It’s easy to get complacent when shooting with a digital camera. It’s all so easy: line up the shot, press the button and move on.

Get back to base and you download your collection of shots, maybe send some to friends over the Web, perhaps make some prints for the album.

But take a good look at your work over the last year or so. How’s the colour? OK? So so? Or just plain brilliant?

(more…)

Very often, when we upload our pictures to the computer from the camera and first look at them on the screen, they will appear dull and lifeless like photo No.1 on the right.

In this instance the photo is under exposed, often a problem when auto flash is used with a long lens, the flash is too far away from the subject to give the proper exposure.

Here are some suggestions for altering the brightness and contrast of the image in Photoshop, use them in the order that they appear, only move on to the next method if you are not getting what you want.
(more…)

Getting the colour right can be the most difficult part of photo editing but a little knowledge of how the colours are made will make this much easier. On the right we have a ‘colour wheel’ to help illustrate the concepts that you need to grasp.

All colours are made from three primary colours – red, blue and green. Forget what you learned in Art at school we are now dealing with light not pigments.

Where the three colours overlap in the middle of the colour wheel we get a neutral grey (somewhere between black and white depending on the intensity of the colours). I have faked it here slightly for the purpose of illustration.

Where two of the colours overlap they form other colours known as ’subtractive primary colours’. Another way of looking at it is that if you remove one colour from the middle of the wheel you will get a new colour. For example, if you remove red from grey you will be left with a mixture of blue and green, this colour is called ‘cyan’. If you remove or subtract green from neutral grey you are left with a mixture of red and blue known as ‘magenta’. Red and green combine to make the third ’subtractive primary colour’ – yellow. Knowlege of these six colours and how they relate to each other will enable you to correct any colour cast in a picture.
(more…)