24
Sep
Manipulation
There aren’t many people who don’t have a digital camera these days, and whether you’re just a click-happy maniac with a simple compact camera, or have just spent hundreds on a digital SLR because you don’t have to pay until Oct 2008 (ahem), if you want to get a little more out of your photos, I can recommend an excellent free program: Paint.NET.
Paint.NET is an open source graphics program which replicates a lot of the features of Photoshop, but costs $0 instead of $X00…
I’ve used it for a while for adding graphics to photos, re-sizing etc. but I’ve just started playing with some of it’s filters and tools, and just to show you what it can do, have a look at these two photos:
This was the original, taken without flash and on full ‘auto’ mode. It’s not awful, and the colour is very vivid, but you can’t really make out much detail in the petals.
So I loaded it into Paint.NET, set ‘Auto-levels’ added an ‘Ink drawing’ effect, and moved the sliders on the contrast/colour settings. About 6 clicks in all, and this was the result:
The extra level of detail that was captured by the camera, but didn’t come out in the untouched version is amazing. It showed me, in a 5 minute example, that you don’t have to fake up your photos to make them look good, but that careful manipulation can reveal what your camera took, but didn’t first reveal. I shall be using Paint.Net a bit more from now on.
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September 24th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
More real than reality itself?
September 24th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Reality is perception, so which real is the most real?
September 24th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
I wish I had time to play around with some of the pictures I have. I do like the “manipulated” version.
September 24th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Have a go Katherine, the example above took me all of 5 minutes.
Which probably shows
September 24th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Hmmm… I will have to look into that. I post a few pics myself, and I am ashamed
to say I am just using an old Adobe program to manipulate some of them. Thanks for the tip!
September 25th, 2007 at 12:49 am
Thanks for the information - can’t wait to try it.
September 25th, 2007 at 1:02 am
I found it quite hard to navigate, but i was probably asleep at the time.
The flower looks great though, so i will have to have another go!
September 25th, 2007 at 1:03 am
I use Irfanview all the time though, so thanks for that tip!
September 25th, 2007 at 11:41 am
No problem
I’d been the same with it Claire, but I persevered and there’s some great stuff you can do with it.
September 25th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
It looks so good that it is unbeliavable
September 28th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Helpful tips, Chris! Awesome stuff.
September 28th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Thank you. Is that your real name?
October 1st, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Only one word… increible!