Camera Colour Features v’s Photoshop

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My camera has an option to change the colour settings of the camera to full colour, black & white or sepia. So I went out to give them a try as I have’nt used them before. These three photographs are the result. It was a dull day and it was raining so I picked a subject that was full of colour to give greater contrast.

I used to sometimes shoot in black and white film on my old camera so it’s nice to be able to just flick between the two (colour and black and white) whenever I feel like it.

Although the detail is good I don’t think I would shoot a lot in sepia unless for a specific need.

But if shooting in black and white or sepia solely and not using colour for that subject then there is no turning back.

Once you get home you can’t add the colour again so it’s something to think about.

But you can always shoot in colour (as well) and then change it later in Photoshop, or is that cheating!

Photoshop

These next three photographs have been produced in Photoshop Elements, the black and white and sepia anyway. So you can compare the two sets of photographs.

The full colour photograph is in RGB colour.

The black and white one has had the colour removed in the colour adjustment palette.

And the sepia one has been created in the colour adjustment palette by adding blue and red.

If you were comparing all six photographs together I don’t think you could guess which was which if you didn’t know beforehand. The first three look a little sharper but that could be the subject, to properly compare I should have used the same photo but I thought that would look a little monotonous.

So I think it’s down to a question of taste - camera or Photoshop (whichever version you prefer). I think I would choose photoshop because it gives a bit more flexibility, but that’s easy to say as I have used it a lot.

But one thing I will say is the Photoshop Elements produced photos uploaded to my blog a lot quicker than the ones that were produced on the camera.

Mandy

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Digital Photography Part 2

This post is the second in a three part series looking at taking, editing and sharing digital photographs. The first part covered taking an image and this post is going to look at editing an image. These subjects are huge and could easily have (and do) a whole blog dedicated to them. So I am just looking at introducing them and what I like about them.

Editing

Being able to upload my photographs onto my computer and then edit them has become very easy to do and the norm. But if I just think back a couple of years none of this was possible, at least not without spending a fortune on the equipment needed to do it. But luckily enough I am living in an age where all this is possible and at a very reasonable price.

Not only that but there is a huge range of software available to choose from to be able to edit my photographs with. From free software that comes with the camera to spending hundreds of pounds on industry standard software like Adobe Photoshop.

Editing is close to my heart because I used to work in an advertising agency and used Adobe Photoshop a lot. I trained at college to become an apple mac operator which included using Adobe Photoshop, Quark and Adobe Illustrator. I love what can be done with these software packages and how easy it is to produce a result with them. Although I can’t afford any of them myself, I use Photoshop Elements for my editing needs.

Why do I want to edit photographs?

When I first heard about editing digital photographs I still used film and I thought why would I want to fiddle about with my photographs and add things or erase things from them. I thought it was, I suppose cheating. I didn’t like the idea of ‘faking a photograph’. But there is a lot more to editing images than just cutting out and sticking somebody’s head onto another body!

But once I took the time to look at editing closely and then have a go myself, I realised it is a great tool for photographers. For instance red eye is no longer a problem, and that’s great especially when it comes to taking snapshot pictures of kids. It can be bad enough just trying to capture them, never mind worrying about red eye!

Editing photographs gives me huge potential for what I can do with a photograph and I realised that when I worked at the advertising agency. Whether it’s removing red eye from a snapshot or producing photographs for a full colour brochure, it can be done and it’s really good fun to just have a play around to see what I can create, with the software available these days it’s practically the sky is the limit for what I could do. I now love what editing photographs, and the software I use can produce.

Cropping a photograph can really change the emphasis, or allow me to zoom in on a feature or just get rid of that unwanted object that I couldn’t avoid.

Here’s a photograph I was just messing around with showing the before and after shots, it gives the image a focal point that wasn’t obvious in the first image.

Framing the photograph and adding a caption really makes it stand out, and is great for sharing holiday snaps as well as reminding me where, when or what they were. Or it could even be enlarged for a print.

This is only a sample of what can be achieved with editing photographs, and as I said earlier a whole blog could be devoted to it.

This is my introduction to editing and I am sure I will talk about it again in the future because I enjoy it so much!

Mandy

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