Photography Magazine

Correcting colors on an image is one of the most widely used applications of photo-correcting software. Let us take a closer look at how and why this can be done.

The truth is, that any digital camera, however much effort has been put into its color correction and white balance settings; creates a color cast under certain situations. This is thanks to the different ‘color temperatures’ of different kinds of lights.  For example, our everyday tube lights have a ‘cooler’ tone as compared to the ‘warm tone’ bulb lights from incandescent light sources. No auto white balance setting can be so perfect (at least not till today) that it can accommodate changes for a variety of light sources such as fluorescent, neon, bulb, tube light and daylight. Most cameras perform well under daylight. So what do you do when you get an image with a color cast? Well, you open Adobe Photoshop!

Check this image out for instance. The skin tones clearly tell you that it has a yellowish and unnatural tone. Well, we open the image in Photoshop, and then open the color corrections option. In fact it is called color balance in Photoshop, and you can reach this panel under IMAGE-ADJUST-COLOR BALANCE-

This shows you a sliding tool. In fact it shows you 3 sliding adjustments wherein you can adjust the red, green and blue tones - consequently adjusting their complimentary tones of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow respectively. Consider the image in question. We have declared that it has a markedly yellowish tone. This is obviously due to the fact that it was photographed under something like bulb light with the camera’s white balance set to daylight. Most compact camera users never fiddle with the camera’s white balance settings, and this is exactly what you can expect as a result. Anyway, we declare that it has a yellow tone simply by looking at the image.

Once you have the sliding tool open under the COLOR BALANCE option on Photoshop, we need to reduce the yellow. In other words, we increase the blue. Either way you look at it, it has the same effect on the image nevertheless. When we reduce the yellow (and a bit of red as well), the image begins to look much better - in fact we have adjusted it to clearly look much better, almost as if it were photographed under daylight -

 Do keep in mind that the color correction tools cannot have an effect over the exposure (or the brightness level) of the images. It simply replaces one color tone with another of your choice. However, the wrong color balance at times does seem to look like there is a problem with exposure.

Photoshop also has an auto color correct option. Look under IMAGE menu (IMAGE-ADJUST-AUTO COLOR). This works very well at times, but we have learned that one can get much better results by doing the correction manually using the above described process.

Being a black and white buff doesn’t always mean that you have to use film. Modern digital cameras are more than capable of shooting black and white files. Well, that is one way to create digital black and white photographs. The other method would be to first shoot in the normal color mode of your digital and then convert the file to black and white using an editing software. The only downside to the latter method is the fact that you will need to invest in an editing software (lets face it - no decent software is available free of charge). However, using post production techniques to get digital black and white images is by far the better option…for various reasons.

The most obvious advantage would be that you have a color back up. Not every photograph looks ‘better’ or ‘more suited to one’s liking’. When you have a color photograph you could always convert it to black and white at a later stage, maybe experiment with the file to see if the monotone version suits the subject. When you shoot in black and white you have already committed to using that version and there is no way you will be able to reproduce the colors if you wish for it later. Also, when you shoot using the black and white mode of the camera, you are recording only about 256 shades, whereas you are able to record thousands of shades on color. Starting with a color file, you would much better and more easily be able to give the black and white filter effects to the color file (black and white filter effects dealt with in a separate article).

 

To convert a digital file to a monotone, you should get your self a good editing software. We highly recommend that you stick to using Adobe’s Photoshop software for the simple reason that it is a world standard imaging software, and studios and photographers are constantly exchanging and working with the .psd format files. Once you have the file open in Photoshop, all you need to do is change it to monotone using the commands -

Go to the IMAGE menu - select MODE and sub select GREYSCALE

OR

IMAGE — ADJUST — DESURATE

OR

 

IMAGE — ADJUST — HUE/SATURATION (make saturation null)

 

The first option is the simplest to understand, while the second and third have their own applications when you need to create sepia images etc. Once you are familiar with converting images to black and white on the computer, you will no doubt opt to do things this way rather than shoot in color on the camera. You will be able to make convenient comparisons between the color and BW versions of your photographs and then begin to learn what kind of images look better in the monotone format.

