I mentioned in another thread that I would post a short guide on how to make some quick editing on images while you resize them.

 

To do this there are many programs, personally I use Photoshop and Gimp. But to make this guide usable for all I will write it for Gimp as that is a very competent and free image editor. The latest release when this was written was 2.6.8. I am using 2.6.4 but I don't think there are any major changes affecting what we are going to use.

 

I stated that it was possible to make some substantial improvements to the photo in 30 secs and I will stand by that. So what did I mean by that?

 

• Set levels
  
• Sharpen
  

 

First of all before we get into what that means, it is important to understand that it can make a difference in what order we do things. This is the order I believe it should be done in.

 

1. Set levels
   
2. Crop
   
3. Resize
   
4. Sharpen
   

 

Set levels can really be done at any time in the process,, I prefer to do it at the start before anything else as that is what will have the most visual effect on the image and the more image we have to see that we got it right, the better.

 

Crop. Sometimes an image will become much more interesting if it dead space is removed and the subject that we wish to show gets properly framed.

 

Resize. As we are about to post the images here, resizing them to a something that can doesn't take to much space and requires us to scroll sideways or having to wait for is a good thing. What size to go for can be debated but, I try to use 800*600pixels for normal pictures, and if special circumstances 1280*1024(or around that).

 

Sharpen Some people here take very good and sharp pictures, others not so sharp. But you can do a lot with the image in this department. Just a little bit of sharpening can make it much better. You have to be aware though that this is not done to fix pictures that are out of focus, but a way to make images visually sharper. This should as good as always be the last thing you do with a picture.

 

 

Need to do some light editing of someones face? Gimp can do it as well as any other program but I'm not going to get into that any more than to point out that, it doesn't really matter where in the chain you do it, but personally I would do that after I had "Set levels"

 

In the posts below I will describe how I go about fixing a picture before posting it. It took me a while to find one that suited this but I think I finally did. I also should mention that the picture that I will start with is not the full picture, I decided to crop first in this case but I will provide info on how to do that. The reason for that was to remove the face of a BM.

 

Ok lets start this. Here is the initial picture before I do anything with it.

 

 

Bare with me here for posting a large picture, but I wanted to show exactly how it looked from the start and to give you the possibility to use that same picture as me when testing.

 

The picture as you can see is of a Thai man selling flowers. It was taken at Fah's birthdayparty in 3som Bar and Ghusethouse last year. Might add that he's been very good dealing with, polite and not intrusive.

Noud

 

Thank for posting your advice.

 

Look forward to your further instalments. I know for one that I will find your help very useful.

 

Cheers

 

Tony

Setting Levels

 

I am going to assume a lot o things in this guide so if there anything that you thought I missed to mention please let me know.

 

Start, Gimp and load your image. And lets start looking at the "Levels..." Toool

 

This is where you find it.

 

 

And this is how it will look after you opened it.

 

 

the red numbers and the ugly green arrow will not be there, I made those ;)

 

Next the the numbers are triangles, these are what were are going to use to set the levels.

 

And how do we know how to set them? we look and the input levels diagram. what we want is for the diagram to stretch from the left side to the right side. As you can see on he image it starts near the border on the left side, but ends well before the right side. What we do then is to that we click and drag, the triangle at the right side (red 3)to were we think the diagram starts, roughly were the green arrow points.

 

It should then look like this.

 

If you move the right hand triangle a bit to the left, like we did it will become a little brighter. But do not move it further than this, if it still is to dark you have use the brightness tool to adjust more. The opposite applies, move the left one a bit to the right and it becomes darker.

 

What we do with setting levels is to tell the program that in this span between the two triangles is what info we want to use. If there some part of the diagram outside the triangles that info will not be used. That is why we need to start using contrast after this if it is to dark/bright.

 

As a little end I will show you before and after images.

 

Before

 

After

 

In this case as we move the right one a little to the left the image is brighter.

 

The worse the image is to start with the more effect you will see of this step. This one isn't that much off, but you can still see some difference.

Edited May 12, 201016 yr by Noud

Why use Levels and not brightness instead?

 

It is a valid question. The simple answer is they don't really do the same thing. Adjusting brightness makes everything darker/brighter. Levels, make sure that what is suposed to be pitch black is just that, and what is suposed to be white is white.

 

The way we do this is by telling the program what where full black and full whit is on the diagram. Left triangle represents black, right represent white. When we look at the diagram in my previous post we can see that there is information all the way to the left, but to the right there is a gap. This means that the software thinks that white is a lot brighter than what it in reality is. What we do is tell the program that it should treat anything to the left of the left triangle as white. What we have done is to make the image appear brighter without making the darker parts brighter, at least not in a substantial way.

