I expect you have often heard the term that photographic software is not for disaster recovery! Adobe PhotoShop will not make a crap picture better. Right well let me go on the record straight away and say I agree fully with those statement. Generally the software is produced so you can enhance, alter, change and manipulate your pictures. Or if it is a big shoot then you can so easily do what used to be done with an air brush. (Warts on models nose, varicose veins)
Yet the stunning truth is it can and should be used for recovery because it can. OK so let me say if you take a crap picture, you can touch it up, fart around with it and maybe you'll end up with something so, so all right. But let us suppose for a minute that you have done a studio shoot with a model and set the flash meter to 100ASA and heaven forbid forgot the last stock you bought was 200ASA. Now with all the preparations you don't notice. OK the pictures are fine, but with everyone a stop out lack a little colour and that bit of sparkle you like to see. Disaster recovery time.
First of all scan the print in and adjust the settings so it looks the same as the original. See below as to what this has given us.
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| This was a very pleasant studio shoot, but when you click on the image you will see the top row of prints are a little lacklustre. |  |
Now these two prints have been adjusted to what I feel the pictures should have looked like if everything had been correct. You can even see a difference in the small thumbnails. |  |
OK I can hear some of you saying that it's unnatural and a print is a print and digitally changing it is unphotographic. Well I say to you that the majority of prints that are made professionally are altered in the darkroom. Dodge, burn, filters in the head etc. Here we are doing those self same things, but without the hassles of doing everything in the dark.
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| I didn't take very long over this correction using the clone tool. Then I used the blur tool just to help fudge the edges. Now if you took your time you could use layers and make a far neater job than I have although it doesn't look too bad at all. | |
Above is something you would need to do with an air brush and not many are that proficient with such a device. Below is a very simple correction using the brightness and contrast. In the original picture on the left the picture is dull and actually makes it hard to see any of the modelling in the lights. When the contrast and brightness are adjusted as in the right hand picture we have a far more dynamic print.
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The best and simplest way is to spend time just playing with the software you have and when you start to find things you cannot do find a tutorial on the web. It used to be fun in the darkroom, but it is messy and bloody expensive. Now you can have all that fun sitting in front of your computer.
©Struthers Web
2000