Frosty Photography - Editing to the Extreme

words & photos by Shaun Cleary

  For this installment of Frosty Photo, I'll be talking about something almost as important as the photo itself: editing. Basic editing suites like iPhoto and Picasa can save a bland or dark photo with only a few easy clicks. I'm going to go over some of the basics on auto-corrects, brightness adjustments, and cropping to sharpen up your shots instantly.
  My go-to software for the last two years has been Picasa. Google launched this a few years ago as an uploading client to their Picasa web photo albums. But, this software is much more than just a mechanism to help you get your photos online. The editing, tuning, and effects panels can do wonders. [At the end of this article there's a quick guide to do everything with iPhoto instead]
  Snow photography can lead to a lot of common issues that can be easily remedied by some basic edits and adjustments. Point-and-shoot cameras can sometimes get overloaded by the whiteness of snowy backgrounds and will do two different things - over saturate the photo with light, or darken and dull the photo, putting a gray wash over the whole thing. Editing in several different ways can fix these problems.

  So right off the bat I'll run over what I do 95% of the time, the "magic fixes." My single favorite part of Picasa is the button in the editing tab called "I'm Feeling Lucky." Hitting this will let the program do its wonders, attempting to correct the picture for color, contrast, and brightness. This is a non-destructive function too, so when you hit it, you can simply press 'undo' and go back.

  Right to some before and afters:  Here's Kath hanging out at Sugarloaf with some fresh snow and a vibrant sky. The photo on the left demonstrates that sort of "graying" that I was talking about. On the right, the colors are restored and the result is awesome.  The only difference between these two shots is I've hit the 'I'm feeling lucky' button.  

  Next up is my buddy Tim after shooting down the top of the Poma Line at Pico Mountain, VT. The Poma Line is the old track where a Poma lift ran back in the day. Now, with only a little hiking and traversing, you can make your way into the path that remains and have an absolutely awesome run down a gnarly and nearly always exposed line. For this edit, I've done two things: fill light and cropping. First off, 'fill light' basically just brightens the photo. This can be great for bringing out details that didn't show up, or when a picture comes out a bit dark.

  Moving the 'fill light' slider over a bit brightens the foreground and Tim, while not over-brightening the background. The second thing I did was play with the crop function. Initially, I thought that I was a little too far away from the focus, and it wasn't lined up quite right. The first function in the editing panel on the top left is 'crop.' There you can create custom crops, preview them, and try some pre-sized templates that Picasa recommends. As long as you're taking your photos at a high resolution (default for any camera in the last two or three years), you can crop your shots however you like without any fear of image deterioration. I think the way I've cropped this moves things around well, and highlights just how long and straight-down of a run the Poma Line is. Check it out for yourself, you won't be disappointed.

  This one highlights what I consider some of the awesome accidents that can happen when you're messing around with fixing the lighting, color, and contrast. You can see on the left I basically didn't have a photo of anything at all because of the awful light and fog. Playing around with the auto options and the sliders under the 'tuning' tab, I get this wild effect. Certainly you can see some of the downsides of adjusting the brightness and contrast - the darkened out edges of the photo and some of the graininess on the bottom right. But the almost surreal effect makes up for it in my book.

  This next one gets its perspective from shooting off the back of the lift at Killington on yet another flat light day. You're probably catching on at this point, that flat light demolishes photos, but these basic edits can resurrect them. My standard process again starts off with hitting 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' undoing it, and then trying a few of the other 'auto' edits (color/contrast), and finally tinkering with the more advanced sliders. Taking just a few moments on a photo can turn it from the ordinary to the Xtreme!

  Let me put up one more pair that goes into the "lost cause" folder to show the limits of what these sorts of edits can do. Here's Tim lining up to drop over some rocks on a trip out to Tahoe. We got hammered with something like 30 inches of snow and there was no letting up at Kirkwood.

  An amazing day of riding for sure, but the only problem was the flat light and heavy snow made photography close to impossible. Because of the extreme dullness of the color and total lack of definition in this photo, I was hoping to gain some detail on the ground by playing with the contrast and adding some color on Tim by playing with the fill light and color sliders. But even with using all of the quick fixes I've talked about above, I couldn't really do anything better than what I started with. Attempting to correct the contrast/color only screwed things up and the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' delivered the poor results to the right. Yes, I got the added contrasts I wanted on the landscape but totally lost any detail whatsoever on Tim. This is one of those photos that is just beyond help unfortunately.

 

  This week, I've hoped to demonstrate just how easy it is to edit your own photos and achieve some really professional results when the initial shot is anything but. And like everything else in this series, I'm not spending hours and hours tinkering with the adjustment sliders or doing meticulous touch-ups.  All of these edits were done in seconds, generally only using the auto-correct functions, mixed in with 'undo' a few times. Because these basic editing suites won't overwrite your photo  (make sure to confirm that on your preferred editing software) just experiment. So, time to dig through your library and become an editing pro. Have fun and pray for spring snow and sweet goggle tans.



  I'm not crazy about iPhoto, especially because it isn't free, but everything I talked about for Picasa can also be done with iPhoto. To start with iPhoto, open up your photo and hit 'edit.' The 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button in Picasa is called 'Enhance' in iPhoto. To fire up the rest of the edits in iPhoto hit the 'Adjust' button and you'll be presented with a bunch of sliders. There, 'exposure' will achieve a similar result to 'fill light' and feel free to play around with the various other sliders, especially contrast and saturation.

Click here for parts one, two, and three of Shaun's on going point-and-shoot photo series.