Working with Photographs
Important References:
- Digital Photography:
- A complete guide to digital cameras, digital photography, and digital video
- Digital Photography FAQ
- Digital Photography for the Web
- Digital Photography For What It's Worth
- Infrared basics for digital photographers
- Internet Brothers - Digital Photography Tips and Techniques
- The Textbook of Digital Photography
- Kodak Digital Learning Center
- Scanning:
- Any useful program for dealing with digital or digitized photographs must minimally have levels adjustment and unsharp mask. All of these do:
- Adobe Photoshop is the professional standard
- Photoshop Elements includes the basic functions of Photoshop
- Paint Shop Pro is a capable low-cost program
- Macromedia Fireworks works best for web graphics, but does a decent job on photos
- Corel Draw Graphics Suite includes illustration, photo manipulation, more.
- PhotoBrush is very inexpensive but quite capable
- Some tutorials:
Information
A common workflow for fixing photographs, especially for the web:
- Crop
- Adjust levels
- Adjust color
- Resample
- Unsharp mask
- Save as
Remember always to save a copy of the original, unaltered photograph.
Assignment
Here is a folder full of “bad photos”; photographs that may have scientific merit, but are over- or underexposed or have other issues which make them unusable as they are. Some are scans of slides, some are taken with ancient digitizing software, and some are taken with digital cameras. Your task is to take five photographs, selected from this folder or bad photographs of your own, and make them better, using any or all of the techniques mentioned above, or other techniques. The resulting photographs should be formatted for the web: 400 pixels wide, and saved as .jpg. Discuss with your evaluator how you will submit them (e.g. zip disk, CD-R, email, etc.).