SHOOT IT RIGHT FROM
THE START AND GET BETTER
IMAGES FOR USE IN THE
COMPUTER
Text And Photography
By Rob Sheppard
While
everyone knows Photoshop
is a marvelous imaging
tool for photographers,
in some minds it has been
transformed into a magic
wand, with powers beyond
imagination—you don’t
have to shoot the image
perfectly initially because
you can always fix it in
the computer. As good as
the digital darkroom is,
the old acronym about computers
is still important to remember:
GIGO (garbage in, garbage
out). Paying attention
to the craft of taking
the picture is also about
using Photoshop and other
image-processing software,
because how you first capture
your subject tremendously
affects what you can do
in the computer and how
you do it.
Use the following tips
to get the most from your
digital camera from the
start. These suggestions
will help you, whether
you go to Photoshop or
print directly from the
camera to a printer that
allows that.
1.Be
wary of underexposure. A popular myth among digital
photographers basically
says that images must be
underexposed to protect
highlights from being blown
out. On the surface, this
is a good idea. Once their
brightness passes the threshold
of a sensor, there’s
no detail. But what I’ve
seen is an overcompensation
of this idea.
An underexposed image can
be lightened in the computer,
making the color brighter,
but that doesn’t
exactly reveal the original
color. As a color is underexposed
and gets darker, the sensor
doesn’t respond the
same to the chroma, or
actual color information
in the image. There’s
less chroma with the underexposed
color, offering less color
to work with when processed
in Photoshop.
2.Get
what you pay for. A sensor is designed to
respond to a certain tonal
range from black to white
in an image. If the full
range of the sensor isn’t
being used when the image
is captured (underexposure),
some of the camera’s
capabilities haven’t
been used—capabilities
that you paid for! A sensor
also does its best job
of capturing bright colors
if they’re exposed
to keep their inherent
brightness registering
fully on the sensor.
3.RAW
is no substitute for shooting
it right. Underexposing forces tonalities
into a smaller range, which
especially affects darker
tones and colors. When
pro-cessed, these tones
can be expanded, but this
increases contrast. Subtle
tonalities can be lost.
A lot of photographers
say “so what” to
this because they shoot
RAW, but I guarantee that
if you shoot a test that
includes subtle colors
and tones, you’ll
see them change when you
compare images with proper
exposure versus processed
underexposure.
4.Avoid
increasing noise. The latest digital cameras
do a remarkable job of
controlling noise and allow
higher ISO settings with
less noise nearly across
the board. The challenge,
however, is that noise
is best controlled at proper
exposures.
Underexposure always increases
noise, at least to a degree,
and as underexposure increases,
noise can increase dramatically.
I’ve seen the same
camera deliver a nearly
noise-free image when exposed
properly, yet when underexposed,
the noise increases so
much that you’d swear
the ISO setting was changed.
5.Minimize
banding. The
smaller tonal range represented
by an underexposed image
must be expanded when processed
in Photoshop. This expansion
can cause banding because
there isn’t enough
tonal information left
to smoothly cover certain
tonality variations. Since
JPEG starts out with much
less tonal information
than RAW, this can quickly
present a problem in that
format (although banding
can occur in RAW, too).
If JPEG is carefully exposed,
you can get an excellent
image file that can be
well-processed in Photoshop.
6. Overexposure
is bad, too. Overexposure puts
details too high in the
tonal range. When highlights
themselves start losing
important detail, there’s
no magic in Photoshop that
can bring them back. Overexposure
can also make colors go
too high in the tonal range.
They lose color up there,
too, so when they’re
darkened, they look gray
and lack their normal saturation
(if they have any color
at all).
7.Expose
to use the whole tonal
range of your sensor. After using a digital camera
for a while, you learn
to judge good exposure
from the LCD, although
this little monitor alone
isn’t the best for
doing that. Two resources
found on most digital cameras
help: overexposure warnings
and the histogram. Overexposure
warnings are typically
blinking areas on the image
where highlights are either
gone or close to overexposure.
The best way to deal with
them is to decrease your
exposure until either they
disappear or they’re
only present in small,
unimportant areas. Don’t
overcompensate and go an
extra stop or two under
just to be sure the highlights
aren’t blown out.
The histogram is an important
tool for photographers.
This graph of data should
avoid large gaps at the
right side, a sure sign
you’re not fully
using your sensor’s
capabilities. You want
to move the histogram toward
the right, as long as important
highlights don’t
block up or clip (seen
on the histogram as a sharp
drop-off at the right),
even if the photo looks
too bright in the LCD.
You can always make properly
exposed highlights darker,
but if underexposed shadows
have to be opened up, you’ll
find noise and weaker color.
8.Sharpness
comes from shooting sharp. I can tell
you from experience in
judging many photography
contests with thousands
of entries that achieving
the highest level of sharpness
can be challenging for
many photographers. I’ve
seen fine photographs that
don’t quite make
it because sharpness was
a little off.
Most photographers work
to avoid the distinctly
blurry or fuzzy image;
I’m talking about
the difference between
a crisply sharp image and
one that’s almost
sharp. The latter often
looks sharp if seen small
on the computer monitor
or not compared directly
to another image that’s
truly crisply sharp. If
you enlarge the photo to
small details, you’ll
find tiny highlights that
are crisply sharp in the
sharpest photo. On the
sort-of-sharp picture,
you’ll find these
highlights are degraded
and no longer crisp. This
is reflected in the overall
photo by giving a duller
image with less sharpness.
9.Think
ahead as you shoot. As you learn more about
digital photography, you’ll
begin to alter the way
you photograph in order
to get the most from the
subject. You’ll think
about the shot in terms
of exposure, color, noise
and more so that you’re
dealing with the best image
you can get for work in
the digital darkroom. This
isn’t a new idea.
Ansel Adams called it visualization.
In his book The Camera,
he defines it as “the
entire emotional-mental
process of creating a photograph…it
includes the ability to
anticipate a finished image
before making the exposure,
so that the procedures
employed will contribute
to achieving the desired
result.”
10.Compose
to get the best shot from
the start. Visualization or planning
of your shot should include
getting the best possible
composition of your scene.
If you casually shoot a
scene knowing you can correct
composition in the darkroom
by cropping or rotation,
that image hasn’t
been fully visualized.
The question comes, then,
that if the composition
was missed, what else was
missed when taking the
picture? In addition, there’s
little sense, to me, in
making more work in Photoshop
than necessary.
This article is based
on an excerpt from Rob
Sheppard’s
book, Adobe Camera
Raw for Digital Photographers
Only. His Website is
www.robsheppardphoto.com.
