Lamoni’s Annual Fall Festival. Before and After.
This article is about why you should optimize your digital images, with a brief example as to how to do it.
No camera, no matter how expensive, can capture the full range of light and dark tonalities that your incredible eyes can see. No camera, no matter how expensive, can capture the full range of colors that your eyes can see. But you can make up for some of the differences by optimizing your images using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).
Cadence
We planned on shooting at midnight when the moon was high enough in the sky to do portraits, but we got clouds, lightning, and wind. So we went with it.
Anoush, Point Betsie Lighthouse – Overexposed JPEG
On this photo shoot I made a dumb mistake. (It can happen to any of us.) My first few clicks of the shutter were overexposed. When I checked the first few images on the back of the camera I immediately saw the mistake. The overexposed images were shot at f/9, 1/100 second, and ISO 100. They were 1 2/3 stops over Basic Daylight Exposure (BDE). I changed my settings to f/11, 1/200 second, and ISO 100 which is equivalent to BDE. After that my images had good exposures. The first lesson from this mishap is: Don’t get so wrapped up in the energy of a photo shoot that you forget to stop periodically to check your images. To learn more about BDE, see the article linked below.
Adobe Bridge window and Google Earth Pro window. Click the image for a larger version.
It started today when I was using Adobe Bridge to go through some sunset photos I had taken out my car window on a recent trip to Michigan. I wanted to know where I was at when I created these images. (I knew approximately where I was but not exactly.) Finding a photo location is usually a quick and simple procedure. My Canon 7D Mark II records the GPS coordinates of the images I take. I clicked on one of the sunset images in Adobe Bridge. Then I opened Google Earth Pro and placed it on top of the Adobe Bridge window.
Old fading wedding photo and digitally corrected version.
I received this question via email from a person worrying about old, fading prints in her scrapbooks:
“I have noticed some of my older photos look like they may be degrading; if I only have the photo itself, what is the best way to restore the print? Do I just take another photo and send it in to reprint? And one other thing, your opinion of Walgreens photo quality?”
Soleece, before and after Adobe Camera Raw.
Cameras, no matter how expensive, do not capture “visual reality”. In other words, what you see with your eyes is not what the camera captures when you click the shutter. The photo on the right is what my eyes saw when I clicked the shutter. The photo on the left is what my camera gave me. I used Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to turn the camera image on the left into the image on the right. Plus I cropped the final image. The process of turning the camera image into the image you want only takes a minute or two.
Colorado Rockies (Front Range) from Keenesburg Colorado.
I have always loved the view of the Colorado Front Range as I approach the mountains from the eastern plains. I was going to stop in Keenesburg Colorado to get gas, so on that stop I found this county highway northwest of town to take a picture of the mountains. Back home at my computer I decided to figure out the names of some of these mountains.
Big G Lake
As the prior article points out, you should not post photos online that were taken at your home, the homes of your relatives, or your place of work until you remove the GPS location information from those photos. There are some other places where you probably won’t want to share the GPS location of your photos. The prior article also tells you how to remove the GPS locations using your computer. For this article I was going to show you how to remove GPS data from photos while they are still in your iPhone. I followed the advice online and discovered that advice did not work, at least on my iPhone 11.
Greater Prairie Chickens fighting. The GPS information is still in this digital file.
When you click the shutter to create a photo, almost all smart phones and many other cameras add your GPS location to the photo you just created. The good thing about that is you can go back to your photos later and look up the GPS locations of your photos.
Camera LCD zoomed in on a Grackle photo. iPhone photo.
It is simple to rate photos in your camera, provided you have a rate button. (Later on I will tell you what to do if you don’t have a rate button.) If you take a photo you want to find quickly when you download the memory card, just push the rate button. When you download the photos on your memory card you can use Adobe Bridge (more about Bridge later) to quickly find your rated photos.
Jack Ergo and Friends Recital, Carol Hall, Shaw Center, Graceland University, Lamoni Iowa
I went looking for a photo of my friend Jack from several years ago and the one I found needed some basic work. I will take you through my process of optimizing this photo.
Greater Prairie Chickens fighting. February 25, 8:34 am.
Most smart phones and some digital cameras record the GPS coordinates of a photo every time the shutter button is pressed, provided you have that feature turned on. If you find a photo on the internet, you can use an EXIF Viewer to see if the GPS coordinates are embedded in the online photo. Not all cameras have this capability, and some photographers strip that information out of their photos before they post them online. I really appreciate landscape photographers that leave the GPS data in their online photos.
39% of Americans never backup their data. That’s not good. Another 19% do this only once per year. No wonder so many people lose important files and photos if they have a hard drive crash.
Welcome to my online buying guide for photographers. With over 75 articles it is one of the most comprehensive photography buyer’s guides on the web.
I get lots of photo questions, especially at this time of year, and many of them begin with “What is the best . . . .” They usually come from photographers or someone who is shopping for a photographer. If you are shopping for yourself, or for a photographer in your life, this series is for you.
My “best of the best” series recommends the best photo gear, accessories, software, books, DVDs, online photo labs, and a whole lot more. Thanks to the information in these articles I get emails from photographers thanking me for saving them time, frustration, and a lot of money.
