Let There Be Light...for 30 Days

I know I've been going on non-stop about GIMP, due largely to the fact that it is 1) powerful and 2) free.  However, I've been persuaded to try Lightroom by Adobe on a free 30 day trial, and, I have to confess, I'm impressed.  Obviously there are a lot of things that can be done in GIMP--in fact, it may be that GIMP can do everything Lightroom can.  If so, I just haven't found a way of doing some specific things in GIMP yet.  That being said, I'm really enjoying Lightroom.  Granted, I haven't completed any tutorials, and I've only been playing around with the program for about two days.  Even so, here's my run-down, followed by some before and after examples so you can see what I'm talking about:

Pros:
1) The program is pretty intuitive and user-friendly.  As I said, I haven't done any tutorials yet, and I've been happily editing for two days.

2) The recovery feature is AWESOME if you have photos with high dynamic range.  In other words, there's a tool that allows you to tone down some of the highlights in your photo--so if your insanely blonde friend looks like her head is glowing while everyone else looks normal, you can recover some of the color and contrast in her hair so that she looks a bit less like an alien.

3) You can independently tune your blacks, so you're not stuck fiddling with contrast and washing out your highlights when all you really want is to make your blacks a bit blacker.

4) The heal tool certainly isn't perfect--GIMP is a better choice for cloning.  However, it's easy and quick, and does a great job on small spots and imperfections.  For touch-up jobs, you can spend seconds instead of hours correcting minor blemishes in your photos.

5) The luminescence tool allows you to ditch some of the graininess in photos shot in low lighting.  Crank it up too much and people begin to look like they've had too much plastic surgery.  On a low setting, though, you can make your photos look a little softer/smoother without losing clarity. 

6) There are lots of fun creative modes to play with to give your photo a unique look.

7) Lightroom won't overwrite your photos, so you don't have to worry about accidentally losing your originals.

8) Dodging and burning is a little different from the way it's handled in other programs, but it's quick and easy to learn, and you can do more than adjust exposure--you have options for brightness, clarity, sharpness, saturation, and contrast.  Nice, huh?


Cons:
1) Adobe programs aren't cheap.  In fact, I was ready to do a happy dance when I found Lightroom for $150 because on the Adobe site it's $300.  However, you can do a 30 day trial for free on the Adobe site (which I'm doing before I part with $150).

2) I'm not impressed with the Autotone function.  Lightroom is great for easily adjusting things by hand, but Autotone seems to like things to be really washed out and grainy.  I imported a few photos with Autotone on by mistake and I struggled to get them looking normal; I couldn't believe I had taken such bad portraits at a paid gig.  It was only when I reset the photo that I realized what had happened.  Among other adjustments, the Autotone feature cranked the brightness and fill light way too high, and turned the contrast way down, and the photos looked overexposed and unfortunate.

3) Perhaps I'm just not looking in the right place, but it seems that all zooming is limited to preset values, so I spend a lot of time and effort fidgeting with 1:2 vs. 1:4 vs. 2:1 vs...you get the idea.  Zooming into a specific area by a specific percentage seems to be an impossibility.  If you know something I don't on this front, I'd love to hear that I'm wrong because the zooming is rather frustrating.

4) The program can watermark on export--this is a pro, except that it doesn't look like you can adjust the position or opacity of your watermark.  Again, I'm new to the program, so maybe I'm missing something, but having the watermark in the lower left corner of the photo means that it will be pretty easy to crop out.  Defeats the point of a watermark...



Alright, enough talk.  Time to show you what I'm talking about.  Below are a few before and afters.  The first set of photos was from a film shoot, and when I scanned the photo,  it was covered in dust, it looked grainy, and it just generally wasn't a very good representation of the original photo.  Enter Lightroom.  Obviously, it's still not perfect--there was some dust I will have to remove in GIMP, and I'd like to clean up the background a bit.  However, for the speed and ease of editing, I was pretty pleased with the difference Lightroom made.  Note: luminescence was particularly helpful for reducing the grain, and the heal tool was used to get rid of some of the dust and the big scratch on her arm from the original photograph. 

