Dave Johnson

Photography, it's often said, is "painting with light." In fact, understanding how to use ambient light and your camera's flash is generally the best way to improve your photos, since you can do everything else right, but if the light is wrong, you won't like your photos. I've written about using your flash before--such as "Two Ways to Freeze Action With Your Flash." This week, let's focus on five critical tips for getting better photos with light and flash.

1. The More Diffused Your Light Source, the More Pleasing the Light

I'll call this the First Law of Lighting--in fact, I'd say that it's the fundamental principle behind most of the advice you hear about lighting a photo.

Ask any photographer who owns more than one lens for their digital SLR, and they'll probably admit that they've long dreamed of someday getting their own photography exhibition. Well, no matter what kind of camera you own, and even if you never get your own show in real life, making it look like you've got one on your PC is a snap. In the past, I've told you how to incorporate your photos into fun projects like lifestrips and photo booth photo film strips. This week, let's treat ourselves to a photo exhibition by compositing photos into a museum scene. Or a billboard. Or on a giant screen in Times Square.

One-Click Exhibitions on the Web

Recently, I discovered a cool little site called PhotoFunia, where you can paste a photo into any one of hundreds of settings--museums, photo galleries, billboards, and many, many more.

We all have our favorite websites for those subjects that are near and dear to our hearts. There are sites I visit for tips on playing drums, for example, as well as improving my fiction writing. But what of digital photography? Obviously, you already read Digital Focus. And while you're here at PCWorld, you might also check out the monthly Hot Pic photo contest slideshow and check in on the latest camera reviews. But what's going on elsewhere on the Internet, you ask? Great question. Follow along while I take you on a tour of some of my favorite online resources.

Digital Photography Review

If you're shopping for a digital camera, there is no question that Digital Photography Review, known more commonly just as dpreview.com should be on the list of sites you visit. No other site is quite as thorough in its analysis of cameras, and it has just about the most complete library of reviews you'll find anywhere--for both cameras and lenses.

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can't promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus.

For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from September, October, and December.

Attend any digital photography workshop, and inevitably you'll hear questions about digital camera exposure controls. Photographers want to know: How are aperture priority and shutter priority modes different? What does the ISO setting do? When would you want to use Program mode rather than Auto? Knowing which mode to use for specific photographic situations, and how your camera's various controls interact with each other can help you take dramatically better photos, and more easily, to boot. Let's start with a common question: What's the difference between Program and Auto mode?

Program vs. Auto Modes

Your camera's Program and Auto modes are clearly different--for one thing, camera manufacturers are unlikely to create two modes that do the exact same thing. Here's a typical camera settings dial, where you can see Auto, P (Program), S (shutter priority), A (Aperture priority), N (Manual mode), and others:

Most of us use a photo editor for touch-up work--fixing red eye, straightening a crooked photo, perhaps even some color correction. Last week, for example, I explained some simple ways to clean up a portrait by removing red eye, whitening teeth, and erasing skin blemishes. But programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP can do so much more. What if you wanted to add a reflection to a photo, for example, as if your scene were surrounded by water? Today I'll show you how to do it using Photoshop Elements, and it'll take about five minutes.

Expand Your Canvas

Suppose you have a photo like this one: A shot of the New York skyline that I recently took from atop Rockefeller Center.

For many years, professional portrait photographers had a monopoly on delivering photos of you and your family that generally improved on reality. That's my wife has always insisted on hiring a photographer to take my kids' yearbook photos; only they could eliminate red eye, whiten teeth, and erase zits from their cheeks. Well, these days, you can do those sorts of things yourself. Last week, I talked about how to improve your photos by adopting a digital workflow and I mentioned that you should save your "local improvements" for the end of the workflow, after the photo is straightened, cropped, and color corrected. Well, this week I describe how to handle some of the most common local corrections you'll want to make: removing red eye, whitening teeth, and making blemishes disappear.

Remove Red Eye

Removing red eye from your photos is not only one of the most common things you might want to do, it's also among the easiest. As you probably know, red eye strikes in low light, when your subject's eyes naturally dilate to let in as much light as possible. When you fire your camera flash, the light passes through the open pupils and bounces off the back of the eye, looking red.

Digital workflow is a fancy term that describes the sequence of things you do between the time you take a photo and when you file it away for some future project. The right workflow can be important, because you'll get better results by using certain tools and filters in the right order. Take your program's automatic color adjustment, for example: If you run it before you crop your photo, the program will try to autocorrect unwanted parts of the photo that might be under- or over-exposed. Crop the photo first, and the software can concentrate just on the parts of the photo that are important to you. Last week we started a discussion of the ideal digital workflow; this week, let's pick up where we left off.

5. Adjust the Brightness, Contrast, and Color

Now that the photo is scoped down to the composition that you intended, let's fix the brightness and contrast. The best way to do this is generally by using Levels and Curves, or the Histogram Adjustment tool, depending upon what photo editor you use. If you have Adobe Photoshop Elements, for example, you can use the Curves tool. In Corel Paint Shop Pro, the Histogram gives you an easy way to do the same sort of thing.

GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a powerful photo editing program, but the sparse interface is somewhat unforgiving--and some typically simple tasks are complicated processes. The open-source add-on AdaptableGIMP transforms the program by making it far easier to do common editing tasks. AdaptableGIMP was developed by the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Waterloo. In essence, this program modifies the GIMP toolbar so that tools and tasks are easier to locate.

The most obvious change is that GIMP's many tools are arranged in a list and labeled. But there's a lot more than that. AdaptableGIMP uses the concept of task sets--essentially, recipes for performing common tasks. You can search for a task set in the search box at the top of the toolbox, and choose the appropriate option from the search results. You are then presented with a limited set of tools that you can use to perform the task.

I've noticed that photographers love to talk about their workflow. Why is a workflow important? In part, because imposing a specific sequence when editing your photos helps you remember to do various things--like color adjustments and noise reduction--that you might otherwise forget. More importantly, the right digital workflow helps you to preserve the best overall quality and really make your photos pop. If you know the basics, like how to read a histogram and how to adjust your image with Curves, then start the new year off right by brushing up on your digital workflow.

1. Start With the Right File Format

Your digital photography workflow actually begins way back at the camera, when you get ready to take your picture. The key question: What image format should you use? If you are striving for the best possible image quality and you have the time and patience to tweak all (or at least most) of your photos on the PC afterwards, then I recommend using a RAW format if your camera supports it. RAW images represent the best quality photo your camera is capable of capturing. Not only does a RAW file have no image compression, noise reduction, or automatic color adjustments, it preserves the full range of colors and brightness that the camera captures--much of which is discarded if you shoot in JPEG format. RAW gives the best results, but only if you are willing to spend the time afterwards teasing it out of the photos in an image editor.

Being a photographer is sort of like being in school--in a good way. There's always something new to learn. (Or if you prefer, you could just let your photo editor do most of the hard work for you.) As I write my very last Digital Focus of 2011, I thought it would be fun to take a look back and round up the ten most essential articles. If you're looking to brush up on some photography techniques over the holiday break, here are my recommendations.

1. Learn and Apply the Rules of Composition

It's true that rules are made to be broken, but you should really understand the basics before you start flouting convention. There are a few simple rules of photo composition that, when you can consistently apply them, will elevate your photos above "snapshot" status. Spend some time mastering tricks like the rule of thirds and the rule of diagonals by reading "The Rules of Photographic Composition."