NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, March 2005
Improving Your Digital Photos:
The Three Most Useful Tools in the Digital Darkroom
by Bill Moeller, Vice President
wmoeller@arkansasusa.com
(click to email author)

This article is actually a preview of the program for next month’s meeting. If it reads a little too much like a tutorial with no examples, don’t worry. On March 19, if all goes well, we will get to see it all on the big screen at the front of the room

In the good old days of truly dark rooms, smelly chemical mixes, and critical temperature control, photographers learned to choose their papers and developers to get the right contrast and image density, to crop their photos for best effect, and to use a variety of techniques to otherwise improve the printed image by eliminating some details and enhancing others. They also learned that it was far easier and better to correct any problems in the image at the time of exposure rather than later in the darkroom.

But what if all the problems were not solved at the time of exposure? What do we do then?

Buried in the complexity of image processing software such as Photoshop and Paintshop Pro are three very simple and powerful tools which, used individually or in combination, will in all likelihood meet well over 90% of your image correction needs. For the time being, ignore all the rest and put a little time into mastering these three. You will be amazed at what they can do, and how quickly they can do it.

In Adobe Photoshop Elements, these tools are called "Levels," "Crop," and "Clone Stamp." (Paintshop Pro and others have essentially the same tools, with different names in some cases, and different details in most.) In this article, I will be referring to the names and details as used in Photoshop Elements 2.0.

Levels is used to adjust overall image contrast and brightness of the image. In nearly all cases, it does this by selecting the area of the image that will be rendered absolutely black, then by selecting the area of the image that will be rendered absolutely white, and finally by adjusting the overall brightness of the image. What areas should be absolute black and absolute white, and how bright should the overall image be? That is for you to judge and decide as you use this tool.

To use this tool, go to the Menu Bar at the top of the screen and click Enhance>Adjust Brightness/Contrast>Levels. The Levels window will appear on the screen alongside your image, displaying a histogram of the image and a number of controls. Make sure that Channel is set to RGB, and that Preview is checked. Focus now on the histogram and the three sliders immediately below it; you can worry about the other stuff later if you ever need it. Study the image carefully and note the areas that you believe should be rendered pure black and those that should be rendered pure white. Then grab the left hand slider and move it slowly to the right. When the lightest areas that you believe should be pure black appear as pure black, stop. Now grab the right hand slider and move it to the left until the darkest areas that you believe should be pure white appear as pure white. Finally, grab the middle slider and slide it as necessary to adjust the overall brightness to your liking. If you're not happy at this point, move any or all of the sliders any which way until you are.

With time, you will learn to read the histogram, if you do not already know how. It can be very helpful in analyzing the image and deciding what adjustments to make. You will also learn to use the other features of this tool as you encounter those rare situations which call for them.

Crop is most often used to correct for poor composition and failure to get in close and fill the frame at the time the picture was taken, but it can be used as a very powerful learning tool to improve your composition. Play around with the Crop Tool on some of your images, and you will very rapidly begin to see how you can improve your composition when you take the picture to start with. Why bother? Because filling the frame and composing carefully when you take the picture makes full use of all those pixels you spent your hard earned money for, while cropping just throws them away.

To use this tool, go to the Toolbox on the left side of the screen and click on Crop Tool. Move the cursor over the image and note that it changes to the form of the crop symbol. Left click and drag the cursor to enclose the area you want in the cropped image. If necessary, click and drag on the center, an edge, or a corner to move or change the size of the area to be cropped. Do this until you have a composition, shape and size that you are happy with. Release, and double click within the area and the image will be cropped as indicated. If you want the crop to be in a fixed ratio of width to height, specify a width and height in that ratio in the Width and Height windows in the Options Bar. If you do not want to be limited to a fixed ratio, click the Clear button to clear all windows. In any case, click the Clear button when you start to be sure that the resolution of the original image is not changed as part of the cropping operation. It is better to change the resolution, if necessary, later when you resize to print the image.

Clone Stamp is an extremely useful retouching tool that is used to eliminate distracting or otherwise undesirable elements in an image. It works by duplicating the content of one image area in another that you want to change.

To use this tool, click on the Clone Stamp Tool in the Toolbox on the left side of the screen. As you move the cursor over the image, it will change to a circle of the size of the image that will be transferred. If you don't like the size of the circle, change it in the Size window in the Options Bar. My preferences for the other settings are a large, fuzzy Brush Preset, normal Mode, 100% Opacity, and Aligned. Study the color, texture, tonality, etc., of the area where you want to make the correction, then look for another area where you can copy part of the image to overwrite the area you want to correct. Left click on the source area while holding down on the Alt key, release, then move the cursor to the destination area, left click and drag to overwrite the objectionable part of the image. Try this on a skin blemish on one of your favorite portraits, or on a telephone pole that seems to be growing out of somebody's head, and you will be both pleased and surprised at how smoothly it goes.

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There are many correction tools in the digital darkroom--Photoshop Elements 2.0 has 150 or so, depending on how you count them. Some are more useful than others, but during the past two years--a period during which I have taken some 1500 digital photos--I have used Levels, Crop, and Clone Stamp more than all the others put together. That's why I suggest working first with these three; then, if and when you run into a situation that these won't handle, decide whether to toss the image, do the best you can with these, or branch out and look among the other tools for the solution. This approach, in my view, makes life much simpler, which is not such a bad thing in this digital age.

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