The Easiest Way to Improve Your Images

I've just totally remade my website and added many new images.  Please check it out at www.dennismook.com.   Thank you.

The easiest way to improve your images is to spend some time with them in an editing program such as Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop, GIMP, Elements, your camera manufacturer's software, etc.  Some very basic tweaks can make a world of difference in your images.  I don't ever send out, post on my website or this blog, or send to my stock photography agency any images in which I don't do some basic editing.  Unlike in the days of color film when we had no control over any of these parameters, take full advantage of the digital process to improve your images.

Even if you are not good with editing software, here is what I would recommend to improve your images.

Cropping
Straightening the horizon
gamma correction (does you image need to be a bit brighter or darker?)
color correction
contrast improvement (more or less contrast)
noise reduction (both luminance and color, especially if shooting with a high ISO)
capture sharpening (very subtle sharpening to counteract the effects of the digital capture process

Here are two images.  The first is straight out of the camera and the second is with the basic processing above.  Huge difference in how much better the second one looks.

Then, if you are going to send your images to the web or to friends, I suggest you resize your images sharpen for web viewing based upon size

That is about it for most of your images.  You would be pleasantly surprised at how much better an image will look.  That being said, there are many other options in editing software that you can use if necessary.  But, if you are "getting it right" in the camera, you probably won't need to use those options often. 



Options, such as highlight and shadow adjustments, vibrance and saturation, vignetting to darken the corners of the image and other controls can be used if necessary, but that really isn't the subject of this post.

One additional thing to consider.  If you are making your images using RAW (as recommended 95% of the time), the camera only records the electrons that fall on the pixels.  What you see is the embedded JPEG image in the raw file.  To make it look better, or closer to your liking, or if you are making images using one of the JPEG settings, look closely at your camera's menu system where you can set saturation, contrast, color, sharpness and other parameters.  If making images as JPEGs, you may want to tweak those settings so the image comes out as close to your preferences as possible.  But, be cautioned.  The camera's software will be processing the image in your camera and will reduce the flexibility you will have in making changes in your editing software later.  I always felt that editing software is much more sophisticated and much better at achieving the tweaks I want rather than some baked-in settings made by the relatively primitive software that is in the camera.  Make sense?

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook


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