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Some Healthy Competition

I recently posted about the importance of self-promotion for getting a little recognition for your work.  I then whined a bit about the advice to sell stock photography, which I have been following (albeit somewhat grudgingly).  One form of self-promotion I think gets less attention, however, is photography contests.  Now, I suspect that there are plenty of shady contests out there that are just fishing for information or photos.  However, there are plenty of reputable photography contests as well.  Of course, there's no guarantee that you'll win, or even get any recognition.  But, so long as I steer away from those which charge an entry fee and watermark my images, what's the harm, right?  And who knows?  Maybe I'll have a bit of luck and someone will really like my photos.  Plus, finding an image which epitomizes the sentiment of the contest or category forces you to think about your photos in a different way, and to get cracking on editing.  With that in mind, I've decided to enter an online contest.  There are a few categories I'm having trouble picking an image for, though.  I've shown the photos below, and I'd be very grateful for some feedback. I've listed the category name along with the photographs I'm considering below.  I can only enter one photograph into each category with the exception of the portfolio category, for which I get to pick three photographs.  Obviously I'm planning to do some watermark work before I submit.  Also, if you see anything in my gallery that I haven't considered but you think I should, please let me know.  Likewise, some of these images might fit into more than one category, so if you think an image would be for another category, I would appreciate the insight. 


The Wild World (nature)

On Location (urban, city, using surroundings to enhance image)

Still Life

Breaking the Mould (anything weird or wacky)

Portfolio (3 images)

Getting Plugged-In

My original plan was to have another installment of Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates devoted to batch (i.e. applying the same edit to multiple photos at once) watermarking and resizing in GIMP and Picassa.  However, while that's a simple task in Picassa, I've had quite a bit of difficulty with the process in GIMP (and this is where the cheating comes back to bite me--incidentally, if you haven't figured this out yet and you were wondering, you can adjust the opacity of your text for your watermark using the layers dock; if you have no idea what I'm talking about, more on this later).  It turns out that you need a plug-in to do batch watermarking in GIMP.  There are a lot of special functions like this you can perform in GIMP if you simply install the appropriate plug-in.

If you're not sure what on earth installing a plug-in in GIMP means, think of it like this: there are certain editing and creative tasks users want that GIMP cannot accommodate.  So, users who are far more computer savvy than myself go and write little mini-programs that tell GIMP how to do whatever it is they feel GIMP is missing.  Then, these kind individuals are generous enough to post all of their hard work on the GIMP registry, where novices like me can download the files to make GIMP accomplish the task.

The problem is 1) installing a plug-in for GIMP is not as simple as clicking one or two buttons and 2) you need a program called Python installed prior to installing GIMP in order to get some of these plug-ins to run.  I learned this the hard way, which involved uninstalling GIMP, hunting for a solid half an hour for the appropriate files, sifting through a bunch of UNIX gibberish I won't even pretend to understand and, finally, with the substantial assistance of my fabulous computer guru (yes, he pretty much did everything for me while I stood over his shoulder going "oooohhhhh!"), locating and installing the appropriate files.  Let's see if I can make the process a little less frustrating for you than it was for me.  Here are the steps we took for Windows 7.  Mac and UNIX users, you're on your own (though this is probably a breeze for UNIX users anyway):

1) Go here and click on the third item down in the list under "Downloads":

• Windows x86 MSI Installer (2.7) (sig) 

2)  Go here and click on

pygtk-all-in-one-2.24.1.win32-py2.7.msi  

3) Go here and download GIMP, and don't forget to install the user's manual if you want it--it doesn't come with the program automatically.  The files to pick here should be pretty obvious.

4) Run each file you downloaded in the order of the download.  So, first python, then the pyGTK package, then GIMP and the user's manual. 

 Given what a pain this is, I'm going to consider this post my good deed for the day.  Hopefully you'll find it helpful. 

Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (Part III)

Alright, so I've talked about digital theft, why it sucks, and how to stop it.  I've been relying pretty heavily on Gimp for this because a) it's free and b) it's a lot more powerful than some of the other free photo programs out there, such as Google's Picassa.  However, if you're not interested in doing particularly advanced things with your photos, Picassa will work just fine and, in fact, can handle resizing and watermarking.  While there are a lot of things you can't do in Picassa, such as dodging and burning (or, at least I haven't discovered how), it's an extremely user friendly program.  And, like Gimp, it's free!  Bonus.  So, how do you resize and watermark in Picassa?

