DPexpert: [ IT’S FREEBIE TIME AGAIN ]

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July 10, 2008

[ IT’S FREEBIE TIME AGAIN ]

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A GOOD PHOTO AND A BORING SNAP is rarely to do with the cost of the equipment. The famous American photographer, Edward Steichen, reckoned that “no photographer is as good as the simplest camera.” And another equally famous snapper reckoned that if your pictures are no good it’s because you are standing in the wrong place.

The art of photography is more to do with aesthetic considerations, such as composition and the perception and use of light, than with the mechanics and optics of the camera. And the good news is that there is nothing esoteric about the fundamentals of good photography – they can be reduced to a set of commandments. Which is just what Kodak has done with its excellent web based tutorial “Photo Tips” at tinyurl.com/6nl442

There are rules here for every conceivable photographic subject and situation, from taking pictures of babies to capturing fireworks displays.

You want to know how to take a picture of your art nouveau commode to advertise on eBay? You can find advice here. Along with all the basics of good composition and lighting. Altogether this Kodak tutorial is the best, least intimidating, most useful general introduction to the basics of photography that we have seen. There’s even a section on making a photographic inventory of your house for insurance records, although there is no mention of the obvious – if the house burns down where are the photos?

While on the subject of freebies, we have discovered a couple of nifty free photo editors. PhotoPad (tinyurl.com/57nb59) is a fast editor with an attractive and intuitive interface that does just about everything most people could want. It can crop, straighten and colour correct as well as convert images to grey scale and even automatically remove red eye and pimples.

Photoscape (www.photoscape.org) is a versatile viewer and editor. It’s not as pretty as PhotoPad but it does the same editing job, with a couple of extra tricks up its sleeve. The back lighting function is intriguing and the “bloom” feature makes for glamorous portraits. There is an excellent RAW converter built in.

Now for something completely different, a little application that does only one thing – it straightens up converging verticals. This thing is called ShiftN and you will find it at www.marcus-hebel.de (click on the ShiftN tab).

Image editors, such as Photoshop and PaintShop Pro, have filters for correcting converging verticals (the effect you get when you photograph the Empire State building from ground level and the walls seem to converge to a point in the sky) but ShiftN, being stand-alone, can be used with the free editors mentioned here.

ShiftN does a pretty good job of automatically detecting verticals and making them stand up straight. However, if fine tuning is needed the interface is clunky. There is no instant feedback from the preview images. The correction must be applied and then checked in preview.

As an application ShiftN is a bit underdone, but it works well enough to be included in any suite of free photo editing tools.

We never cease to be amazed at the generosity of the smart programmers who create these useful applications and then give them away.

Posted by terry at July 10, 2008 02:11 AM