Shooting beautiful pictures is EASY

Comparing color pictures I made with film camera many years ago with digital pictures coming from my digital camera today I was wondering why film pictures often look so much more colorful and bright.

Just look at those film era pictures:

First I thought it is camera and it’s features that makes the difference. So, I bought expensive (at the time) digital Point and Shot camera Casio P600. Pictures were good straight out of the camera but still not as good as film pictures. Then I tried out several other digital cameras. The best colors I was getting from Sigma DP1 camera that uses huge Foveon sensor to capture pictures. Pictures were very good but I still I was not completely satisfied. So, I decided to try to do some post processing on the pictures I’ve taken to make them look better. Post processing as altering digital images in image editor in various ways like changing their size, making them brighter or darker etc.  It took me a couple of years to research how digital pictures can be altered to get the exceptional results. The problem with post-processing the pictures is that there are billion way to do it. I’m a lazy person, I wanted fast way to achieve the best result. At the end I came down to 4 essential post processing steps you need to do to get most of your pictures as fast as possible. Here are a couple of “Before” > “After” examples. Can you believe that I spent not more then 30 seconds to improve each picture?

Here I brightened  shadows a bit not touching highlights and, also, improved overall composition.

On this picture I completely changed composition focusing your attention on how tasty handmade sushi looks. Don’t you want to eat some after looking at the right picture? :) BTW those ones I made myself and will make a blog post later explaining how to make sushi at home -  with pictures :) In some cases using these post processing steps I was able to recover pictures that otherwise would be wasted.

After years of experiments I realized:

Most  pictures can be improved with post processing on computer!

You do not need to spend a lot of time to achieve beautiful results. I narrowed down 4 steps for you that you need to execute on each picture to get maximum out of it and to do it fast!

So, you are wondering what are those magic steps and what tools you need to alert pictures.

- Composition improvement = cropping and tilting of picture.

- Color improvement = fixing black/white colors, fixing brightness and altering shadows\highlights.

There are many tools you can use to apply above steps to your pictures. I recommend following:

- Paint.NET – free but powerful tool for image editing

- Adobe Photoshop – not free but very powerful professional tool for image editing

Both tools are perfectly fine for picture processing, so it’s just a matter of preference what you prefer to use.

I wrote a simple tutorial explaining Composition and Color improvement of your pictures (4 magic steps to beautiful pictures) and  how to alter your pictures in Pain.NET and Adobe Photoshop. You can get it here – UPGRADE YOUR PICTURES.

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Cheers,Alexei