 

Once you learn a bit more on Photoshop you will also be able to convert isolated areas of an image to black and white (very common technique in jewelery ads) and add lighten or darken selective color areas on the B/W version. The latter technique is exactly what is achieved on B/W film using color filters.

If you have been following our tutorials on panoramic photography, you were probably able to make near perfect panoramic images, with a little bit of luck. If your photographs didn’t seem to stitch together well, the most probable cause is that you had objects very close to you. Read on…

 

If you have been shooting panoramas hand-held, its about time you started using a tripod. And not just any tripod (although just any tripod is better than no tripod at all). Let us consider an ordinary tripod with a regular camera mounted on it. Try this test - compose your viewfinder image in such a manner so as to have a vertical line close to the camera (say 2 or 3 feet away) and another away from the camera (maybe 6 to 10 feet away). The closer vertical line could simply mean the edge of a near object such as a computer monitor or a fence (if outdoors). Similarly the further vertical line could be the edge of an object or a wall some distance away from your camera. Notice the distance between the two vertical lines in your view finder. Now, turn the tripod head towards the right or to the left while keeping your eyes on the distance between the two (vertical lines). Nine times out of ten, the gap will seemingly increase or decrease as you rotate the tripod head. This is simply thanks to the parallax error caused by the fact the camera does not have its tripod mount socket located at the optic center of the lens. In fact it is not possible to have the tripod mount at the optic center of the lens, since that point is somewhere inside the camera body! To avoid the parallax error, we need to make sure that the camera is mounted to the tripod in such a manner so as to rotate from its optic center when you turn the tripod head. That is the only way you can shoot perfect panoramas.

 

 

 

That is exactly where the panoramic tripod head can help, and it is specifically designed so as to allow you to shoot perfect panoramic images that can be stitched to each other without a problem. The panoramic head usually has a vertical arm and a horizontal arm that allow you to move the camera mount horizontally as well as vertically. To adjust the camera so as to allow it to rotate from the optic center of the lens, you need to mount the camera on the tripod indirectly using the panoramic head (the panoramic head fits on to your regular tripod head). Then you need to, as mentioned earlier, position your camera so you see one near and one far vertical line in the finder. Now, you experiment by moving the camera vertically and/or horizontally until it is positioned in such a manner so as to totally avoid the parallax error. By this we mean, there would be no change in the distance between the two vertical lines when you rotate the camera this way or that.

Ok - you’ve got your self a panoramic tripod head. You’ve aligned it to suit your camera-lens combination (it is a good idea to mark the position of the brackets so you do not have to go through the painful process of aligning your camera and lens every time you have to shoot a panorama). You’ve also found a great landscape or interior location to shoot your panorama. You mount your camera on the tripod using your panoramic tripod head. You shoot your 360 degree (or partial) panorama. Now comes the painful task of stitching together the images on  manual software, right? Wrong! There are dedicated software on the market for this very task. And what’s more, they also publish your images in variable formats. Once you have the shooting mastered, you need to invest into a good panoramic software. This technology was first introduced by Apple USA, on their VR WORX software that played panoramas on the Apple Quicktime player. Today there are a number of software available on the market to stitch and publish your work. We will not deal with any specific software here, but speak of the basic principles behind every one of them. Any panorama software involves the execution of three basic steps mentioned below.

 

The Shooting Stage

This involves positioning the camera and lens on a tripod with a panoramic head (as mentioned in earlier tutorials). Whatever the software you will be using to stitch together your images, it will never work (just as you will never be able to manually stitch the images either) unless the camera was positioned at the optic center of the lens while shooting. Different software will call for different shooting methods - some will ask for images of top, down, left, right, front and back, some will ask for panoramic images shot rotating the tripod head clockwise, etc. But remember, in every case the camera and lens first need to be mounted correctly on the tripod.

