A digital novice - Brief Article

I started taking pictures seriously about four years ago when I joined the Photographic Guild Camera Club in Southfield, Michigan. I only shot slide film for the first several years and competed in the club's color slide and nature slide competitions. I never expected to print my own images because the very idea of a darkroom scared me off. However, I've always been a computer enthusiast. When I discovered I could use my computer equip ment to scan my slide film images into Photoshop[R] and print the Photoshop image on an Epson[R] printer, I plunged right in. It was then I started to compete in print competitions.

That's how I got started in digital photography. Digital technology has not only made it possible for me to print my own images, it has enabled me to transform otherwise ordinary images into extraordinary images.

Sedan # 23 is an example. The slide of this image was scanned into Photoshop. The first step after scanning was to "tweak" the image. I clicked on Image>Adjust>Levels, which brings up a rectangular window with three (Black, Midpoint & White) slider bar triangles which I alternately left-clicked and dragged to the left or right until I achieved the desired results. I clicked on Image>Mode>Lab Color to change the color mode from RGB Color to Lab Color. I then clicked on the a & b sections of the Channels box which appears in the lower right-hand corner of the default Photoshop screen. The result is that the image changes from color to black and white. If this is done, the Unsharp filter will not affect the colors. Next, I clicked on Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask and set the Amount to 180, the Radius to 2, the Threshold to 1 and clicked OK to sharpen the image. Then I clicked Image>Mode>RGB to change the image back to RGB mode. To twist the colors of the image, I clicked on Image>Adjust>Curves, which brings up a rectangular box with a diagonal line running from the bottom left corner to the upper right corner. Now, the fun starts. I left-clicked and held the mouse key down at various locations on the diagonal line and pulled the line down or pushed it up. I did this to several parts of the line and observed as the colors changed dramatically. You can create a million different color patterns with this procedure. If I didn't like the way the colors were changing, I simply clicked on Auto which returns the image to the default mode and I would start again until I was satisfied with the image. If you want to, you can save various color renderings by clicking on Save. That way, if you open the original image later, or, any other image for that matter, you can apply the same curves to the original or the new image. Once you've saved a pattern, it's a lot of fun to apply that pattern to other images.

As you can see, the final image, has much more impact than the original. This image won the Greater Detroit Camera Club Council Digital Print of the Year Award in the annual competition among the 10 member camera clubs in Metropolitan Detroit and Canada.

Another example is Sedan # 15. This image was made in same manner as stated above. It won the Best of Show Medal in the PSA International Contemporary Club Slide Competition and was the Winner of the Judge's Choice Medal for Best Photograph by a Michigan Photographer in the 67th annual Detroit International PSA Salon of Photography.

In November, 2000 1 traded in my film camera for a Canon D30 digital camera. I soon learned that very minor adjustments to a digital image can be made easily and effectively. I found the most beautiful Bird of Paradise I have ever seen while on a trip to Maui, Hawaii. While I was in the process of taking the picture with my digital camera, a bee landed on the flower. I took about 6 shots as it moved from one spot to another. My camera was in the horizontal format. I also took a number of shots in the vertical format, but, by that time, the bee was gone. When I transferred the images from my camera into Photoshop, I realized that my best composition was in the vertical format. So, I digitally "flew" the bee from the horizontal image onto the vertical image and printed it.

Here's how I "flew" the bee. After "tweaking" the image as stated above, I also used the clone stamp tool to remove the hot spots. Then, I selected the bee with the Magnetic Lasso Tool. To make sure that it was selected properly, I enlarged the image by holding down the Ctrl key and the Space bar at the same time with my left hand and by dragging the cursor (using the Rectangular Marquee Tool) with my right hand to make a box around the bee. When I released the mouse button, the image filled the screen which makes it easy to see how accurately it was selected. At the bottom of the Tools bar, there are two rectangles with circles in each. I clicked on the right circle. This turns the un-selected area red. Next, I clicked on the paint brush tool and selected a small paint brush to use to select or deselect the areas which the magnetic lasso did not capture correctly. To change to the un-select mode, you click on the curved arrow which is just above the two rectangular boxes with the circles in them. When finished with this fine-tuning, I clicked on the left rectangular box with the circle in it. This changes the image back to the Select mode. Then I simply clicked on Edit>Copy and opened the vertical image of the Bird of Paradise and clicked on Paste to drop the bee onto the vertical image. By left clicking on the pasted copy, I dragged the image to the exact place where the bee had landed on the horizontal image. I then clicked on Layer>Flatten Image to complete the bee's landing. I was very pleased when a watercolor artist said: "I've seen paintings that look like photographs, but your photograph looks like a painting."