Rule Number One
It occurs to me that this would be a good time to spout off about my most important rule…and reveal a personal flaw. Some of you are already thinking that spouting off might be one of them. While there are many others, it is necessary to note, following the white balance advice in the last post, that I am color blind. I am among the 5% of the male population that has trouble with reds and greens. I was editing pictures from a wedding and was told that some of my ‘improvements’ made the bride look like a painted hussy…not so good. Consequently, when I think the ‘cloudy’ WB setting gives the image needed warmth, a person with normal color vision might think it looks like kaka. You should see what your settings do and I recommend taking the same shot with all of the WB settings to understand the differences. Why not? The film is free.
However, that does not detract from my Number One Rule…until the next Number One rule comes to mind. That is - ALWAYS take the best picture possible the first time. Get as many of the settings right on the camera BEFORE you take the shot. Do NOT adopt the attitude that says, “I can fix/improve the shot back home on the computer”. Think about the settings and composition so you minimize the editing later. Why? Because every change you make afterwards burns up pixels, shrinks your file and loses information. The size of an edited file is dramatically reduced and will limit what you can do with the image. An example of how images lose information is shown below. On our February trip to Ireland, I got this nice view of Adare Manor in the morning fog. The unedited JPEG shot is 5.04 MB in size.
Adare Manor in the Morning (unedited, 17 February 2011)
Being a novice, I have relied (too much) on the easy, one-step commands that automatically adjusts color balance, sharpness, contrast and saturation. However, all that modification reduced the file to 1.37 MB. The results are often a nice improvement but that has prevented me from learning how to really enhance images in better ways. We’re hoping that will change as this blog develops.
Adare Manor in the Morning (edited, 17 February 2011)
Then I thought about cropping the image to emphasize the manor and the horizontal elements of the shot…and making it black and white. Interesting but now the file is only 497 KB. I best not have any plan to make an enlargement of this one.
Adare Manor in the Morning (edited more, 17 February 2011)
On the other hand, if you have no desire to do anything more than make 3x5 prints and use the images on-line, have fun.
posted by Ted Ringger @ 10:28 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Hey, thanks for the great post! I agree with you wholeheartedly on getting the best photo you can on the first try. Image editors can help you do a lot, but there are a some mistakes they just can't fix.
On the other hand, if you're losing a lot of detail when you edit your photos, something is up with your editing software. You should be able to output an image with exactly the same level of quality as the image that went in. Sometimes, an editing package can produce a smaller file size because it compresses the data better than your camera, but if you are losing detail, check the settings in your editing software.
Good advice. Thanks. I said in the beginning that I am a novice and editing is my weak area. I shoot JPEG/fine and that, plus clear ignorance of what the software can do has had its impact. I need to learn more going forward...which is the goal of this blog.
Yo Ted,
I'm no photographer but I am somewhat of a zeros and ones geek. Maybe the reason the black and white file is so much smaller is because it stores only 32 shades of white to black rather than 256 possible colors.
Whaddya think?
Ted, I ran across these resources you might be able to use.
A discussion of file formats in PaintShop Pro 8 from Google Books and an About.com tutorial on color space. Both file format and color space can affect how large your files turn out, and how much detail is retained or lost.
Hey Jack. I'm not one to be definitive about any of this but my guess is this is all about pixels, which are more than zero's and one's. While the absence of color implies fewer pixels because the green ones are gone, that's not the case since they were replaced by gray ones. The file size is reduced because I cropped away chunks of the original picture [and probably removed the color as well]. Stay tuned.
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