Archive for the ‘Photo Editing’ Category
Cloning, in digital photography, has absolutely nothing to do with sheep. Unless, of course, you want to use the cloning tool to turn an image of one sheep into a whole flock of them.
The Cloning tool is used to copy one part of the image into another area, or even into another picture entirely. If your beautiful picture of clouds at sunset is ruined by the ugly electrical wires running across them, it can be fixed. The wires can be painted right out of the picture by using the cloning tool to copy small bits of the clouds around the wires over top of them.
This technique can be time-consuming, especially if there’s a large area that needs work. It’s also very easy to do it badly, with results that clearly look like they were cloned. Remember to click on different areas of the picture to be the source of the cloning tool, because if you don’t, you can easily get a tell-tale pattern in the texture of the image.
Cloning is also useful in other ways. Imagine two pictures of the same family portrait. In the first, Grandpa is yawning. The photographer saw that, and shot a second one, but he didn’t notice Junior sticking his tongue at his sister in the second shot. Rather than throw away both pictures, the photo editor can take the smiling Junior from the first image, and clone it over the ugly one in the second photo.
Cloning is one of the most common tools used in photo faking, just as the family portrait example shows. One recent example is Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj, who was was fired by Reuters. He was caught using a cloning technique on his pictures, making battle damage in the 2006 Isreal-Lebanon conflict look much worse than it really was.
While Burning and Dodging are listed as tools in most photo editing software, they are digital versions of techniques originally developed by darkroom photographers years ago.
Burning is a trick for getting more detail out of a section of a picture. The photographer makes his print normally, and then masks off a large section of the print, usually with his hands. Then, with the light blocked, he adds a bit more exposure time to the print, so that the area that wasn’t masked gets more exposure. Dodging, on the other hand, involves using a small piece of paper or cardboard to block the light from a section of the photograph.
Burning, then, means adding extra exposure to some element of the picture, while dodging is less exposure. In general, this is different from the Brightness of a picture because brightness is applied to the entire picture, while burning and dodging are only applied to areas of the picture.
Photoshop, as an example, offers tools for Burning and Dodging. You can adjust the size of the “brush” and apply it to any part of the image, and the program will lighten or darken the area, just like a classic burn or dodge would have.
Both techniques are used for “balancing out” a picture. For example, if a landscape or cityscape turns out perfectly, but the sky behind it is overexposed (looking like a big white blob rather than the normal blue and white of sky and clouds), then dodging the sky will reduce the exposure, and hopefully bring the color back down to a normal level. If the sky exposed in the perfect shade of blue, but the windows are too dark to stand out from the buildings, then burning the windows would help to expose them better, bringing out more detail and clarity.
Incoming search terms:
There are so many different file types to choose from, like RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG. Which one is right for you?
RAW is the internal file format for many digital cameras. Photographers like to shoot in RAW format because it doesn’t get any processing in the camera, allowing them to adjust things like white balance and exposure after the picture has been taken. The main disadvantage of RAW is that it’s proprietary, so every brand is different and not all formats can be read by photo editing software.
JPG (or JPEG) is a compressed format, and one of the most common types used on the Web. Keep in mind that saving into JPG will cost some of the quality of the picture. The good news is, in most cases, you can’t tell the difference between the original and the compressed JPG. If you’re going to email pictures or post them to the Web, this is the format to use.
GIF is a much older format than JPG, with nowhere near the power. GIFs can only have 256 colors. However, GIF is a great format for images with large areas that are all the same color. GIF is best used for logos and line-drawing images.
Think of PNG as a newer, more powerful GIF. It has many of the features that make GIF useful on the Web, without the 256 color limitation. PNG is also a “lossless” format, which means you don’t lose quality when you convert your picture to PNG.
TIFF is another lossless format, and one of the most common. If a digital camera has an option besides RAW or JPG, it will be TIFF.
Photo editing programs will generally have their own format, as well, like PSD for Adobe Photoshop and PSP for Paintshop Pro. These are great for use with the programs, but not for archiving–if the software world changed, you wouldn’t be able to read your backups anymore.