Almost everyone now owns a digital camera that has plenty of digital grunt. A pint sized camera can come complete with 10 mega pixel capacity, a razor sharp lens, high end quality image reproduction and enough features to leave any film user green with envy. With all of this potential in our cameras, the question is: Are we making the most of our cameras?

The purpose of this article is to help you put more snap into your everyday snaps. We will do this with the much acclaimed Paint Shop Pro 12. Paint Shop Pro 12 is easy-to use software for professional digital imaging results. It combines a unique set of automatic and precision photo and graphic tools with an integrated learning system. You will produce superior results with complete ease. In addition Paint Shop Pro has a wonderful network of web resources to help you investigate and analyse what others are doing in the Digital Imaging field using this program. Here is one for you: www.pspug.org. This is the Paint Shop Pro Users Group. Their motto is “Helping expand your creativity and your mind”. On this website, you will find message forums, a chat arena, tutorials, tips and tricks and online classes. There are many other websites readily accessible to all enthusiasts and professionals.

Making Snappy Prints

Digital photography is definitely easy and convenient. With the onset of new technology, we can process our prints in seconds and nothing satisfies a photographer’s vision more than a truly beautiful photographic print. These days you do it yourself. Head into your local photo retailer, walk up to the print kiosk, plug in your flash card and off you go. We have come a long way haven’t we?

WARNING!! Along with all this ease and convenience, we can become a little complacent
and adopt a “That will do” attitude. Often a slight adjustment in Paint Shop Pro can transform our snaps into a more professional image to be proud of. We can add SNAP to our snaps by editing our files before we print them.

Lets see how easy it is to add snap to our family snaps. First, lets have a look at our Before Image. This is a native digital file direct from the camera. I had the white point setting incorrectly set on candescent lighting. Of course the digital camera intelligently removed the yellow/orange cast from the shot just as it is meant to. The down side of this process is at times warm skin tones can be lost. So, how do we fix it?

PSP 12 has many fantastic and easy to use features. One of these features is “Smart Photo Fix”. The best thing about is that you don’t have to be an editing genius to use it.

Let’s give it a go!!

From PSP’s unique Learning Centre, click Adjust. (refer to Figure 1). You will notice that the Learning Centre will now give quite a few options to choose. The one we will use is Express Lab.(Figure 2). Once you click on Express Lab, you will enter another screen that has various adjustment sliders as shown in Figure 3. You can experiment with these sliders and see what effect you can achieve by making slight and gradual adjustments. However if you want to remove a cast, click on part of the object that should be black, white or grey. To remove a sampling point, just click on it. After you have set your sampling point, click on the colour you want to remove. If you do not like the results, si

mply click reset. If that sounds too complicated, do not be frightened!! An easier approach is to simply click Suggest Settings at the top of the dialog box. At the very least you will notice a huge improvement in the look of your photograph. If you the want to add to the suggested settings, slide your chosen effect slowly and see the results.

When you have finished, exit Express Lab and you will return to the native working environment. This is quite an impressive feature considering you have to spend more than $1500.00 extra to buy software that will do the same thing.

And…Voila! How easy is that? To make serious tonal adjustments we would use a curves or levels adjustment layer. We will learn how to do this effectively in our next issue.

After you have made your adjustments, you simply save your new, edited file to a disc, memory stick or flash memory card before you head down to your local photo store for printing.

Once upon a time, we could never have even entertained the thought of repairing, improving and editing your family snaps before we had them printed. Now you can do it easily and inexpensively.

Vive La Digital Revolution!!

Entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 12:02 am under Graphics editors, Paint Shop Pro, Tutorials.  Print This Post