We all have a love affair with our photos. Pictures are how we capture those moments in time that our memory soon forgets. And although our love of pictures started with negatives, slides, and prints, it’s now even more widespread as the world of digital imaging and image editing invades the lives of even the casual picture-taker.
“Image Editing” is what we call the process of fixing and enhancing your pictures using a computer. What use to be reserved for only those that were willing to spend hours in a darkroom, is now available to anyone with a home computer and the few minutes it can take to take an OK image and make it GREAT.
At the Senior Health Foundation computer lab, we offer a wide range of classes on digital imaging, from classes on how to use your digital camera, to sessons on using the popular image editor Photoshop Elements. And we offer the classes, not because it’s “trendy” to do so, but because we love photography and have been doing it ourselves for over 40 years. We really do practice what we preach.
In fact, this next week, on Thursday May 28th, at 1:00pm we are starting our popular Photoshop Elements Basics series, which consists of three classes that help you get stated with the image editing process. And a few weeks later, on June 25th at 1:00pm, we take the process even farther in our More Photoshop Elements series. (An example video of what we teach can be found here.)
But what can you really accomplish on the computer with your pictures? Well, let’s take a look at a couple of Before and After examples.
Here’s a picture of my son Jack that came right off my digital camera.
Picture of Jack before the fixes
In this case, I turned the camera sideways, so back on my computer it needs to be rotated. No big deal, but in looking closely at this picture, Jack has a great expression on his face, which makes the image a candidate for more of a “portrait” look, which is exactly what we did.
Using our favorite image editor, Adobe Photoshop Elements, we took these editing steps:
- Rotate the picture 90 degrees left
- Adjust the brightness and contrast (levels)
- Whiten Jack’s teeth and remove a small blemish from his face.
- Remove background distractions (people) using the clone tool.
- Blur the background
- Sharpen Jack
- Boost the overall color
Here’s what we ended up with, and the entire process took about 5 minutes. No kidding.
Back in the days where we worked in a photography dark room, doing the same thing to this image would have taken hours. And even then, the results would probably not have been as good.
Sure, we’ve done this process a few times, but the fact is that once you learn some of the basic tools and techniques of image editing, just about every good picture that comes off your digital camera can be made to look even better.
And it’s not that hard to do!
But let’s see another example, this time with an older print that shows lots of wear and aging. In this case we had to scan the print (digitalize it) to get it onto the computer before we could work on it. Here is what the original picture looked like:
Whenever you’re intending to fix up an image, it helps to first analyze and even list out all the problems. This picture has lots of them, but we decided that the worst were:
- The image is dark and flat looking (lacks contrast)
- There is a jagged black border around the edge
- The image seems to have yellowed with age
- There are tears
Again using Photoshop Elements, we begin the fixup process. Here is what we do (also called our Worlkflow):
- Crop the image to remove the black border and uneven edge
- Remove the yellow color cast by turning the color saturation down
- Adjust the brightness and contrast (levels)
- Remove the tears using the Clone Tool
Here are the results of our effort. 
Again, the process took only about 5 minutes of time. Had we wanted to, we could have spent even more time and removed some of the dirt and “noise” from the background, and brightened the girls faces even more. But today we were just going for a “quick fix”.
The point is, the ability to get your pictures digitalized onto your computer opens up an entire new realm of possibilities, even to those individuals that are not “photo-heads” or computer “nerds”.
As we mentioned earlier, starting next week and continuing on into June and July, we are offering a series of classes in how to use the popular image editor, Photoshop Elements, to make fixes such as those we’ve shown here, on your images.
We really do have a love affair with our pictures. And it can get even better with a little help from SHF.
Here is a short DiscoverSkills.com video tutorial on how we did the fixes…
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Amazing. Now I want to learn this too! I presume you teach us how to scan a picture on to the computor so we can begin the process. Is this taught in the basic three classes and do I need a “scanner” of some sort? No idea what I’m even asking!! The weather has kept me away from resuming classes and I may wait until spring. Sorry. Why does my cursor (arrow) keep walking off my screen and become unmanagable? It floats all over the place!! Then I can’t even turn off the computor! Donna
Donna… Yes, we do learn these “basic” editing techniques in the first three classes called Photoshop Basics. And yes, we also discuss scanning in that class. As for your mouse cursor… are you using a notebook computer and touch-pad for your mouse? Does it happen all the time, or just when viewing certain web pages?
Thanks for your comment!