Week 306 - Photo Editing for the Travelogue - 06-24-2012

Photo Editing for the Travelogue:

(Creating travelogues Part III)

Editing photos can be the most difficult and time-consuming part of a good travelogue. But, it is the most fun and rewarding. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of editing programs available. Every camera comes with photo editing and there are many more free editors available from the web.

The programs you buy are the most capable and can do everything our little pea brains can dream up. For photo editing, Adobe PhotoShop is the most known program, with a current retail price of $699 to $999. Adobe Illustrator is a program that can be used to create graphic designs, priced at $599. These are tools that the professionals use.

For consumers wanting to be creative at a reasonable cost, there is Adobe's Elements, a subset of PhotoShop for only $99. We use Paint Shop Pro, a consumer level program the combines photo editing with graphic design. The current version is $99. We are still using the 6-year old version 9. We will show you amazing tricks using this older version. The newest version will do even more and easier. The terminology we use here is from Paint Shop Pro Version 9. Many of these terms will be the same for all editing programs, e.g. crop, clone, etc.

Let's get started: Lesson 1 - Cropping

Cropping is eliminating part of your photo; parts that don't add to the quality or even detract. Here is an original photo of Mount Rushmore, photo with crop marks and the final cropped photo.

On the photography page of www.BigRigBible.com we have mentioned that you do not need to use high megapixels if your photos are only going to the web or emails. However, with large megapixel originals, you can crop a small portion of the photo and still get a decent photo. Here is what the same photos look like if your original was low megapixel.

Lesson 2 - Photo fixing

There are hundreds of treatments you can apply to a photo, such as Automatic Saturation Enhancement, Sharpen, Contrast, Color Balance, to name a few. And each one has dozens of parameters with limitless variations. This original photo of Devils Tower, Wyoming was taken at dusk. The center photo is Automatic Saturation Enhancement with a More Colorful setting. The right photo is Paint Shop Pro's One-Step Photo Fix which applies several treatments. The One-Step fix is very useful on darker photos. It makes them look like they were taken earlier in the day.

Lesson 3 - Cloning

Look at this beautiful entrance to www.SampleRanches.com in Healdsburg, California. Ugh, there are power lines marring the photo. You can remove them with the Clone tool. You just grab some sky with the clone tool and paste it over the power line.

It took 10 minutes to clone out the power lines, but what a difference! Is this cheating? No, it shows the beauty of God's creation without man's wires.

Lesson 4 - Merging

Suppose you are out on the Northern Rim of the Grand Canyon with friends Gordon and Karen. You forgot your tripod, no one is around and you want a group photo. First, Pete takes a photo of Ellen, Gordon and Karen. Then, "nobody moves" and Karen takes a photo of Pete, Ellen and Gordon. Back at the ranch, you just select around Pete with the Smart Edge selection tool and paste him into the first photo. Takes about 5 minutes.

Here are more samples: 1) The run, jump and snap. The left photo was not enhanced. You place your camera on a rock, set the timer for 10 seconds. Then you run, jump and snap! You get the photo. It might take a few tries. 2) The clone brush puts air between the three rocks and the graphic tools are used to create the sign.

On this one, we can't remember: maybe untouched or perhaps a merge.

Another merge. Gordon is normal, but we put sun glasses on Karen.

You didn't really think we drove the Mothership through the Brawley, California's Jack-in-the-Box did you? Merge!!!

Long Rifle Lodge in Alaska. Stuffed bear on the left, merge right.

Stuffed friends on the left, on the right, real sign, real bear, but merged.

One more trick for this week. We don't have a wide angle lens for our camera, but we do have the Smokey City Design Panorama Factory Version 5. With this software you can "stitch" together 2 to 10 photos and get a panoramic mural. The program has a few thousand options, but we just used the defaults plus telling the program which camera we have. This 180 degree picture of frozen Muncho Lake in British Columbia was our first attempt at "stitching" together nine photos to create this one. Looking closely in the middle you can see a watermark as this was a trial program version. It worked so well, we coughed the $100.00 to buy our own copy.

This Crater Lake, Oregon panoramic was built from four photos. (Click to view larger photo: www.BigRigBible.com/WeeklyPhotos/W253/W253-20-1920.jpg)

Oh yes, it is probably easier to do these parlor tricks with 45 years of computer programming experience. But, really, anyone can do them with a little instruction (email, hint, hint) and patience.

Whatever tool you use, if you enjoy the outcome, the time spent will be fun.

Love, Pete, Ellen and Mandy

This special edition travelogue was brought to you as there is nothing new in our travel.

Photos from 2006 to 2009