 

The Stitching Stage

Now ends the hard work and now begins the fun! When you have photographed the required images, you load them on to the panorama software and click away. Usually the stitching is completely automated while you sit back and relax.

 

The Publishing Stage

Next you will need to publish your panorama… you could choose to publish it as a jpg for print format. On the other hand you could choose to publish it on the web, so as to make an interactive panorama. Interactive panoramas invite a user to click and drag with the mouse so as to be able to ‘look’ this way or that, giving them the feeling of standing in a room or at a location and looking around. This has today become the norm to market real estate in most developed countries. To view the published Panoramas on a web page, the user usually needs a JAVA enabled computer or a FLASH player. But let us not get involved with the graphic design stage…

If you have read the introductory article on Panoramic photography you may wish to give a better, more professional looking finish to your panoramas than to simply stick the images on card. There is of course a digital way to do this. In fact there is more than one digital way. Let us look at the Photoshop way for a start. This is of course assuming that the reader already has a basic knowledge of this image editing software’s applications and controls and commands. If not, it would be pretty difficult to get into digital panoramic photography at all and we would suggest a few weeks oh Photoshop tutorials and practice first.If you have 3 images to be stitched, open them all in Photoshop. Any version of the software would work for this. Check out the size of your images. Make a horizontal box so 3 images would easily fit into it. If your images at 640 by 480 resolution for example, you would want a box of 640 height (at least) and around 1500 length roughly. We will make it the appropriate size later.

Drag and drop all three images into this horizontal box and select appropriate layers to adjust the layers 1,2 and 3 (or however you have chosen to name them) so that they align to make your panorama. More often than not, when you shoot hand held panoramas, your images would probably appear to fit in a zig zag manner, with some higher than the previous and some lower. Do not worry about this just yet. We shall get to shooting perfect panoramas in a later article. For the time being we shall simply crop away the ‘extra area’ using the crop tool on Photoshop, resulting in a neat Panorama’.

Do note that you may have to adjust the tonal values brightness and contrast on certain images for them to match seamlessly. This is more common when you have photographed using the auto mode of the camera, so try and shoot using a manual camera mode (where it is  possible) and set the same exposure for all images of the panorama. Anyway, we shall get back to perfect panoramas later, as mentioned earlier. Let us get the basics first.

So - now we have a 3 ’stitched’ images, with one or more probably out of horizontal level. So, use the crop tool to cut off the additional area and you will have something that looks much better.

Easy wasn’t that? Try and experiment with 4 or 5 or even more images that you stitch using photoshop. You will soon learn to get your images more or less aligned even with hand held photography. Once you have a couple of perfect horizontal panoramas, you could get them printed at a lab and cut away the white area to leave a panoramic print. The prints can then be mounted and framed to decorate your interiors. Remember, like everything else, practice makes perfect where panoramic stitching is concerned.

When you think of panoramic photography, the image of a horizontally long photograph comes to mind. Panorama is nothing new to the world of photography. Its been around for almost as long as the art of photography itself, but it is also true that this form of photography has evolved just like everything else. Let us get into the basics of panoramic photography.

 

Panorama was earlier done using an extra long bit of sheet film and a lens with more than average field of view. If you do not really know what that means, dont worry about it. Today you can make panoramic images with any film or digital camera, and digital does make things easier where image stitching is concerned. On that note, let us learn a little about image stitching which is the basis of panoramic photography. Try this for a start - place your camera on a tripod and shoot your first photograph as you normally would. Then, rotate the tripod head to the right and frame your second shot making sure that the two photographs overlap each other to about 25% at least. You could shoot a third and a fourth image as well. The resulting images would look something like this…

 

 

