Years ago I stood at a photographer’s brink: Either I would learn Ansel Adams’ Zone System, which standardized the approach to black-and-white photography, or quit. I chose to quit — moving up to the next level would require more money and time than I had.
Digital photography changed all that. No more light-locked darkrooms with temperature controls on running water, and no more reeking of acetic acid. What a reprieve.
And it was fun to play with photo software, such as Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop —in my mind they’re the most satisfying programs to use on a personal computer.
But as software and hardware developed they also increased in price. It’s our own fault: We loved the freedom to print our own pictures, and so we ended up having to buy things we never needed when using film. The cost has been moving us closer to the same brink I faced decades earlier: become an advanced amateur or stick with snapshots.
Recently, however, software prices have dropped and quality has improved, leaving us at another interesting juncture in development: Getting serious about digital photography doesn’t have to break the bank any more.
I won’t get into cameras or printers here except to say that you will need a good-quality inkjet printer and quality glossy paper for it, and a single-lens reflex camera (SLR) that offers RAW, or uncompressed, photos. (Snapshot cameras compress photos in the JPG format, and compressing photos is when you start damaging them.)
What I want to talk about is the arrival of some new tools that are revolutionizing desktop photo processing.
Photo-editing Software
Things get interesting when it comes to software.
Corel Corp., Adobe Inc.
Photo editing software packages Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (Corel), and Adobe's Photoshop Elements 8
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The Rolls Royce of the photo-editing software, Adobe’s Photoshop, has always been priced out of reach for most people — it was, after all, designed for professionals such as corporate art directors and printing houses.
Then, a few years ago, the company released Photoshop Elements, which was basically Photoshop but stripped of the features that prepare photos for commercial printing presses. In its turn, JASC’s Paint Shop Pro was a little less sophisticated until it was bought by Corel Corp., which has turned it into a worthy competitor to Photoshop Elements.
These two programs are now well within the price range of most photographers —
Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate is selling for $69.99 and
Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 8 goes for $79.99 — which is a lot better than buying Corel’s entire Graphics Suite, which includes its professional photo-editing software, for $429, or Adobe Photoshop CS4 for $699.
Corel has two versions of its software — Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 ($39.99) and Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate ($69.99) — and I’m recommending the Ultimate version because this is where Corel separates serious photography from snapshots.
The Ultimate version has an integrated Learning Centre —to become a serious amateur you need it to know how to judge a photo (go ahead, watch the tutorials and admit you never knew how photographers’ minds work). It also has media recovery software and some interesting features such as Photo Merge, Histogram, Curves and Levels Adjustment tools to make precise edits. It also adds support for 250 cameras that shoot in raw format, without compression.
Adobe has also included a similar feature in its release of Photoshop Elements 8 called the Auto Analyzer, which performs a general quality assessment using a proprietary process — based on criteria such as contrast, objects, lighting and number of faces — and adds “Smart Tags” to the photos that explain how the software sees the photo.
I would urge cash-strapped photographers to consider these cheaper packages seriously because of one major feature they both share: they can handle “plugin” tools that can work magic.
Plugins are where the action is now
Don’t fret too much over the relative merits of Corel and Adobe products — they both have enough tools for advanced editing, and both require a learning curve. Concentrate instead on plugins — separate software packages that work within photo-editing software and perform astonishing feats.
Alien Skin and Nik Software
Alien Skin's Image Doctor and Nik Software's plugin bundle
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The really good news is that the plugins work with both Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate and Adobe’s Photoshop Elements.
These tools are so sophisticated they can cost more than the photo editing software itself. But they will move your work to a new level of excellence.
Plugins created recently by
Alien Skin Software, called Exposure, Image Doctor, Bokeh and BlowUp, or by
Nik Software, such as DFine, Colour Efex Pro or Viveza lead the way.
Exposure, from Alien Skin, essentially alters your images to look as though they had been taken on various different kinds of film — such as Portra, Velvia, Kodachrome, Polaroid, TRI-X, Agfa Scala, GAF 500 and Kodak EES. Most amateurs tended to stick with one or two films, such as Kodak’s Ektachrome or Kodachrome, and really didn’t bother to try other films.
Film stock was essentially a chemical mixture, and the different proportions in the mix had dramatic effects on colour and texture. Kodachrome was popular because it was a very “warm” film, favouring reds, oranges and yellows, which are complementary to skin tones; Ektachrome, a transparency film, favoured the blue-green end of the spectrum and was great for outdoor photos, but made skin look cold.
There never was one perfect film, only a lot of idiosyncratic ones, and the reason Alien Skin kept the old brand names is because each brand meant something to photographers. They might lose their meaning over time; but right now they can be a useful tool for understanding how images are handled.
And now here they are, all bundled into a plugin, including a bunch of films that have been discontinued. In fact, they all seem headed for the museum — even the king of films, Kodachrome, was scuttled by Eastman Kodak on June 22, 2009, for lack of demand.
