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Pat Miller Photo. com |
Hey, have you seen my articles about Digital Image Editing and Workflow? See my discussion of the basics and my image editing series Part I through Part V first. Well, I’m ba-a-ck. I’d like to share a few more image editing ideas with you.
When I start editing an image, I may apply some degree of exposure and/or color correction to an entire image. I may use the Levels, Curves, Color Balance or Hue/Saturation tools singularly or in combination on the entire image - "global" changes. Then sometimes I might want to fiddle around with one or more isolated parts of that image. I’ll concentrate on a particular area and make whatever corrections I think are needed in that area. I may want to darken a part of the background, try to create some negative space, to shift attention to the primary subject. And/or I might brighten or increase contrast and/or color on the primary subject to give it more emphasis in the photo.
I apologize for using "and/or" too many times in the above paragraph. But the nature of image editing is that to a large part it’s subjective. It depends on your judgement and taste regarding any particular picture. A certain image may only need a little judicious exposure correction - say, the foreground is a bit overexposed. Or it may need just a taste of color enhancement - you may have a butterflyfish whose color is a bit muted. Or it might need more - maybe you have a muted-color butterflyfish, a really overexposed foreground and a distracting rubble background to boot. So of course there is no firm step-by-step procedure that you can use on every image. It takes practice and judgment gained from experience. Yes, you too can now spend hours in front of a computer monitor!
I might mention a professional computer term here (kids, don’t try this at home): GIGO, short for Garbage In, Garbage Out. I mean you shouldn’t expect to wind up with images to rival James Watt if you start out with crappy pictures. If you are in love with a crappy picture you took of a manta ray because you never took a picture of a manta ray before - keep it to yourself, okay? Don’t waste too much time in your image editor trying to make it presentable. If you have to go to editing extremes trying to make it look nice, it’s probably not going to look natural when you’re done - it will look "Photoshopped." This takes practice and judgment gained from experience.
A typical application of editing only certain areas of a picture is removing or de-emphasizing elements which distract attention from your primary subject(s). Like what specifically? Backscatter is a problem in underwater photography, and digital cameras also sometimes put down specks due to dust on the sensor or other digital noise. To remove backscatter or other specks you basically have to cover the little bastards up. Usually you have a blue water or blue sky or other mostly solid color background, and you use a tool that copies pixels from that region and then paints them over the speck. Use the Clone Stamp tool 
found in many applications including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Or use the Healing Brush 
or Spot Healing Brush, which is easier and gets better results usually than the Clone Stamp when you have an area that’s mostly a consistent color such as a blue water background, because the Healing Brush attempts to blend automatically.
You want to set the diameter of the brush just slightly larger than the speck of backscatter, and then sample an area of unblemished background right next to the offending backscatter, so when you paint it over the speck the copied pixels blend imperceptibly. Sample on a spot by pressing the Alt key and clicking with the left mouse button in Windows, or Option key in Mac OS. Then left-click on the backscatter to get rid of it. Short dabs (clicks) with the Clone Stamp/ Healing Brush tend to blend better than swiping away at it like a paint brush.
If you are trying to remove blemishes in an area that's not fairly featureless, and/or you are working close to an edge where the color and/or textures are different, the Healing Brush may not work very well. So Undo and experiment with another painting tool. Try the Clone Stamp.
Next we get into a more interesting and challenging example of selective image enhancement.
Next: Selective Enhancement of Images - Part II
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