10 replies to this topic

[WreckWench]

So many cameras shoot jpegs but it seems you can't edit them. Or can you? What's the secret? I'd love to clean up some of my shots and use them on the site but it seems it harder to edit them then it was to take them.

[TCdamsel]

I took some photos from a rented point and shoot in Bonaire 2 summers ago and downloaded them (jpegs) to IPhoto on my Mac. I edited them using iphoto and made them look WAY better. In fact, they looked like I actually knew what I was doing The editing tools are pretty basic, but quite effective!

[peterbj7]

On my Mac I also use iPhoto, but on Windows I use a variety. All my cameras bar one shoot RAW and I process that in Photoshop, which gives vastly better results than any manipulation of JPEGs. If your camera can shoot RAW (can it? What was it again?) I'd do the same thing. When I'm working with JPEGs I sometimes use Photoshop, but usually I use Roxio Photo Suite and although it's less powerful it's much easier and quicker to use. Both of these are pay-for software. There's an excellent free option in Paint.Net (NOT to be confused with Paint.Com which comes with Windows) and I also use Irfanview.

Edited by peterbj7, 14 January 2012 - 06:50 PM.

[Landlocked Dive Nut]

There are a LOT of softwares designed for photo editing, including JPG files. Even the photo editor that comes with Windows will allow you to do some color enhancement, retouching, cropping, captions, resizing, and other basic editing functions without a huge learning curve. You can purchase (range $29 to thousands) software that can do even more (or do it all better), but there will be a learning curve to use all of the features.

I'm currently playing around with Picasa, a free downloadable software.

[peterbj7]

I was trying to remember the name "GIMP". I used it a few times but now don't have it on my computer. Does it read RAW?

[ScubaShafer]

From my experience with JPEGs you should know that the JPEG format is considered to be a "Lossy" format. That is, every time you save a JPEG after editing, you lose a tiny bit of information in the pixels.

One way around this is to edit only "copies" of your original JPEGs. Even though you will still lose pixel information every time you edit and save your "copy," you will still have all the pixel information in your original JPEG.

Here is an article that explains it a bit better: http://www.askdaveta...ics_format.html

[Racer184]

If you plan on ever doing any post-processing (editing after taking the photograph)

shoot in raw

I don't mean you have to be naked, (though that might help).

See your camera menu and record in raw format.

I use Adobe Lightroom. It makes huge difference. It is free to try for 30 days.

[drifter]

Unfortunately, there is a decent learning curve for image clean-up and it isn't consistent for all images. Here's what I started doing and it got me on the right track:

Step 1...burn the photos to a CD, leave a 'working' copy on your hard drive and remove the CD. That way, you won't mess up the originals! Some of the photo editing options can't be undone (especially when using jpegs).

Step 2...take 1 photo that you think is really interesting but not quite right (too dark, etc) and play around with the software to see what settings you need to alter to get it to look better. Write down what you changed

Step 3...find another photo that has a similar problem and try it again. I find that often several photos in a row will have similar issues with lighting or coloring.

repeat, and you begin to build up a 'feeling' for how to improve an image with less and less guess work.

Sometimes, you have your camera settings wrong, and an entire group of photos will have the same problem or you want to perform the same operations to several photos like add a watermark, resize and brighten or adjust the coloring on each image or something like that. Most of the more advanced applications will give you the ability to record a sequence of operations and then indicate a group of files that this should be performed on. This can be really useful though it will pretty much lock your computer up for a while. But, you can start it processing and go on with life rather than being tethered to the mouse and keyboard for hours doing it by hand.

Shooting RAW is great if your camera will handle it, though the image sizes are much larger than jpeg. I just checked, and my camera will hold 521 RAW images vs 1900 high resolution jpeg images. You pay a price for saving all the data from every single pixel!