When playing around with editing software there are tons of things you can do. One of the things I never really played around with, until recently, was adding texture to my images. When I first moused over the option I was like huh, interesting. But really? I couldn’t think of any reason I would want to give my pictures a different texture.
That’s because I wasn’t being creative enough. There are tons of ways I’ve used the texture feature recently. I had a picture of an eagle that I wanted to use but it was a little bit out of focus. Not a lot, and it was centered really nicely and the colors were fantastic. After playing with some of the editing options I realized I wasn’t going to be able to sharpen it up so I started playing with the options I was less familiar with. I chose a star texture (as in the stars and stripes) to enhance the image. It worked perfectly! I got a patriotic image that was totally unique. I liked it so much I started using it as a special effect for several different images.
As with any digital manipulation you can eat up a ton of space and fragment your hard drive so I suggest defragging after any lengthy editing session. What is your favorite texture to add to images and what has been your favorite edit?
Photo Credit D Sharon Pruitt
June 19th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Digital Manipulation | Comments (0)
Have you ever taken a picture of something, or someone, only to realize that in the background there was a random piece of litter, or a person you didn’t notice, or a dog bounding after a Frisbee? (long story but let’s just say I watch for random dogs now) Well most higher end editing software lets you erase these types of intruders. Oh yeah. How happy was I when I discovered this little trick? Happier than that puppy and his toy, that’s for sure. I use to try to crop mistakes out but that would sometimes ruin the entire image. Bah. Now I worry a whole lot less what is in the peripheral of my shots (I still worry but I don’t obsess…much).
I’ve erased all sorts of things from backgrounds. I’ve removed entire buildings, street signs, dogs, even people. Yeah. Getting rid of that old boyfriend doesn’t have to be done with scissors now. Hehe. Of course all of those changes can take up lots of space, especially if you are like I am/was and it takes multiple tries to get it right. That’s fine though, just delete the results you don’t like and then defrag your hard drive when you’re done. Less fragmentation means easier editing next time you want to erase something.
What have you erased from your images?
Photo Credit D Sharon Pruitt
June 18th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Digital Manipulation | Comments (0)
One of my favorite things to do after I’ve cropped and centered all of my digital images is to play with the colors. Sometimes I’ll highlight blues or maybe the reds, but most of the time I like to turn them into black and white images. Of course my photo editing software has about seven different versions of black and white, and darn if I don’t like them all. What does this mean? It means that I’ll end up with half a dozen versions of the same image.
Yikes! You wouldn’t believe how much space this can take up. It’s ridiculous, but I have to make all of the versions then line them up side by side to decide which one(s) I like the most. Then I delete the losers. Yeah, I’m OCD like that. All of this saving and editing eats up disk space in my computer and causes the hard drive to look like a fragmentation party. In a bad way. Because I do this with pretty much any portrait shots, nature shots, animal shots, still life shots (what can I say I love black and white images) I’ve found I need to defrag my computer pretty much all the time when I’m in editing mode. Luckily for me, this keeps everything running smoothly so I don’t have to choose between black and white or color — I can have both!
Photo Credit Brian Schulman
June 17th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Digital Manipulation | Comments (0)
As mentioned previously, I love taking digital pictures and then playing around with them. There is, however, a bit of a learning curve when it comes to digital manipulation. I can do some pretty creative things with my editing software (now) but it took me forever to figure out how to take the right kinds of pictures so I’d be able to use the cool effect I wanted. All of this trial and error invariably caused my hard drive to become a fragmented nightmare. Fortunately, some defragmentation and photography advice later and I was good to go.
Once I got really ‘into’ photography and editing one of my first big projects was making a calendar for my dad. After all, I’m his only child and my son is his only grandchild. You can probably guess what the focus of the calendar was, right? Well I wanted cute little collages and adorable borders around some (okay, most of the pictures). You know…like little hammers around my son when he was ‘helping’ grandpa build the fence. Or the little candy canes around the baby with Santa…or the bunny border for Easter pictures. Oops. Getting carried away again. My point is, borders good. The trick is having borders you can use the borders with. You see, if you have only close up shots, your borders will look like they were added as an afterthought, not so good. Conversely, if the subject is too far away, when you crop the image it could become grainy as it is made larger, also not so good.
What I finally learned to do was focus on (and eventually take) images where the subject is centered and at a medium distance. This gave me the most flexibility when cropping and adding borders.
Are you a border addict? What tricks do you use?
Photo Credit D Sharon Pruitt
June 16th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Digital Manipulation | Comments (0)
Everyone loves special effects, right? Well my definition of everyone centers around me, according to my husband, so if you don’t like special effects be sure to let me know so he can get an ‘I told you so’ in. But back to my obsession with special effects for now. I love special effects not only in movies but also in the photographs I take. Of course I didn’t know how cool it could be until I got into digital photography, and more recently, digital manipulation. So freaking cool!
There are several special effects that I will talk about in future posts, but for now I’ll stick to the wow factor. The first digital photo printer I ever used had photo editing software included. I admit, it was nothing like the fancy, high priced, photo editing software out there, but man did it hook me…and hook me hard.
The very first special effect that resulted in my obsessive addiction to photography? I was able to turn my pictures into coloring pages. Wow! How much of a five year old am I, huh? Really though, it was so neat. Yup, when I realized how much fun that was, I started playing around with the program and pictures I’d already taken to see which ones made the best coloring pages (clearly defined objects with nice contrasting colors, if you were wondering).
From there I started to really get into editing images and I soon found all of those cool edits caused my hard drive to fragment. This fragmentation made editing my images ridiculously slow and frustrating after a bit. Fortunately, I realized how easy this was to solve with regular defragmentation. Whew.. what would I do without my addiction?
How did you get into digital photography and editing?
Photo Credit L Marie
June 15th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Digital Manipulation | Comments (0)
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