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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More real than reality itself?
Reality is perception, so which real is the most real?
I wish I had time to play around with some of the pictures I have. I do like the “manipulated” version.
Have a go Katherine, the example above took me all of 5 minutes.
Which probably shows
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!
Thanks for the information – can’t wait to try it.
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!
I use Irfanview all the time though, so thanks for that tip!
No problem
I’d been the same with it Claire, but I persevered and there’s some great stuff you can do with it.
It looks so good that it is unbeliavable
Helpful tips, Chris! Awesome stuff.
Thank you. Is that your real name?
Only one word… increible!