 

So what does brightness do?

It makes everything brighter, including the darkest parts of the image.

 

I'm going to use an example now. Food related =)

 

Imagine you have a sandwich, and a slice of cheese. The cheese slice is smaller than the sandwich. If you stretch the cheese so it covers the sandwich, that would be the same as using Levels, if you just move the cheese to the middle, that would be changing brightness.

More in a moment, but this food talk got my hungry. Think it is time to do something about that, when I get back I'll go over Cropping and resizing.

Cropping

 

Sometimes we only want to share parts of an image. Maybe it is a girl, perhaps the fat BM to the left is better left out of the picture. For some reason we only want to show a part of the image, and this time I'm mostly interested in the five roses in the middle.

 

What do we need to think about when we crop?

 

• Is the area I want to show large enough?
  
• What proportions should I use?
  
• Portrait or landscape?
  

 

Is the area I want to show large enough?

Take a look at the area you are interested in showing, is it large enough to be used? If not, can I leave some in the picture that is not what I want to highlight without taking focus from what I want to show?

 

What proportions should I use?

Most people tend to us similar proportions. Most digital cameras targeting the consumer market takes photos at a 2:3 ratio. My camera a Nikon D80 works at 2592*3872. I now it's a few pixels away from being exactly 2:3 but it's close enough. Staying at 2:3 looks good. But there is no need to do that Old none widescreen monitors, used 3:4 proportions, modern widescreen use 1:1.6. And if we go back to photo, some cameras are 1:1. So Anything from 2:3 to 1:1 really works, but I find that If I post more than one picture I do like use the same proportions on all.

 

Portrait or landscape?

I find this to be more down to you personal taste, use what ever make your picture look good.

 

Back to the flower vendor again. I for some reason have decided that what I wanted to show with this picture was the five roses, and in the coming example I'll show you one way to crop and get the proportions right. I'm going to do this from the picture I initially posted after having set levels.

Edited May 12, 201016 yr by Noud

After looking carefully, I've decided to go with a 3:4 proportion, and a landscape view.

 

There are many ways to go about cropping, but this is what I find to be the easiest way.

 

The top left, button in the toolbox is "Rectangle select"

 

If you know what aspect ratio you want you can click the box next to "Fixed:" And type in what you like. I am going to use 3:4 as I said before so that is what I put the box that shows "Current" in picture.

 

After that I select the are I wish to make my picture. You can pull in the corners to resize, but since we crossed the fixed box, the aspect ratio will stay the same. To move it around click and drag in the middle. When you have positioned it, this is how it will look.

 

 

And now to do the actual cropping. =)

 

 

That is it.

Resizing

 

This is the easiest step. Not much to be said about it really. Pick a size and try to stick to it. 800*600 is a good for most occasions. Ig you don't think the images are sharp enough go for 640*480. I wouldn't recommend smaller than that. If the image is good enough and there is a gain with it being larger 1280*1024 is another common size to use.

 

How about mixing sizes?

I sometimes see this done, prefer not to do that myself, as I don't find it appealing to me and I get the thought that the images are just thrown up without much thought. There are some things you can do though, if you really want to mix sizes, and that is to have one side the same length on all images. For instance 800*600 + 450*600 + 600*600. First two has the same proportions, the last one will usually work well too.

 

How it is done in Gimp

You will find the resize toll here.

 

 

what you will see next is:

 

 

when we resize we will be using the width/height in pixels, so the top two fields are relevant. As we already got the proportions right when we cropped, lets put in 800 in the top field and when we tab down to the second field it should change to 600 since the little chain to the right of the show that they are link a to maintain the aspect ratio.

 

Once that is done. Click scale and It is finished.

 

You got a picture with the right proportions, and the size you wanted.

Sharpening.

 

Finally we are at the last step in the quick photo guide. There are two tools for sharpening images, as we wanted this to be quick we use the easy one. It can be found here:

 

 

And once opened it looks like this:

 

 

Normal setting for Sharpness is set to 10. But in most cases you will want a little bite more than that. I thought 35 was good in this case, but pull the slider up and down a bit and look at the details in the picture to see the effect. Click ok, and you are done with that too.

 

Save it as a .jpg, the standard quality in Gimp is 85 that's usually ok.

 

And now to the with/without comparison.

 

 

Top image is just resized, bottom have had levels adjusted and has been sharpened.

Edited May 12, 201016 yr by Noud

Hope all this can be of help to someone and that it comes to some use. If you want more examples I'll be happy to supply some. Or if you have any questions just ask away, I'll answer as good as I can.

 

//Noud