PART TWO: EDITING YOUR PHOTOS

Sometimes the difference between an image that'll never leave your hard drive and a gorgeous frame-worthy photo is a few simple tweaks.

1. KEEP YOUR ORIGINALS SAFE

When you edit your photos, always work on a copy, not the original. You never know when you might need that original, either because you’ve messed up or you want to apply a completely new effect. In ordinary image editors, you should get into the habit of doing a “Save As” as soon as you’ve done any work on the photo. In nondestructive programs like Aperture, Lightroom, and iPhoto, the original image will always be available, but it needs a bit of digging out, so even here it can be useful to make a duplicate just so that the original is there right alongside it as a before-and-after reference. You should also keep backups, and with the advent of Time Machine, there’s just no excuse not to. If you’re using a pre-Leopard version of the Mac OS, you could use the older Backup utility instead. Alternatively, check out your editor’s help file—many programs have a built-in backup option.

Back up your Mac, including your photos. Losing them is a heart-crushing experience we hope you never have.

2. FOLDERS AND FILENAMES

The filenames used by digital cameras don’t mean much to humans, but you can rename them once they’re on your Mac. Most organizing apps have simple batch-renaming tools (if not, grab the free Rename utility from pathossoftware.com), so just choose a system that makes sense. This could be as simple as a batch number followed by a photo number, which keeps them in chronological order.

Plus, digital cameras usually reset their file numbering system when you erase or format the memory card. So when you transfer another batch of pictures to your Mac, they may have the same filenames as photos you’ve already got. Not a problem if they’re in separate folders, but if you try to move them into the same location, you could inadvertently overwrite an earlier set.

Built-in batch renaming is handy, but if you use iPhoto you don't have to bother.

Once you dump your photos into a cataloguing tool like iPhoto or Aperture, you don’t have to worry about folder and filenames—just use the software to create album names and photo titles.

3. HISTOGRAMS AND LEVELS

Histograms look technical, but they’re actually easy to understand, and can tell you very quickly what’s wrong with a photo, whether you can fix it, and how to do so. Just about all image editors offer a Levels dialog, and this should always be your first stop when trying to fix a problem.

Diagnosing histogram/levels problems is pretty straightforward. The histogram is a chart showing how many pixels there are at different brightness levels, from solid black (at the left edge) to brilliant white (at the right). If the histogram doesn’t quite reach the left-hand end, it means the photo doesn’t have any true black tones, so it’s going to look pale and washed-out. If the histogram doesn’t quite reach the right end, it means the picture doesn’t have any true white tones, so it’s going to look dingy. You just drag the levels sliders to line up with the ends of the histogram, which expands the histogram to fill the full tonal range. This boosts the contrast, saturation, and overall vividness, and can often fix problem photos at a stroke.

Nudging the levels sliders in from the edges of the histogram can do wonders to fix your photos.

On the other hand, if either end of the histogram is a solid black line—which means it’s “clipped”—there’s nothing you can do. You often get this if the photo has been overexposed or underexposed, and it means that the shadows or highlights are so blown out in some portion of the photo that an image editor can’t save the day. But at least you’ll know what’s happened and be more careful with the camera exposure next time. And although a clipped histogram is bad news, it tells you not to waste any more time trying to fix the unfixable.

4. SHARE YOUR PHOTOS!

The problem with digital photography is that your pictures never have a physical form—unless you do something about it, all they’re ever going to be is files on your hard drive. Printing can be expensive, but if you send your best shots to an online lab, it’s much cheaper than doing it yourself, and less work. All you do is upload them and then wait for them to arrive in the mail. You can also get enlargements of your favorite pictures, and the sizes available go way beyond anything you could print at home.

To share photos without spending a dime, create an online album using free services like Google’s Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, or Facebook. And don’t forget slideshows using Lightroom, Picasa, Aperture, and even iPhoto, which has amazing built-in slideshow themes. Even better, you can export your slideshows as movies, then upload to YouTube. Taking pictures is only half the process—sharing them afterwards is the real point!

MobileMe's galleries are gorgeous and an easy upload from iPhoto or Aperture.

5. CREATIVE CROPPING

We’re quick to experiment with crazy effects, but how often do we crop our photos? And yet it’s really important to think about your picture’s composition right at the start. Do you need all that extra detail at the edges? Is it straight? Would it look more exciting on a slant? This is one time you get to use your creative skills when editing, instead of getting hung up on sliders and percentages. Remember a few guidelines, like the rule of thirds, wherein you mentally divide your photo into a 3x3 grid and position the subjects on those lines and where they intersect.

Spice up a standard snapshot with an interesting crop.

The other reason for cropping is to achieve certain aspect ratios, or the width of the picture compared to the height. The aspect ratios of common print sizes are often different from the aspect ratio of your camera’s sensor. Most compact digicams have a 4:3 aspect ratio, but 4x6 prints have a wider 3:2 aspect ratio, which means the top and bottom edges of your shots will be cut off. So if you’re producing fixed-size prints, cropping your photos first means you get to choose what’s cropped off, not the photo lab.

