HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
MAIL

 
Cropping is no different from rewriting a sentence in your report when you find that it's confusing.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Digital photos, like gems, need polishing to take on their best appearance


March 16, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   Remember when you worked all night on that report for English class? You wrote and rewrote that final paragraph 10 times before you got it just right. You fixed up four or five words that were spelled wrong.
   Imagine how you'd have felt feel if your teacher had told you to go back and do it again because it wasn't an original work -- because your teacher noted that you had "retouched" it by rephrasing the final paragraph and altering the spelling of all those words.
   That would be nonsense, right?
   And of course your teacher would never do that. The effort you put into schoolwork or into projects at home or at the office isn't judged on how it came out the minute you threw it together. It's judged on the final version, the one you slaved over.
   We're used to this. We know the fence isn't painted until you've put the last coat on. Your car's not washed until you've rinsed all the soap off.
   Digital photos are the same way. They often need a few extra steps, a few tweaks, after coming out of the camera, but many photographers are reluctant to make the necessary changes. They leave the photos untouched, exactly as the camera took them, out of a belief that digital photos should not be "manipulated."
   What kind of changes, or tweaks, am I talking about?
   Most important is cropping. Few photos, digital or otherwise, come out of the camera perfectly framed. Cropping the unnecessary and distracting elements from a picture makes a big difference. (A wedding-party photo that sports a "No Parking" sign at the far right, just past your brother-in-law's shoulder, doesn't need to have that sign in the picture, for example. The photographer should crop it out.)
   Cropping is no different from rewriting a sentence in your report when you find that it's confusing. It's an essential part of finishing the project that you started when you picked up the camera and aimed it at your subject.
   Next is contrast enhancement. Many digital cameras have trouble capturing the full range of a scene from dark to light. They do fine with the middle of that range but not with deep dark areas and bright white areas. Simple contrast enhancement fixes them up quickly.
   Good image editing software should have this function built in. It might be called "Auto Contrast" or "Auto Levels."
   The third essential tweak is color fidelity. Your sister's new red Corolla should look like a new red Corolla and not like a pumpkin. When the camera can't adjust the balance of colors right -- when it has a hard time figuring out what is called the "white balance" -- colors simply look wrong. Good photo editing software should have an automatic adjustment for white balance, sometimes called "Auto Color" or "Auto White Balance" or something similar.
   The last important tweak is sharpness. Digital photos often seem less sharp than pictures from film cameras because they have less resolution -- less detail, in other words. Our eyes are fooled into seeing the reduced detail as a lack of sharpness. So a little sharpening can help a lot. (I'll tell you how to get the right kind of sharpness in a future article.)
   Adjusting your image in these four ways doesn't alter the intent of the actual photo. Let me explain.
   Cropping doesn't change the photo's "truthfulness" any more than turning a few degrees to the left takes you out of one scene and into another. Cropping merely removes a distraction or emphasizes an essential part of the scene.
   Restoring contrast doesn't turn a real scene into a faked one, as we surely can all agree. It merely makes the image more accurate. Color fixing, by restoring the white balance, does the same thing.
   Enhancing the sharpness of an image -- making objects in the picture as clear as possible -- can be considered a way of stripping off the haze imposed by the camera. The scene itself isn't fuzzy, so when the camera makes it look fuzzy, your job, as a good photographer, is to make up for the camera's shortcomings. Boosting the sharpness gives the camera back some honesty.
   Can you overdo this sort of thing? Sure. Use common sense. The tools that come with your software aren't just for photo manipulation. They're most useful for photo restoration, even if all you do is make your sister's Corolla look as red as -- well, as red as a new car ought to look.