Tips

Photographers may invest a lot of money in lenses that produce sharp images, but they often fail to capitalise on their investment by not applying sharpening post-capture.

If you’ve used a compact digicam to take digital photos in dim lighting with high ISO settings, your shots will probably be noise-affected. And, even if you’ve used a digital SLR camera, you may find it’s almost as noise prone with long exposures, regardless of the sensitivity setting. To complicate matters, JPEG compression-related artefacts can cause image noise to be more visible, making otherwise great shots unprintable.

Black and white photographs taken with infrared film have a distinct character that immediately distinguishes them from regular B&W photographs. With the progressive demise of traditional film (particularly B&W emulsions), it’s good that we can simulate the infrared look in modern editing software.

More sophisticated image editors provide separate adjustments for the three main components of colour: hue, saturation and lightness. Together they enable us to describe colours with a high degree of precision.

Although the human eye can perceive a brightness range equivalent to more than 17 f-stops, most digital cameras have a dynamic range less than half as wide. Consequently, while your eyes can adjust dynamically to enable you to see details in highlight and shadow areas, your camera will usually record only the middle tones in a scene. Bright highlights and deep shadows – where your eyes can see details – will be ‘clipped’ and devoid of detail.

Although most simple software applications allow you to add frames and borders to your digital images before printing them, in most cases you can only choose from pre-determined templates. No creative flexibility is provided. In this features we’ll outline some simple ways to add fancy borders that can be used by everyday photographers and scrapbooking enthusiasts to customise their favourite pictures.

Most photographers will remember occasions when the dynamic range in a subject was too wide for the camera to capture. If you’ve shot raw files, you can generally recover a fair amount of highlight and shadow detail when processing the shot in Adobe Camera Raw.