Alien Skin’s Image Doctor and BlowUp require some study as well. With Image Doctor, you have to understand how scratches and dust particles can and should be treated, or how image compression (JPEG) damages pictures before you can begin to gauge how much improvement they can take. BlowUp, which has a much better enlarging algorithm than the (bicubic) one included with standard photo-editing software, requires an understanding of the relationship between pixels and detail, but give it a good-quality photo and it will expand as a very dramatic large-format image.
The most interesting Alien Skin plugin here is Bokeh, which is used to create depth of field effects. Photographers once had to rely on knowledge and skill to adjust a camera’s f-stop opening so that the subject of a portrait, say, would be in focus while the background is blurred. Bokeh does this on the print level: it lets you isolate an object and blur out the background. Simple enough, but it goes a step further, allowing you to create a blur on a gradient, meaning the blur becomes more pronounced as it moves from a selected central point. A face, for instance, can be in focus, the ears a little out of focus and the background blurred. Bokeh can also capture highlights in the background and render them as hearts or stars — a bit of a cheap effect, but good for sentimentalists. The ultimate result is that your pictures will pop after using this effect.
For the professional, these plugins are necessary, and are highly recommended to advanced amateurs. Alien Skin is asking almost $595 for The Photo Bundle, five plugins that can cost $200 or more each. That’s about as much as a decent low-end single-lens reflex digital camera these days.
Nik Software’s plugins offer a great example of how digital photography has advanced.
A very basic lesson in photography lies in learning to control colour and light, which can be adjusted very easily with a filter such as Viveza. Like most Nik filters, Viveza avoids the need to create complicated selections or layer masks and instead uses “colour control points” placed directly on an image (sky, skin or grass), to control adjusting brightness, contrast or colour. Similarly, Color Efex Pro controls colour, with old favourite filters such as soft focus, darken or lighten centre, and vignette and new filters such as glamour glow, high key, tonal contrast and bleach bypass.
Silver Efex Pro does roughly the same thing as Viveza, but for black and white photos. The filter has the ability to protect images from “artifacts,”or errors in colour and contrast, and includes a collection of emulated black-and-white film types, much like Exposure from Alien Skin. Each emulation can be further adjusted with Nik’s intriguing and easily learned controls.
Dfine is a superb way of controlling or eliminating digital “noise” created by such things as pushing film speeds (ISO) for low-light levels, and some images can contain a goodly number of artifacts from the compression process. Dfine controls how much and where to apply noise reduction.
Image-sharpening filters are part of the standard package of Corel and Adobe tools, but Nik’s Sharpener Pro allows for much more control over what is sharpened and how.
If you want to see how well these things work, try to blow up a picture after you first run it through Nik’s Dfine, then through Alien Skin’s BlowUp. Dfine reduces the “noise” made by the camera while it struggled to resolve all the subtleties of colour and contrast it was presented with.
I can’t recommend these filters enough. I will allow that they involve a learning curve, but Nik offers free online tutorials for each of its products, and even also sells a tutorial on how to deal with photos, called The 123 of Digital Imaging Interactive Learning Suite. Learn everything in this and you will know more than you ever thought there was to know about photography.
What’s more is that there are a lot of plugins on the Web, some of them free. Rummage about in The Plugin Site (
thepluginsite.com) and discover how they work. There are several good ones out there, but generally speaking, what you give up for free software is slickness and serious development of tools.
You can stop right here if your budget or ambitions have reached their limits. Once you have a photo-editing package and those plugins, you should be set for a lot of satisfying and creative exploration. But if you want to go further, check out the following tools.
Delicate tools
Now that we’ve settled software issues, we must address a hardware one: The colours as seen by your various devices: Camera, printer, scanner and monitor.
Datacolor
Datacolor's Spyder3Pro colour sensor
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The problem with monitors is that their colour rendition can vary widely, and that viewing the Web through a browser is not a good place to judge the accuracy of colour. Worse, too many of us cut back on quality when it comes to buying a monitor, a false economy if you’re editing photographs. Unless you calibrate your monitor for correct colour, you are likely to get your first nasty colour surprise when you see the difference between what you saw on the screen and what came out of the printer.
Many computer monitors come from the factory preset for an office working environment, not necessarily the right conditions for colour photography. They have improved over the years, and colour profiles are becoming pretty standardized, but calibrating your colours is what sets the advanced amateur apart from the dabbler.
Worse, colour settings tend to “drift” over time and the monitor will need to be continually readjusted — once or twice a month even.
At photo workshops, Vince Versace, a fashion and glamour photographer with a strong Hollywood reputation, tells his students that if they are to take anything away from his lecture, it would be this message: “Calibrate, calibrate, calibrate.”