It is easy to see now, that the 3 images can simply be combined to make one panoramic imahe. But how do you actually ’stitch’ the images together? We shall get to the stitching options later. For this introductory exercise, let us simply make 3 prints and paste them on a hardboard or something similar, so it is understood what is required. Do not be put off if your first attempt does not immediately provide good results. One thing you need to keep in mind is to make sure your tripod head is aligned well. For this purpose, a tripos head with a spirit level would work well. It is possible to shoot a series of overlapping images hand held, with care - but it would never be perfect shooting this way. In any case, if you stitch your 3 or 4 images together by sticking them side by side so that the overlapping areas create a panoramic effect, you would have something like this as a result -

 

 Do note that the images have been photographed vertically so that one has the maximum vertical field of view or coverage. We have the luxury to shoot as many images as needed to cover the horizontal axis, so let us always remember that the vertical axis is not being stitched, and so we shoot with the camera held (or mounted to the tripod) vertically. Go ahead and experiment with image stitching to get the feel of panoramic photography. Every photographer remembers the excitement on creating his or her first pano stitch. The images above have been photographed hand held. One can see where the stitch is not perfect, but this is probably what your first few stitches would turn out as. Try sticking your images on a black card to create exciting panoramic cityscapes and landscapes.

Pentax corporation once more proved itself to be a distinguished photo equipment producer. Pentax has announced about a new DSLR camera Pentax K20D.

The new camera is not just an upgrade of the previous model K10D. K20D has included in itself the newest technologies.
Specially for this camera a 14,6 mega pixel matrix was developed with a size of 23,4×15,5 mm. The main advantage of such matrix is a much better ability to perceive diagonal light rays. It will allow getting better results when shooting with a wide-angle lens and also when using film camera lens that are so popular about Pentax.

New camera is equipped with a Pentax SR (Shake Reduction) system that in many cases will spare photographer from using a tripod or flash. The most valuable thing is that the built-in stabilization system works with all types of Pentax lenses and with all types of threaded lenses attached through lens adapter.

The absolute novelty of Pentax is the Dynamic Range Enlargement technology is used in K20D. It optimizes the dynamical range that allows achieving details clearness in light and shady areas of the picture. The brightness range has grown one EV-level up in the new camera. This will sometimes free a photographer from making doubles in the search of best exposure compromise.

Most photographers really appreciate a possibility of shooting without paying too much attention to the camera. They would be excited to know that Pentax equipped K20D with a LCD screen with the Live View feature. Now you can frame the picture using not only pentaprism viewfinder.

All these features and newest technologies are “packed” into the famous Pentax dust and moisture protected box. Pentax K20D is a camera that will help a photographer to get a high quality picture with a possibility to add some effects in a rather unhurried mode of shooting. Although the speed of Pentax K20D – 3 frames per second – is quite enough for most of professional reporter needs too.

  

The Year 2007 was very successful for such photo equipment giants as Nikon, Canon and Pentax. Their new digital cameras made many professionals to sell their old distinguished cameras to second-hand market. But not many people noticed new small Olympuses. And really unjustly. Mature professionals remember these compact film SLRs and rate them high for a lens quality, small weight and usability. Today to take their place came a line of DSLRs that will definitely add much fame to this brand. The newest Olympus camera is Olympus E-510. Here is its visit card: sensor format – 17.3X13mm (noticeably smaller than all the 10 Mega pixel rivals, this camera although doesn’t really loose in quality of pictures but allow to lower the lens weight significantly). The Live View mode allows framing a picture using digital screen that is new for the leaders of the market and makes such cameras much more expensive. The stabilization system of Olympus E-510 lets you shoot from hands on exposures that are 3-4 steps more continuous than regular. The ultrasound wave filter that protects your camera from dust is built in. Camera is also equipped with a new graphical processor. Shoot speed – 3 frames per second.  

The camera will really suite both a professional and an amateur photographer. And even more likely an amateur because of its price. Olympus E-510 with two very good lenses will cost you not more than a thousand dollar. 