First, double-click the photo you're trying to alter.  This will bring up a window with the photo, a toolbar to the right with basic fixes etc., and a toolbar on the bottom.  Now that you've selected the photo, click CTRL+Shift+S.  This will bring up a dialog box.  First, select the folder you want to save the new image to in the "Export Location" window.  I also like to set the image quality to "Maximum" in the drop down menu halfway down the dialog box, but for a smaller file you might want to reduce the image quality.  Next, you can either resize by clicking the "Resize to:" button and sliding the bar or you can watermark the image by clicking the "Add watermark" button and typing whatever you want your watermark to say in the box below.  I suppose you could do both at the same time, though I'm not sure why you would... Anyhow, the only thing left to do at this point is to click the "Export" button.  Note, your original image is unaltered and in its original folder.  Nice and easy, right?  The only problem is, you have a lot less control over the color, location, etc. of the watermark than you would in a program such as Gimp.  As you can see below, the watermark simply appears in white at the bottom of the image.  The second example here shows a resized image. 

This picture shows the mermaid statue in the Old Town Square in Warsaw, Poland.  The mermaid is the symbol of warsaw, and the bronze sculpture dates to 1855.  The town square has been reconstructed more than once, most notably after its destruction during World War II, and the statue, which survived the war, was relocated to the center of the square.

Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (Part II)

As I mentioned in my last post, resizing photographs is a great way to protect digital images from theft.  However, it's by no means the only method, and there obviously times when a tiny photograph just won't do.  Another option is watermarking the images--that is, superimposing a semi-transparent word or image on your photograph (your name being one easy choice).  With some digital galleries (such as imagekind--see my link to my imagekind gallery on the left), you can opt to have the images watermarked upon upload.  However, if you're sharing on a social networking site or your own website, you probably won't have that option. I've been spoiled by sites that do the watermarking for me, and less careful than I probably should be about uploading photos without a watermark to Facebook.  So, I figured it was about time to learn to watermark my own images. 

So, why resize an image when you can just stick a watermark on it and let everyone see your work in all of its full-sized glory?  Well, as you can see below, the watermark is a bit distracting, and some might argue it detracts too much from the beauty of your image.  Assuming that's a risk you're willing to take in order to have a full-sized picture, however, why not just use one of the many handy and free watermarking websites that can be found with a quick Google search?  For me, there are two advantages to watermarking your own work.  First, if you're a paranoid freak like I am, you probably don't want to just upload your photos to any old website--after all, the whole point of going through this is to protect your images, right?  If you're not paranoid, you may still be interested in the added level of control you get from watermarking your own work--you can decide what your watermark says, where it appears on the photo (thereby at least reducing some of the concerns about how distracting the watermark is), the color of the watermark, and how transparent you want it to be.  So, if you're convinced that watermarking is worthwhile, read on, my friend.

In tackling this issue,  ran across a bunch of different explanations and methods of watermarking your images.  The level of complexity varied, but in general I didn't find any of the methods to be quite as easy as my cheater way of doing it.  Yes, I cheated.  What can I say?  It seemed like a lot of the tutorials were making things more complicated than they needed to be.  If you'd like to cheat as well, I'll fill you in on my secret: a simple text box is your friend.  You don't need layers to create a watermark; just open your image, select "text box" from the toolbar on the left (this should load automatically when you open Gimp), and click on the image to create a text box.  You can type whatever you want to watermark your image with in the box, then play around with the color, resize the box, move the box around on the photo, change the font size and style, and so forth until you're happy with the watermark.  Voila!  Let me reiterate a point I made in my last post, though--do NOT save over the original image! Make sure you leave the original unaltered, and save the watermarked image as a copy.  Otherwise you will be very sad when you go to print your beautiful photo and it has a big ugly watermark on it.  Which is the idea for digital pirates, of course!  Now, we'll see if my cheating comes back to bite me when I tackle the issue of resizing and watermarking in batches in my next post. 

This photograph of the Charles Bridge in Prague was taken in December 2010 from the top of the tower on the Old Town side of the river.  Prague is one of the most stunningly beautiful places I've ever been and, though it's freezing in the winter (as you might imagine), the snow on the bridge and roof tops made the city particularly lovely.  I converted this photograph to sepia tone to capture the old world feeling of the city. 

Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (Part I)

From my perspective, one of the more exciting aspects of modern photography is the ability to quickly and easily share photos via the magic of the internet.  It's also a bit frightening.  Don't get me wrong--I don't think anyone (with the possible exception of my mother) wants to steal a picture of me making funny faces while I drink Belgian beer in an unremarkable restaurant.  I also suspect that, for the most part, if someone were inclined to swipe a photo or two, it would most likely be to use as a desktop background or some other innocuous purpose.  However, as I've started trying to sell my photographs (I have to fund my hobby somehow, after all), I've been advised by multiple sources that, in order to protect myself from piracy, I need to take some defensive action.  Rather than learning the art of swordplay, I've been researching how to watermark or resize images.  I've provided an examples of resizing here--the first photos on this blog, incidentally.  Watermarking will be covered in "Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (PartII)".  Being a poor, unemployed, recent graduate student, I am not really in a position to spend oodles of cash on editing software for my photographs--as such, I've been learning to use Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) for my editing needs.  More on editing software later.

So, what's up with this resizing business?  A quick Google search for "resize photos" will turn up hundreds of websites offering to quickly and easily resize your images.  However, as part of this whole learning to do things myself thing, I've read a fantastic tutorial on how to resize images in Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Lite_Quickies/).  You can see the results below.  So, I've explained why resize--to make it more difficult for some malicious person to come along and steal your hard work (and, by the way, this is also a handy trick if your photo is too large to send via e-mail or you're working on a website and you're not happy with how long an image takes to load).  But I haven't yet explained how/why it solves the theft issue.  So, here goes.

You probably already know that when you buy a new digital camera, one of the important specs you will want to consider is the megapixel resolution, with a higher megapixel resolution resulting in a higher quality image.  What you may not know is why megapixels matter.  In simple terms, a digital image is composed of a bunch of squares of color, or pixels.  However, each pixel contains only one color.  So, you can easily imagine that the size and number of pixels in the image will drastically change the quality of the image--where you have a large number of very small squares, the squares will appear to blend seamlessly, and you will see the sum of the squares as an image; where you have a small number of large squares of color (pixels), your eye will detect the squares, and the image will look blocky (a very technical term here, obviously).  Now, thinking back to high school geometry for a moment, to find the area of a rectangle, we multiply length x width, right?  Typically pixels in an image are measured per inch, so to find the pixels per inch, we multiply the number of pixels across that inch by the number of pixels down--the number of pixels in the whole image can then be calculated by multiplying the pixels per inch by the number of inches in the photo.  The term megapixel just means one million pixels--so a six megapixel camera will produce an image with 6 million pixels (of course, there is a lot more nuance to be discussed here, and different settings on cameras will produce different resolutions, but hopefully this discussion is sufficient to establish why pixels matter).  Generally, the larger you want your print/digital image to be, the more (and smaller) pixels you need to hide the fact that the image is really just made of a bunch of squares of color.

That's all well and good, but at this point I'm sure you're wondering how all of this talk of pixels relates to the issue at hand--that of how to prevent the theft of digital images.  Well, if I use my 6.1 megapixel camera to take a photograph and I slap that photograph online without resizing the image, you can easily download the image and produce a print that is just as high quality as the one I could print myself.  However, if I resize the photo by reducing the number of pixels, I'm throwing away some of the information in the photograph so that if you try to print the photo, you will end up with an ugly, blocky image instead of a nice, seamless, high quality image.  Of course, this also limits the size of the image I can post on the website without it starting to look blocky.  I'll close with a word to the wise: as a general rule of thumb, I NEVER alter my original images--and this is especially important for resizing.  Always save a copy of the image--if you save only the resized images, you cannot just go back and add those pixels you threw away.  They are gone forever.  I strongly recommend saving a copy and resizing the copy.  One final note: the dimensions you ultimately decide on (i.e. how small you resize the image) is entirely up to you--the smaller you make it, the worse it will look if someone tries to steal and enlarge the image.  However, you still want your photo to look good online, right?  So play around with the dimensions and find what works best for your needs.  Happy swashbuckling!

Just to give you an idea, this photo is 500x750 pixels, resized from 2048x3072.  The photograph was taken from a window in the Louvre in November 2004 at sunset.