What calibration does is to adjust your entire computer setup so it will deliver a consistent colour range. And you know what? This is exactly the same process as Ansel Adams’ Zone system, except for colour. I’ve been to this brink before. It can be scary, but these days the tools are better.
Device manufacturers make computer files for each device involved in colour reproduction; they’re called ICC profiles, which contain information about how the associated device produces colour. That ICC profile offers a way to achieve consistent colour. You can get adequate results using the generic ICC profiles, but if you want to move up a level, you really should do some serious calibration, either by software or hardware.
There’s a good example of what calibration does at
WikiHow, but if you really don’t feel like digging too deeply into the intricacies, you can buy a hardware calibration device, such as Spyder, from
Datacolor, which makes a series of colour calibration devices for monitors and printers. And Datacolor has also released a basic tool within the price range of the advanced amateur.
It’s the Spyder3Express ($89 U.S.), a simple color correction tool for monitors that automatically adjusts the color of your monitor, with no expectation of you being a colour expert. The kit includes an odd-looking device that hangs in front of your monitor and measures the colours produced by the accompanying software. The software compares the colour it knows it sent to the monitor, and then adjusts the monitor accordingly.
Ditching the mouse
If you have ever tried to do simple things on a computer with a mouse — such drawing a straight line or trying to click on a single pixel — you know it can be an exercise in frustration. Mice were never designed to be precise tools.
To handle the delicate and precise tasks of editing pictures, you might feel more comfortable with an entirely different tool, such as a pen tablet, which uses a powered stylus drawing on a tablet to mimic the action of a mouse, except in a much more precise way.
The gold standard in this tool is the Intuos, from
Wacom, which comes in four different sizes and runs from $229 (U.S.), to $789 (U.S.), depending on size, and including a mouse that interacts with the tablet.
Wacom has recently expanded its line to include three new lower-end products: the Bamboo Pen-and-Touch controllers, which are essentially 5-inch track pads like you find on laptop computers, and they respond to gestures (“multi-point” input from one or more fingers) or to a pen stylus. They include the Bamboo Pen ($69 U.S.) and the Bamboo Touch ($69), or a combination called the Bamboo Pen and Touch ($99).
Now a company called
Genius has released a serious competitor to Wacom at a much cheaper price. Genius has two graphics tablets, called the MousePen i608 ($99 U.S.), which has a 6-inch by 8-inch working area and comes with a cordless mouse with integrated scroll wheel, and the EasyPen i405 ($79), which has a smaller 4-inch by 5.5-inch working area.
This affords the advanced amateur a credible and cheaper alternative to Wacom’s gold standard Intuos tablets. Both Genius tablets have programmable keys for access to Office and Internet functions. The cordless pen features 1024-level pressure sensitivity and two buttons for controlling shapes and thickness while drawing or writing. This is not quite what Wacom’s pen offers, which has 2048-level pressure sensitivity, but is much more sensitive than using a mouse.
A tablet like the Genius or the Wacom is a serious tool, which vaults the action of the mouse into another level entirely. It means you have to get used to using it.
By my calculation, the 1024-level difference between the lower-cost Genius and the premium Wacom is what separates advanced amateurs from finicky professionals, which is to say that unless you’re in industrial design, the Genius tablets are well worth the savings. Or look at it this way: By the time you have mastered a tablet like the Genius MousePen or EasyPen, you will likely be at the level where you could afford to jump to a Wacom product.
I haven’t tried Wacom’s Bamboo trackpads, so I don’t know how good they are, so I can’t compare them. It boils down to how comfortable you are with track pads.
Organizing your work
ACDSystems
The ACDSee Pro photo organizing and editing package
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There are two main approaches to organizing your photos: Based either on searching through file folders or on creating a database of photos while leaving them in their directories. Both have their strengths. Organizing them by file folder helps force you to organize them according the “tree” system of organizing folders. Creating a common database can help when various different programs scatter photos in many different directories, but then you’re really committed to the software and its upgrades to be able to maintain continuity of the database.
The big software here is Adobe’s Lightroom, which integrates with Photoshop and is designed to free professionals to get back to shooting pictures. It will set you back $299 on top of the price of Photoshop.
Much easier is
ACDSee, now in its Pro 3 version, which costs a little more than half that, at $169.99. It works a little like Windows Explorer, organizing your pictures by folder. It is blindingly fast at managing your collection, especially if you speed the performance by adding thumbnails and metadata of selected files to the database with the enhanced catalogue feature. It has a flexible import feature, batch tools, and one-click visual Tagging, and it allows you to tell it which is your favourite photo-editing program, to make the switch from ACDSee to your editor and back again.
There’s a family version of ACDSee called the ACDSee Photo Manager, which focuses on such things as organizing, viewing and sharing photos by e-mail, making prints and online albums. That one costs $49.95, and I’d recommend it only for those whose budgets are really tight. Otherwise, if you plan on processing a lot of photos, go with the Pro version.
