sizing and printing images which you may need to consider if you wish to produce prints, print greetings cards etc and prepare images the right size to send for entry into an exhibition

 

Page last revised February 2011

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