Newsletter

As photographic technology and market trends continue to evolve at a rapid rate in our digital era, many of the latest advancements occur in the professional arena before filtering down to prosumer and amateur photographers. One such sector in a constant state of change is the photo printing and output market. InfoTrends, a leading worldwide market research and consulting firm for the digital industry, recently released an interesting study examining how these advancements influence customer preferences and create new revenue opportunities for photographers who recognize these shifts and adapt accordingly.

While you can choose enhanced color saturation when using your digital camera
via the Menu, this choice generally adds saturation to all colors at once. This
might work fine for some subjects, but there are many ways to "juice up"
selective colors later in the software. We'll work with two controls here,
Hue/Saturation and Selective Color, both used as Adjustment Layers.

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Every month in Shutterbug we publish photographs from readers based on an assignment
published in a previous month's issue. We get hundreds of photographs
from readers all around the world and unfortunately we are limited to publishing
just a small fraction of the work we receive. We've had topics including
"Black and White in Color", "Silhouettes" and "Historical
Reenactments." Our purpose in creating this section in the magazine is
to create a visual forum for readers and to challenge them to fulfill assignments.
It's always a delight to open the packages we receive. I know the thrill
I got when my fist photo was published, and my hope is that the same excitement
is shared by those whose images we select to publish each month.

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High scene contrast always creates difficulties for photographers, whether
shooting film or digital. The difficulty stems from the difference between the
ways the film or sensor "sees" and how the human eye sees. Our eyes
are adaptive, and can resolve large variations in brightness by the way it scans
throughout the scene and the amazing reflex of automatically restricting and
dilating the pupil to adjust to bright and dark areas before us. While light
metering systems in cameras are impressive in the way they can read light, the
fact remains that at the moment of exposure the lens on a camera records a scene
at one fixed aperture, or opening. In most situations this is no problem, as
the meter averages light values and the bright and dark areas are distributed
through the recording medium properly. But high contrast presents a problem.

A better solution is to use the --1 contrast setting. This allows for smoother tonal gradations and addresses the need to control the divergent light values in this backlit scene. All Photos © George Schaub, All Rights Reserved

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There are times when you want your color to exactly match what's in the
scene, but for the most part color is a fairly subjective matter that can be
tweaked with ease in just about any image-editing program. Color has a hue--like
yellow, green or blue--as well as a vividness, which in photography is
often called its saturation. In addition, color can have a cast, which is influenced
by the prevailing lighting conditions when we make the photograph. That cast
can be influenced by the light source itself, such as photographing under direct
sun versus what we'd get when photographing under tungsten lights, and
by the position of the subject in relation to that light source, such as the
difference between photographing in the shade or open light. In addition, color
can also be influenced by the recording medium itself, be it film or digital,
and how the film is made or the digital image processor is programmed to change
the color during the recording processing.

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There are times when we have images that are too dark or too light and often
reject them out of hand. But the values only need to be adjusted to bring what
might have sat in shadow into the light. We can do that selectively with certain
tonal areas in the print or globally--that is, on the entire image. This
web how-to covers revealing what might sit in the shadows and deals with a very
simple global adjustment. The work is done here in Photoshop, but many other
image manipulation programs have similar controls.

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The pixels that make up a digital image each have an "address",
a code that defines color, brightness and shades. When we make images with a
digital camera or from film with a scanner we are creating a matrix of pixels
that altogether create the illusion of a continuous tone image. These codes
are not dyes or even densities, but specific information as to how the computer
will interpret the colors and tonal values on the screen. It is only when we
make a print that we leave the "digital" world and enter the world
of dyes and pigments. Because each pixel has a code, basically a bunch of information
that is composed of bits and bytes, we can alter that code to change the "address",
or color and tonal look of every pixel. In this lesson we'll use the Replace
Color dialog box, found in most versions of Photoshop, or under other names
in other programs, to illustrate the point and give you an easy, fun way to
play with your pictures.

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