This is a collection of pieces of advice to make your everyday photos more enjoyable to look at; a little more with every post. These are only bits which do not claim to be complete, but are rather all you need to know at that moment.
I assume my readers are non-professionals who are interested in capturing their memories in the way they have experienced them, instead of how their camera device automatically suggests an output, thereby speaking of using anything from a mobile phone to an auto-set DSLR.
About the author: I am
Mareen Fischinger, a
professional photographer, living and working in Düsseldorf, Germany.
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(Please note that I know nothing about certain camera models and do not see myself in a position to give any shopping advice.)
When editing in Photoshop, I feel like I’m able to manipulate it the same I would a jpg, no more.
(Submitted by iwrite)
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When you shoot in RAW Format, you will be able to get a lot more out of the photo you took than having it already narrowed down to the information a JPG can take.
With JPG, a final (and compressed) format, you cannot save such a large range of contrast/brightness and colors. The raw file is like a negative that you can still influence when it is being interpreted into a JPG. For example, see these two “prints” of the same raw file. The first one might have been your JPG, the one where you messed up the settings and thought you lost quite some information in the brightness and color (too bright and all greenish) to bad exposure – The second one is what you can still make of it!
For example, white balance can be done later and you can pick the area of brightness and contrast which is appropriate for your photo from lots of information stored. It will remember what you told it to do when you save the file your raw converter creates, but it will not overwrite your raw file, ever.
Of course, raw files are much larger and not for everyone. You should not give them out of hand and always convert to a format like PSD, JPG etc., so that the photo can be final.
Mareen
(Sorry for the absence…)
Your camera is set up to show you an image that becomes an exact shade of 50% gray when you blend all colors together. At the same time, it is trying to give you everything in a contrast ranging from black to white.
The (left) histogram below represents the amount of black, dark gray, gray, light gray til white. See how it flattens up against the too dark and too light? This way you can tell that there is no over- or underexposure.
When the sky is bright, and the sun does not shine on the object you would like to photograph, move your camera down to let the software in your camera adjust to showing contrast within the darker object and then quickly move it up to the original frame you were looking for to take the photo (with an overexposed sky).
The untouched histogram on the right shows this in having a large amount of white and hardly any black.
Now your photo will be brighter in the foreground, how you wanted it.
Not so advisable.
If you shoot in direct sunlight and do not have a bouncer or fill flash handy, you will have to deal with shadows under the eyes, nose, chin etc. and it just does not look good. Leave alone them squinted eyes.
Genrally speaking, a non-genuine photo is probably best taken in the shade.
There are two types of shade:
1) An overcast day, which is the better solution.
2) If your photo is taken in the shadow cast by a building or tree, your camera will quickly adjust and the scene will look natural and not dark or cold at all, as long as you have no streaks of strong and bright sunlight interfering.