6. NONDESTRUCTIVE EDITING

Nondestructive editing means that the changes you make to a photo can be undone at any time. Some programs do this as a matter of course, including iPhoto, Picasa, Lightroom, and Aperture. The changes you make are stored in a database, not applied permanently to the file.

Photoshop and Elements, though, lie somewhere in the middle. For example, you can apply a levels or saturation adjustment directly to the image layer (destructive), or use an adjustment layer (nondestructive) which sits on top of the image layer and changes the way it looks, but doesn’t touch the pixels themselves.

Make your Photoshop edits on adjustment layers and leave your pixels alone.

Direct image adjustments are permanent. But with adjustment layers, you can re-open them and find the settings exactly as you left them, ready to be changed. The trick with Photoshop is to make all of your adjustments as nondestructive as possible, using adjustment layers rather than regular adjustments, and layer masks rather than selections. Whatever you do, try to leave your options open. 

7. LENS CORRECTIONS

Sometimes your camera’s lens causes problems, like distortion (where straight lines near the edge of the picture appear to bow outwards), chromatic aberration (color fringing around the edges of objects), and vignetting (where pictures are darker in the corners).
 
But these can be fixed. Adobe introduced automatic lens corrections in Photoshop CS5, which means the software identifies the camera and lens used to take the picture and matches it up with a specially prepared lens-correction profile. Not all camera models are supported yet, and it’s designed for digital SLRs rather than compacts, but even if your camera isn’t on the list, you can still apply these corrections manually. It’s surprising how much difference this makes.

Your photo should reflect what your eyes see, not necessarily what your lens saw.

Other programs have similar tools, but may not fix all three problems. Photoshop can do it all within the Lens Correction dialog, plus fix converging verticals and other perspective issues.

8. WORKING WITH RAW FILES

All digital SLRs and many high-end compact cameras can shoot RAW files as an alternative to regular JPEGs, and it’s well worth doing. RAW files are unprocessed images, saved before the camera has carried out any white balance, contrast, photo styles, and other adjustments. That means you can choose what settings you want to apply later on.

It’s not just about preserving your options, though. RAW files contain a wider brightness range, so it’s often possible to recover detail from highlights or shadowed areas that would otherwise have been lost. And depending on the RAW-conversion software you use, you may get sharper, less noisy images too.

Most image-editing and cataloguing apps can now open and edit RAW files directly, but the results will be slightly different. Adobe Camera Raw, used in Lightroom, Photoshop, and Elements, doesn’t give quite the same results as Aperture and iPhoto, for instance. There are subtle differences in things like tonal rendition, noise, and saturation.

Adobe Camera Raw is built into Lightroom, Photoshop, and Elements, and it handles RAW files.

That’s not all. If you want your photos to exactly mimic the photo styles of the camera you’re using, you need to use the camera maker’s own RAW software. Canon cameras, for example, offer a range of “picture styles,” including Landscape, Portrait, and so on. But Adobe Camera Raw and Aperture ignore all these and produce a generic color conversion. To reproduce these picture styles from the RAW files, you need to use Canon’s Digital Photo Pro software.

9. DODGING AND BURNING

In the old days, photographers used dodging and burning to enhance their prints in the darkroom. Dodging meant shading certain parts of the print under the enlarger to make them come out lighter, while burning was exposing some areas for longer to make them come out darker. You might “burn in” the sky in a landscape shot, for example, or “dodge” your subject’s face in a portrait to make it come out lighter.

Nowadays, dodging and burning seems to get overlooked as a basic image-enhancement technique, but it’s every bit as effective as it always was and so much easier to do using software. Photoshop and Elements both have powerful Dodge and Burn tools, and you can achieve a similar effect with Aperture’s Adjustment Brushes.

Experimenting with Dodge and Burn can open up new creative possibilities.

It’s sometimes difficult to know where to start, but certain basic techniques always work well. For a start, some deliberate darkening around the edges of the picture effectively draws attention to the main subject. Or if you’ve got ugly areas of dense shadow, a little lightening (dodging) can bring out the detail. You can use dodging and burning to direct viewers’ attention to what you want them to look at or as an aid to composition, balancing the light and dark areas to produce a more pleasing arrangement of shapes and tones.

10. SOFTWARE WITH STACKING

A number of photo-cataloguing programs can “stack” (or group) similar photos so that normally all you see is the top photo, but you can expand the stack to see all the others. This means your screen isn’t cluttered up with multiple versions of the same image—and as your photo collection grows, keeping the clutter down becomes a very pressing problem. These stacking tools are equally useful when you produce edited versions of your pictures since the new image can then be stacked alongside the original.

This stack of two images means we have one less thumbnail to look at or scroll past.

The simpler photo-cataloguing programs like iPhoto and Picasa don’t support stacking, and this is one of the main reasons for upgrading to something more powerful. The new Organizer application with Photoshop Elements 9 does support stacking, as do Lightroom and Aperture. Stacking is one of those features that doesn’t seem like a big deal at first, but becomes essential once you’ve used it for a while.