Greek Shrine

• Link to step one of this set of posts
• And to step 2

Step three: learning to edit.

OK you have been taking lots of photos, you’ve been using jpeg + raw as your file formats. And you have been using the jpeg files to upload and do any printing. You are now ready to move up to some editing on the files. You can start with edits on your jpegs but in some ways that can be more difficult than editing raw files. Jpegs can take light editing, some sharpening and maybe some tonal adjustment. But any serious editing will cause the images to develop very ugly artifacts like banding and posterization. We will get into that when we talk about raw files in another post. Right now lets list some of the available free editing software on the web. So far as I know these editors will only work on non-raw file formats. Jpeg and .tif formats mainly. Some of the best known are:

• Paint.net an excellent light editor for Windows developed by MS but now open source
• Photoscape another pretty good Windows editor
• Serif Photoplus another Windows editor
• Adobe Photoshop Express online editor (this is not Photoshop) but it comes with 2 GB of free storage.
• Picnik a web based editor.

And Mac users have a freebie that is included on their system, iPhoto or some such. Your camera also may have come with free editing software of modest capability. Canon cameras come with DPP and Nikon users can get the pretty good Nikon editor but it isn’t free.

Paint.net is an open source project and it has developed a large community of developers who are supplying a good variety of plugins which have greatly extended the capability of the basic product. This is a good choice for a basic editor.

Adobe Photoshop Express comes with 2 GB of free gallery space, and a free photoshop.com address, and it connects directly with Flickr, Photobucket and some other online galleries. The tools allow you to do basic editing like sharpening, cropping, resizing and other simple tasks. These are implemented with a wizard type interface which is simple and easy to use. If you select one of the tools you will see a string of thumbnails at the bottom of the image showing how different levels of the tool will affect the image. You click on the thumbnail to apply that level of the adjustment.

Editors with raw support.

Sooner or later you will want to move to real editor. And the three best supported editors are:

• Photoshop Elements 7
• Adobe Lightroom 2
• Photoshop CS4

Why Adobe products?

Why do I limit the list above to Adobe products? The primary reason, in my mind, is the fact that there is a vast online support community for these products. You will find literally thousands of online websites, tutorials, podcasts, and video tutorials on these editors. If you participate in online lists almost all the users will be using one or another of these products and you will easily get help when you get stuck. I have never failed to find a number of online tutorials or other help when I use Google to search for a way to do something in one of these apps.

Besides online user help Adobe itself provides a very comprehensive online support capability including forums and user groups and there are literally hundreds of published books available on each of these editors. Amazon shows 183 books for Photoshop CS4 and 202 books available for Photoshop Elements 7. Corel Photo Paint X3 by contrast has 3 books available. GIMP 2.6 has 14 books. Apple Aperture 2 has 26 books.

Elements

PSE 7 is the current version of Photoshop Elements and it will allow you to do raw file conversions and just about all basic editing on your images. PSE has a lot of wizard type interfaces to guide new users. And it comes with a pretty good photo organizer. I think this is the best choice for new users who need raw support or who want better editing capability. If you work at developing your editing skills you will eventually start wanting to do things that cannot be done in PSE and that is the time when you should start thinking about moving up to Photoshop. A good online community for PSE is found at this PSE group.

Some good introductory books:

• The Photoshop Elements 7 Book for Digital Photographers by Kloskowski
• Advanced Photoshop Elements 7 for Digital Photographers by Andrews

Lightroom

Some people find Lightroom to be a middle ground between PSE and Photoshop. But it seems like every Lightroom user I have heard from also owns Photoshop and uses that for the more intense editing procedures. Lightroom is aimed at production photographers, people who need to batch process large numbers of photographs. Perhaps someone who is shooting senior portraits by the hundreds. You can easily apply the same corrections to an entire batch of shots. This is possible in PS but not as easy and I’m not sure how well it would work on large batches. LR also has a very powerful photo archiving ability, it makes it easy to find your photos whether they are on your hard drive or have been moved to an external storage device. LR has the same raw converter as Photoshop: Adobe Camera Raw. Lightroom lacks the ability to select certain parts of the image and apply effects just to the selected area. That is when LR users move over to PS. Glenn Michell has some thoughts on the two.

Online support: Yahoo Lightroom group

Some good introductory books:

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers by Kelby
• The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Evening

Photoshop

Photoshop is simply the best editor available. Over the years many competitors have attempted to catch up with PS but they never succeed. I think the reason that they fail is this: they usually come up with a fairly good basic product. Maybe something in the PSE range plus a few more features. But to catch up with the vast capabilities of Photoshop they need a large group of programmers and time to write and debug all that code. So they need to sell copies of their first effort to finance the further development and they always seem to run out of money before that happens. Now PS is the best, but it also has a huge user community who has been using it for a decade or more. As new features are added many of those users are used to the arcane and difficult user interface and vociferously resist the least change in the way things work in PS. That means that new features are grafted on to the current user interface making it that much harder to learn. Old features never go away. John Nack has commented on this built in resistance to change from the user community.