“And what about the lens?” - you will probably ask. People who once used the lens of the Zuiko trade mark will probably say: perfect lenses! We’ve got a zoom lens 14-42 mm – light, compact, comply with 28-84 mm film one (for a remark – the crop factor of Olympuses equals 2). The second one is a zoom Zuiko 40-150 mm complies with 80-300 mm film zoom lens. For most types of shooting these are more than enough.  Although the Olympus engineers thought different and have developed lenses of the “TOP PRO” class. Its price is not low but the quality is corresponding… On the point of view of the author the Olympus professional zoom lenses gathered in itself the sharpness of Zeiss lenses with the flexibility of the Pentax lenses. Anyway to try once is better than to read 100 times.

Since the launch of digital camera, enjoying photography has become a common hobby. Digital cameras are easy to use and affordable. Amateurs have started to use digital cameras more often while professionals use the DSLR or digital SLR.Cameras as we all know, is used for recording images. Point-and-shoot cameras record still images, video cameras are used for recording movements as the name suggest while digital cameras can record both still images and moving pictures. They have become popular because you can capture various emotions, colors, motions and much more.The most commonly used still camera is the 35 mm and it gets its name from the 35 mm film that is used. A basic camera digital or point-and-shoot consists of primarily six basic components. The components are: •

• Viewfinder 

The viewfinder enables a photographer to see the subject. There are basically two types of camera viewfinders. The first type will allow you to look through the lens of the camera while the other will enable you to view at a plane parallel to the camera lens. Viewfinders are there in all single lens reflex (SLR) cameras, point-and-shoot cameras and a few digital cameras.  

 

• Focusing mechanism

SLR and DSLR cameras have another mechanism called the focusing mechanism, which is normally not there in Point-and-shoot cameras. Normally you can focus well using the viewfinder itself but SLR has focusing meters. The second option is to pick up a camera with a removable prism. Professionals also use the Hartmann Mask for focusing purposes. Hartmann Mask was initially devised and used for telescopes. Most cameras these days have auto focus mechanisms that have made focusing much easier.

 

• Shutter

The camera shutter is a device that enables light to enter through the lens for a small period of time to enhance the exposing of photographic film. There are two positions for fitting camera shutters: The different types of shutters used in modern day cameras include leaf shutters, diaphragm shutters, focal plane shutter, projector shutter and central shutters.

 

 

 

• Lens

This is considered to be the most important part of the camera. It is a far more important than the glossy dials and other advanced features that are a part and parcel of modern day digital cameras. A basic camera lens comprises of multiple elements that will help you to add a creative element to your photography. The multiple elements in a camera lens help in directing light to the camera sensors so that it can get a high clarity of the object being shot. The main aim of the lens and its multiple elements is to reduce any kind of aberrations. One of the frequently faced problems is that of chromatic aberration, which can lead to blurring and difficulty in color alignment. This problem arises when the lens is of poor quality.The second most important aspect of a lens is the focal length. The focal length helps in determining the magnification of a subject. It plays an important role in SLR or DSLR cameras. If you buy a wide angle lens then the focal length will be smaller and for a tele-zoom lens, the focal length will be larger. Apart from this, focal length of a camera lens will also determine the depth and the perspective of any image. Here are the different types of focal lengths commonly used in SLR cameras:

Focal Length between 21-35mm: Wide Angle lens: This is used for landscape photography

Focal Length between 35-70mm: Normal lens. It is used for standard/hobby photography

Focal Length between 70-135mm: Medium Telephoto: This is mostly used for Portraiture

Focal Length between 135-300+ mm: Tele Zoom. This is used for wildlife, nature, birds and sports photography

 

• Body

The body of the camera helps in limiting the amount of light that exposes the sensitive film.

 

 

 

 

 

• Films

 

 

 

 

Films are used mostly in SLR and point and shoot cameras. There are different types of films available in color or black & white. Color films include slow films (25-64 ISO), medium films (100-200 ISO), fast films (400-1000 ISO) and ultrafast films (1600-3200 ISO).

There are many other independent and well as in-built parts, which play an important role in the final composition but are considered as secondary factors.