Editing?

I just zoomed in on the plane and sharpened it since the zoom made it blurry, but the sharpening made it grainy.

Hi, Did you also increase the colour saturation, say the yellow, as this also adds to the graininess of the picture. I have also had the same problem in the past. Also USM increases the size and contrast of the darker pixels, so if there are a lot of them in the picture the will become more pronounced.
This is what i have discovered anyway.
I try only to use USM or contrast enhancement, not both.
Best of luck 😉
Dean
www.onebigworld.fotopic.net

This was originally quite a good photo, but I zoomed in and sharpened it a little. Is there any way to get rid of the grainyness? NeatImage is an option, if only I knew how to use it!

I use PhotoShop Elements CS which is much cheaper than Photoshop 7 and which does what I need.

Lots of comments on this thread. In summary, photo editing is a way to improve your images to you own desired appearance. Not all photographers use it, but the majority do.

There are few images that I sell that are not edited in some way or form. The quote from Willy, is a good one. You need not use a full version of Photoshop to get lots of editing options. There are packages such as Photoshop Elements, which offer a vast array of tools to improve your pictures, and the advantage of Elements, is that it is kept very simple. The latest version is 4.0, but versions 2.0 and 3.0 are still very good. I use Photoshop CS2, as I have spent years learning how to use it, but there is little point filling your hard drive with this pro software unless you intend to use it to its full potential. The basics such as cropping, colour correction, cloneing (removing unwanted objects) and sharpening are all in the basic package. Be careful when using a sharpening tool as you do not need to sharpen very much to get a crisp image. Noise reduction filters, degrade the image quality, so again be careful how much you use. Take a look at my website (link below) to see the results of careful Photoshop work in the various galleries. Most of the aviation images have been tinkered in Photoshop.

On a final note, older versions of software are not neccesarily dead. They are actually a good way to try out editing without paying out a fortune. The newer packages offer upgraded tools, but to understand what they do, you need to understand the basics.

Photoshop 7 is dead

Long live Photoshop CS2 :rolleyes:

Moggy

I use PhotoShop Elements CS which is much cheaper than Photoshop 7 and which does what I need.

cheers moggy

how do you crop the images so they still stay the size size as the original file after cropping

Presuming you mean the same physical dimensions, you use Image > Image Size

Moggy

how do you crop the images so they still stay the size size as the original file after cropping

Not sure if this is what you mean, but it’s a trick I’ve picked up somewhere:
Open image.
Convert image to ‘Lab colors’ (Image – Mode – Lab colors).
Go to the channels tab and select the ‘lightness’ channel.
Now apply sharpening as needed.
Set image to RGB again (Image – Mode – RGB colors).
Re-save with different filename.

Enjoy!

Unfortunately, that falls at the first hurdle for me, I’m not using Photoshop, I use PaintShop Pro 7 🙁

I am aware of that technique and if I had Photoshop I’d use it 😐

Thanks anyway.

I have read somewhere, that it is better to do the sharpening with the image in greyscale – but I’ve yet to work out how to do that, and reapply the colours afterwards. 🙁

Not sure if this is what you mean, but it’s a trick I’ve picked up somewhere:
Open image.
Convert image to ‘Lab colors’ (Image – Mode – Lab colors).
Go to the channels tab and select the ‘lightness’ channel.
Now apply sharpening as needed.
Set image to RGB again (Image – Mode – RGB colors).
Re-save with different filename.

Enjoy!

It means it cannot find a really good place to take a sample – I’ve found that accepting what it suggests still works quite well, though.

You can move the sample box around, though, if you wish. Mouse over the box, hold down left mouse button and drag.

Some message comes about uniform X and Y or something, what’s that?

Ahh but a Student’s Job, by definition, is to learn. The instructions are simple enough.

Try it – once you’ve read my post and done it a couple of times, you’ll find it’s not exactly rocket science or brain surgery. There’s no time like the present.

Student of aviation, what would I know about editing? 😉

Come, come – too complicated, for a student?

🙁

This is just too complicating. 🙁

Would it be ok if I send you an image and do to it what you can?

I have read somewhere, that it is better to do the sharpening with the image in greyscale – but I’ve yet to work out how to do that, and reapply the colours afterwards. 🙁

Oh, that’s easy.

It has 4 section tabs, you only need 3 of them:

Input Image – fairly self explanatory, use this tab to load your original image

Device Noise Profile – This is the section where you do all the work:

There are a couple of methods, I’ll deal with the easiest, the automatic method:

– Click on the “Auto Profile” button (you could load a custom device noise profile, based on your camera type – which you can download from the Neat Image website instead). Don’t worry too much about the sliders and whatever in the right hand corner, it’s all automatic. Once you’ve read and understood the comprehensive tutorials, you can take things much further.

– Once it has found a nice place and taken it’s measurements, Click on “Auto Fine Tune”. This probably won’t make much difference, but I do it anyway. The Auto Complete button doesn’t do anything I can fathom in this (the free) version – It is probably for batch processing.

– Go to the “Output Image” tab and Click on “Apply”.

Once the image is displayed, you can click anywhere on it to compare it with your original image.

Click “Save Output Image” – Don’t worry, you can change the location, and it won’t let you save it with the same filename as the original, it automatically appends “_filtered.jpg” to the filename.

That’s it. In all the tabbed sections, you can zoom in and out (easiest if you have a wheel mouse, and simply rotate the wheel forward and backward) – this doesn’t affect the file, merely the size of the image on the screen.

Try it again.

I generally follow the same steps as “Wannabe Pilot”, namely:

Remove noise using Neat Image or similar

Load new image into Image manipulation s/ware (I use PaintShop Pro 7)

Select the area of the image I want to work with (Crop) – I usually use the select tool, then copy and paste as a new image

Sharpen the image, using the “Unsharp Mask” – read up on how to use this properly – you can overdo it. I use Radius 1.50, Strength 60 and Clipping 1. If it still isn’t sharp enough, I use the same settings again and again (but no more than 3 times in total), rather than adjusting the settings and doing it once.

Then, if necessary, I use the Automatic Contrast and Automatic Saturation tools to improve the final look – Contrast, as I said earlier, can often find hidden detail – especially if the original image is quite dark. Saturation can easily be overdone – I use it as sparingly as I can to make colours a little more vivid – but try not to oversaturate.

RobAnt, yes Neat Image certainly does look very impressive but I don’t know how to use it and put the picture through the filter, which is what is bothering me.

Moggy, I’ve tried the Picasa programme, not bad at all. Does a very quick and effective editing job, so I’ll be keeping that.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to change my camera, so maybe my photos should breing an improvement.