Adobe of course has the large developer force, time and money to make sure that they stay far ahead of any competition. They have been steadily adding more power and capability to each new version. And I have yet to feel like a version upgrade is worthless from them. New versions are on a three year schedule lately. So Photoshop is difficult to learn, partly because of all the baggage it is carrying around from the past. It is also darned expensive, about $650 US for a new purchaser. Upgrades are running around $200 every two years.

Also Photoshop has a schizophrenic nature, it is both a graphics editor for graphical artists and it is a photo editor. Photographer may well never use many of the tools in PS since they are targeted at graphic artists. But it can do things that no other editor can do, and it can usually do those things in many different ways. But that will come at a cost to you.

Lynda.com has many online tutorials for PS (as well as many other applications) and they have 30 plus hours of video tutorials just on learning how to use the selection tools in PS. 30 hours for one feature. I watched them and worked thru the examples but still don’t think I understand everything about the tools. So this is why I urge people not to spend that $650 unless you are sure that you are ready to tackle this difficult editor.

A major online community for PS can be found at: listmoms

Good books for CS4

• The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers by Kelby
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop by Schewe

Editing webpages

There are some excellent websites that cover editing technique. Like mostsites they are specific to Photoshop but if you know your editor you can probably adapt the techniques to your editor.

Cambridge in Color which is Sean McHugh’s site is one of the best that I know of. It has a slightly technical reading level but has very good coverage of a most basic Photoshop techniques. Be sure to look at Sean’s photo galleries while you are there.

The Light’s Right the site owned by Glenn E Mitchell has a great set of tutorials that probably a bit more advanced than Cambridge. He has a 300 page ebook on sharpening for example. There are also a number of video tutorials. The essential read on this site is the ‘pop’ series of articles but you will want to read more than those. Mitch also has a blog and some excellent photo galleries.

The Luminous-Landscape is owned by Micheal Reichmann and a lot of other writers often contribute including Jeff Schewe. He has a set of video Magazines that can be downloaded (not free) that have some intensive looks at various aspects of photography. He also has the best intoduction to Printing and Color management that I have seen. It’s a 6.5 hour video which he sells on site. This is call From Camera to Print, and it is on the advanced side and probably of little value unless you have Photoshop and a serious printer.

There are many guides and tutorials on this site but they are not as well organized. You have to look for the gems. The trip is well worth the effort. Try the Understanding series.

Commercial Tutorials

Lastly let’s look at the two major commercial tutorial sites.

The first is Lynda.com. They offer a wide variety of video tutorials covering most Adobe and many other software packages. The instructors are excellent on the whole and the price is reasonable: $25/month for full access.  Lynda is mostly limited to software training tho they have a few more general photography sets. You can get a free month of Lynda as a gift when you register CS4. The courses range from the basic to the advanced and can get very advanced.

KelbyTraining is Scott Kelby’s site and I have only used it when they were offering a free look when they started up. At that time I thought it was very limted and Nikon centric, but I hear that they have added many new instructors and have photographic technique as well as software training courses. Cost is $20/month. I’ll give it another whirl sometime soon. Kelby is the author of many very popular photography books and his books often live at the #1 position on Amazon.

And that wraps this post up.

Big Cypress

New Users Corner

It’s here

Your spiffy new DSLR has arrived and you are wondering, what next? Naturally you will charge up the battery and head out to do some shooting. But if you are new to DSLR cameras the results may be disappointing when compared to your old point and shoot.

Why is that true? Because unlike P&S cameras, DSLR cameras demand that you do a lot of the thinking that the camera did for you when you used the less powerful model. DSLRs are not just bigger and more expensive point and shoot cameras even though camera manufacturers advertise them as if that was the case.

If you feel a burning desire to buy some things for the camera then get a couple of extra batteries, Sterlingtek is a good place to find them at less than a quarter of the cost from your manufacturer. You can find them on Amazon and eBay too but won’t know who you are buying them from.

A couple of extra memory cards is a good idea. 4 GB is a good size to my way of thinking. That will usually hold a day’s casual shooting but it doesn’t hold so many shots that it would be a disaster if something happened to the card. If it gets lost or ruined in some way. NewEgg is a good source as is Amazon.

If you are using the high speed UDMA Flash cards then you will want a fast UDMA Card Reader. Otherwise a slower but cheaper USB2 Card Reader will do. I never have thought it makes much sense to use your $1000 camera to do the job a $18 card reader can do faster.

Getting a Cleaning Kit is also a good idea. I like the Giotto Rocket blower as the first line of defense against dust on your sensor.

I would wait to buy lenses or other major accessories. You of course need to decide what you need and when. But the way you look at these items may change a good deal in the next few months. You could buy something and then come to regret the purchase as you learn more.