This article is published annually in November with regular updates. Re-posted November 20, 2023. Most recent update: December 8, 2023.
Sunset, Lake Michigan
It started with a text message from my brother John that included this sunset photo. He found it somewhere on one of my websites. He was asking technical questions about the original photo that I could not answer without finding the original photo and checking the size in MB and dimensions in pixels. I knew at first glance that this is a sunset photo of Lake Michigan that was taken at Thorne Swift Nature Preserve which is not far from Harbor Springs Michigan. I was leading a photo workshop field trip when I created this image. It was taken several years ago but I had no idea what year or the specific date. But that was simple to figure out. Using Adobe Bridge it would take only a few seconds.
Single Keyword searches with Adobe Bridge are fast and simple. Open your master folder of photos (see Adventures with Adobe Bridge for suggestions on how to create this folder). All of the keywords for all of the photos in your folder will show up on a list at the left. Scroll down the list until you come to the keyword you want to use in your search. For this example I chose the keyword “portrait”. Click the box in front of the word portrait and in less than a second all of your portraits will show up. You can see some of them in the above screen capture. The process is the same for any other keyword you want to look for, be it elk, moose, sunsets, or Elvis sightings.
This is the third article in a “how to” series. In the prior article in this series we ended up with a folder of renamed photos that need to be keyworded. They are still all selected as you can see by the blue borders. This article will show you how to batch keyword these photos.
In the last article we ended up with several folders with photos that need to be renamed. This is the folder for July 24, 2023. I will take you through the simple steps to batch rename these photos.
I was downloading, renaming, and keywording photos today so I did some screen captures to create this series of three tutorials on how to use Adobe Bridge. If you find Bridge intimidating, this series is for you. When you click on Bridge to open it, this is what the workspace looks like. There is more about why you should use Adobe Bridge in Adventures with Adobe Bridge. FYI, Adobe Bridge is a free download.
Why use Adobe Bridge? To quickly find a photo or photos. And it is free. If you have a hard time finding photos you want, Adobe Bridge can make that process so much faster and simpler.
I get asked that question on a regular basis. This time it was a photo I posted on Facebook of our extended family (20 of us) at a restaurant when we were all together in the Bay Area in California.
I was going through parade images yesterday to send to the local newspaper. The parade was over when I spotted this person on a skateboard with an American flag. I took 8 images of him with varying backgrounds, him with different body postures, and the flag at different angles. My least favorite had his head looking straight down as he checked his phone. This is my most favorite. I processed this image with Adobe Camera Raw and Topaz software before sending it off to the newspaper.
At a family reunion several years ago I decided to make digital copies of some old family photo albums. I did one digital picture of each page (there were several photos on each page). When I got back home I digitally separated the individual photos that were on each page. This particular image is a family favorite. I decided this image would be a good test of Topaz Gigapixel AI which enlarges, and hopefully improves small photos. The original photographic print also has a lot of damage which created some additional problems.
I have been using Topaz Sharpen AI and I am impressed. It has rescued some old photos that were previously unusable. This photo is an example. I tried Photoshop but I could not successfully fix this photo. I have other photos of this dancer that are sharp, but I like this particular moment in the dance.
My friend Paula lost all of her high school photos in a fire. Last week a friend posted a high school photo of her on her Facebook page. It is a very blurry photo that appears to have been copied from a high school yearbook.
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Goldfinch, camera LCD. iPhone photo.
Sometimes I click the shutter and it might be one of my better photos. After the action dies down I go back to that photo and zoom in on the back of the camera for a better look. In this case of this Goldfinch this morning, I wanted to be sure the catch light in the eye was sharp. It was so, I pushed the RATE button (left side of the camera) three times. At the top of the photo screen you can see three little stars in brackets.
When I download the photos with Adobe Bridge (which is excellent software and it is a free download), I can click on the three star icon and Bridge will show me just the three star rated images.
As is my custom at the end of photo shoot, I handed my camera to Beth and asked her to pick our her favorites. She turned the thumb dial on the back of the camera to go through the photos and she read the four digit file numbers of her favorites, I wrote them down. If she said something like “I especially like this one!” I put down a star by that file number.
How far was I from this burning building that I photographed last night for the local newspaper? My initial guesstimate was between 300 and 400 yards. The actual distance was 356 yards, more or less. How I did I figure that out?
A chance look today at an old photo just sent me back in time, both photographically and technologically. It was bone chillingly cold and Sarah and I were doing figure studies high in the Colorado Rockies. (One of our images is at the end of this article.) Back in 2007 most cameras did not have built in GPS units and my primitive mobile phone did not have GPS capabilities either. But I still wanted to keep track of some important photo locations, and this spot was one of them.
I have acquired some small, old family prints that I would generally describe as “fuzzy”. They are not clean and sharp. Making small fuzzy photos bigger does not make them better, it makes them worse. As I was explaining to an inexperienced photographer, making a high resolution copy of a blurry photo does not make it better. It just means you can turn a small blurry photo into a much bigger and therefore much blurrier photo.