FUN PHOTOGRAPHY

Learning digital photography may not need a course or a photography school. It requires love for photography or dedication. It is not as difficult as sending a spaceship from NASA.

Your digital camera exposure time determines how long your digital camera takes to record its picture. On a well-lit day, exposure times can be very short because plenty of light is available to help record a photograph. At nighttime, exposure time can increase dramatically due to the near absence of light. Although most digital cameras handle this adjustment automatically, you should learn how to adjust your exposure time by hand. Read your digital camera’s manual for instructions.

Capturing the perfect image is far from an easy task. There are many factors which come into play in determining how impeccable your image is from selecting the perfect backdrop, to the color tones as well as the level of exposure. It is only when the perfect symphony of all these elements is achieved that the image is at its most spectacular. But very often, we find that even a small tweak can cause dramatic changes, thus detracting from the inherent beauty of the image. And to correct these, it is not always a feasible solution to start from scratch and re-shoot the image, all over again. It is here that skillful editing comes to the rescue, enabling you to not only correct your image of its imperfections, but also to enhance your picture quality and tone which your digital camera, by itself, may not allow. But the quality of editing is also largely dependant on how effective your editing software is and also how suited it is to your needs.

With Photoshop you have the ability to fix almost any flaw at the tips of your fingers. Overexposed photos are no exception. The simplest way to correct this is to open the photo in Photoshop and select Image> Adjustments> Shadow/Highlight (this is for CS-only, for pre-CS look below). You will notice an immediate and probably extreme change in your photo, but just use this setting as a starting point. Photoshop default settings are often way over the top. Simply adjust the Amount Slider and the Tonal Width Slider in both the Shadows and the Highlights until you find just the right balance. That’s all there is to it!

Experiment with Exposure: Both digital and even film cameras work best in sunlight, but once you move indoors or into dim light, it gets more difficult. Experiment with exposure to best handle any lighting situation.

Retouching - this type of Photo Shop effects tutorial attempts to teach people how to accomplish the basic goal of Adobe Photo Shop -fix pictures. The retouching Photo Shop effects tutorials helps people get rid of red eye, fix skewed angles and basically make the picture presentable. This is done through the various tools offered by Photo Shop. Majority of the people who look for Photo Shop effects tutorials go with this first because, let’s face it, everyone wants to look perfect in their pictures. By learning this Photo Shop effects tutorial, you will be able to take what you can see in nature and give it a whole new reality. Some people eliminate wrinkles, scars, and some actually erase people from group pictures!

Color Correction: You can change the color of your image and balance the overall exposure of your images in a number of ways. The most common is by using the levels function or the curves. Here you can gently touch up your photo making the dark areas darker and the lighter areas lighter to achieve greater or lesser contrast. There are countless other methods and techniques you can use with Photoshop to better your images without having them look like they have been altered. Selective blurring can give the impression of movement, you can change certain areas of a photo such as the color of a specific object, red eye effects can be removed, skin blemishes and spots can be hidden and even with a little more skill and knowledge, complete makeovers can be achieved. We have an ever increasing collection of video tutorials on our Photography Book web site which show you step by step how to achieve some of these process.

Every wedding has a professional photographer who has been doing this for years. What they are going to produce is pretty much a known entity before the wedding even gets started. You know he is going to hold the wedding party over after the ceremony and do a bunch of staged shots. You know he will “stage” the feeding of the cake between bride and groom, the throwing of the bouquet, the dance of father and bride, all that standard stuff.

However, newer LCD displays and such are fixed at a certain resolution; making the resolution lower on these kinds of screens will greatly decrease sharpness, as an interpolation process is used to “fix” the non-native resolution input into the displays native resolution output. The best thing about digital cameras is that it’s easy to take thousands of pictures. That’s also the worst thing about digital cameras. After you’ve owned your camera for a few months, you won’t be able to find that great picture you took a couple of months ago if your pictures aren’t well organized or named logically. Folders are the best way to organize groups of pictures, and the My Pictures folder is a great place to start. In your My Pictures folder, create a sub folder for each year: 2004, 2005, 2006, and so on. This might seem silly the first year you own your camera, but after five years, you’ll be glad you did this because you can go back to your 2005 folder and easily find a picture from a vacation you took that year. Arranging pictures by year is also helpful if you’re scanning older photos stored in shoe boxes or albums that you took before owning a digital camera. This is also a good way to start organizing the pictures that you currently have on your computer.

There are several good free digital photo editing software programs available for download that can fit the bill for most common photo editing needs. All you have to do is perform a search for “free photo editing software” and you should have plenty of results to choose from. But there are two programs for sale that seem to meet the needs of most average photographers whether novices or even serious hobbyists, and they are Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Paint Shop Pro 9. Both of these programs are very highly rated in most independent and consumer reviews as being very easy to learn and use, while also handling most any editing task that the average photographer could need.