The three steps

So to become master of your new camera and to learn good photographic technique you need a plan of action. And I have a three step plan for you:

• Step one–learn how your camera works.
• Step two–learn basic photographic technique.
• Step three–learn post process editing for your files

By taking this process in small bites you can make noticeable progress and see that your photographic skills are improving.

Step One

Learning how your camera works can be a tedious process. The first and really vital step in this process is to do the dreaded: read the manual. Find a quiet place where you can have an hour or so alone and get the manual in your hands and the camera in your lap. Read a section of the manual and then find the things that were mentioned on your camera that you have in your lap. Try the different functions and menu items. Do this a section at a time, it may take several sessions.

Now you will not remember all this stuff. But you will recall that there was a way to do something that you are puzzled about and you will be able to find it in the manual weeks later. I carried the book in my camera bag for the first year after I got my first DSLR. And should still be carrying it since I frequently need to look up items four years later.

I have heard of people photographing the manual and saving it on a memory card so that they can pop the card into the camera and read that section on the LCD. That was a step too far for me.

I actually worked on doing a section a week for months. I’d work on recalling how to set focus points one week, and I’d do white balance the following week. Even tho I had 20 years of using SLR cameras, before I bought my first DSLR, all these complex functions were new to me.

While this is going on, visit your camera manufacturers website. They will have a lot of training material available. Usually in short video clips.

• Canon Digital Learning Center
• Nikon Digital Learning Center
• Sony Tutorials
• Olympus Digital School
• Pentax Pentaxian site

If your manual is just too confusing there are third party books on a lot of camera models. I have not read any of these but I have occasionally heard comments from people who seemed to find them useful.

• Short Courses
• Digital Field Guides
• Magic Lantern Guides

And you can just get on Amazon and search for your camera model in books or videos.

Shoot, shoot and shoot some more

While all this is going on, keep on shooting. The more the better, and look at your work after you have a shooting session. Think about how you could improve your images. Remember once you have a digital camera it costs you nothing to take photos. I estimate that it took me 1500 shots or more before I thought that I had a basic grasp of camera operation.

During this step I think you are better off learning about your camera than you would be trying to learn shooting modes. However using jpeg modes on your camera teaches you nothing. What does the camera do exactly when you put it in night mode or sports mode? Most likely you won’t have any idea, and how can you learn from that?

So I suggest putting your camera in program mode, your camera may call it P mode. That is something for you to check in your manual. The camera will also probably select focus settings for you. Leave the other settings at default settings unless you have a reason to change them.

Set the file size to large jpeg and you may want to think about using the raw+jpeg file option if your camera supports that. This might be especially important if you are shooting some event that is important to you. The camera will then save two copies of each image file. One as a large jpeg and one as a raw file. Don’t worry about the raw files now, but later when you learn how to post process your images, you could go back and reprocess those shots. So just save those files for the time being. For now just use the jpeg files to email or get prints made.

The camera will probably set the metering mode to evaluative which is fine at this stage. Concentrate on learning to frame shots and understanding your camera.

OK are we ready to move on to the next step? That will be in the next post.

Making a Cheap Flash Diffuser

Direct Flash can be harsh and make for ugly shadows. There are products on the market to get around this problem, Fong’s Lightsphere (about $60) and Demb’s diffuser ($35) for example. But being cheap I decided to make one that is good enough, for $1.13, and a little work. I’d say it took me about 10 minutes, total, to make my version.

I was at the local supermarket and saw these at 3 for $3.39. There had been a thread running on one of the email lists that I read, about diffusers and these seem to fit the bill for making one.

rubbermaid twist and seal box

RUBBERMAID 16 oz TWIST&SEAL BOWLS 3@$3.39

They have nice external ribs that I thought might add a bit more diffusion but are also almost transparent. When I got the home I assembled the tools I needed. Just a magic marker, an art or utility knife, and a small piece of sand paper.

parts

BOWL, KNIFE, LID and SAND PAPER

Hold your flash down on the top of the bowl and trace around the head with the magic marker. Then carefully go around the marked area with the sharp blade. Cut to the inside of the mark otherwise the hole can be too large depending on the thickness of your marker. Do not try to cut thru in one slice but make shallow cuts until you work your way thru the plastic. The material seems to be just a bit brittle and cutting thru in one cut might cause cracks in the plastic. Check the hole for fit on the flash head. It fits snugly on mine but I had to do a little trimming. If you make a mistake you have two more lids to work with.

Next I took the sand paper and just roughed up the inside of the bowl to make a frosted surface. It probably doesn’t matter but I tried sanding in different directions to make a more random pattern of scratches. I think this will increase the diffusion effect over the almost transparent plastic. Then I just slid the lid on the flash and screwed on the bowl.

Final assemby

DIFFUSER ON MY OLD SB-26 FLASH

You can see the frosted effect on the final version. All these shots where taken with the flash and diffuser except for the last one which was with the camera pop-up flash.

You may notice the velcro around the flash head on my old Nikon SB-26 flash. That has a purpose which I’ll talk about in an upcoming post.