{"id":190,"date":"2005-11-13T22:12:18","date_gmt":"2005-11-13T14:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/?page_id=190"},"modified":"2005-11-13T22:15:53","modified_gmt":"2005-11-13T14:15:53","slug":"09-perform-table-top-magic","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/ten-tips-to-better-digital-photography\/09-perform-table-top-magic\/","title":{"rendered":"#9 Perform Table Top Magic"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Perform Table Top Magic<\/strong><\/p>\n

Photography, even in the days of film photography, has never meant just taking the picture, sending to the lab, getting back the film, and then keeping the prints or slides. Serious photographers would spend hours after the actual shooting was done, many of them in the darkroom, tweaking with the way the shot can be printed, using techniques like dodging and burning to bring out the best in their works. Some would use a combination of shots and do creative montage and composites.<\/p>\n

And this is just as true with digital photography. A lot of amateurs assume that digital photography is just a matter of taking the pictures, downloading them to a PC, and then printing them out on an inkjet printer or sharing them on the web. Some will of course send them to the lab for enlargement of printing. However, the most serious ones will actually spend hours, using an image-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop, to tweak their pictures so as to bring out the very best in them, before actually sending them for printing.<\/p>\n

Just as the photographers of yesteryear toil over their works of art in the darkroom, these days, digital photographers use their digital darkroom to carry out what I would call table-top magic.<\/p>\n

Even the beginner to digital photography can benefit much just from a simple trick in Photoshop: adjusting the levels of an image. Remember the histogram that we used to evaluate for exposure-correctness I mentioned earlier on? It is equally useful in making your images look better by improving the contrast and lighting.<\/p>\n

<\/center>
<\/center>The Levels Adjustment tool in Photoshop provides a convenient means to add better brightness and contrast to enhance your digital images. <\/span><\/p>\n

To do so, call up the histogram by using the Adjust\/Levels command. The histogram of your shot will appear on screen. See the arrows at the bottom of the histogram? These delineate where the darkest, the brightest and the midrange tones of the image lie. By adjusting these arrows so that the graph falls neatly between the 3 of them, your image will automatically benefit from better brightness and contrast, and in some cases, better saturation.<\/p>\n

<\/center>
Simple levels adjustment in Photoshop help to bring out the details and contrast of this shot of the leaves of the Victoria Amazonica taken in very tricky lighting situations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another favourite digital editing trick I like to use to bring out the impact of my images is to selectively mask out and convert portions of the image that I think are distracting to the overall feel of the photo and convert these portions to black and white. I would then darken the black and white portions of the image to help bring out the visual impact of the subjects that I want to portray.<\/p>\n

<\/center>
By masking and isolating the distracting elements in the background, and then desaturating them in Photoshop, the main subject of the chess players are brought to the attention of the viewer. The result: a photo that tells its story more effectively.
<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, the power of the digital darkroom goes much beyond simple adjustment and tweaking of the images. In the hands of a master, the unreal or impossible may be made to look real and possible, just as it is in many of the special effect movies that we see these days.<\/p>\n

And this is precisely one of the controversial points that more traditionalistic photographers use to discredit digital photography: that it is not real. For me, I have no qualms about digital image-editing as long as it is done for creative and artistic reasons.<\/p>\n

Take the example of a painter: is the scene that he paints really what you would see if you were right there with him? If you observe him work, you would realize, a lot of times, what appears on the canvas is what the painter himself sees or chooses to see. If it doesn’t look nice on the painting, he doesn’t paint it. And if the scene looks much better if there were some birds flying in the sky, for example, he would paint them, even if it wasn’t actually there when he was working on the painting.<\/p>\n

Why shouldn’t the same be applied to photography, which is after all, in a sense, painting, only in this case, using light as a medium? Unless, of course, the purpose of the photograph taken was for journalistic, documentation purposes, or for use as legal evidence. In such cases, then there is a moral obligation on the part of the photographer himself, to ensure that the photograph reports objectively and truthfully the actual scene.<\/p>\n

Previous tip: <\/span>Keep To The Dark Side <\/span><\/a>
Next Tip: Share Your Gains<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perform Table Top Magic Photography, even in the days of film photography, has never meant
Read More<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":181,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"simple.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-190","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/PrzUn-34","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/190\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}