What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with

What comes out of the camera
is just the basics to start with

My wise old grandmother, my dad’s mom, adopted me when I was a young juvenile delinquent of 10. She instilled in me a love of plants…. wildlife…. Mother and Father Nature…. life…. by giving me the love and discipline that all young children need. Note that I said “love and discipline.” Too many parents think that toys, iPads, iPods, iTunes…. are substitutes for love. They are not.

I was told the law of the land and the house, and the consequences if I broke those laws. Guess what happened when I broke those laws? Yep. The consequences. It only took two times to realize that she was serious. I labored to uphold the law…. Sometimes I’d still break the law…. peer pressure.

After breaking the laws and suffering the consequences, my wise old grandmother would let me cry for five or ten minutes and then come in to tell me that she loved me and to wash and dry my tear-streaked face. All was well.

She also had a love of photography. Each time a newer and better camera came out, it was hers. She used to spend hours lovingly placing her photos in her photo albums, and she had no problem “cropping” pictures with her scissors…. big scissors…. She used to tell me, “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with.” She would love the digital world….

On February 12, 2012, I went birdwatching with a group of about 30 people. I took over a hundred pictures in just two hours. I’m not picky out in the field…. when I get home it’s a different story because I’ve learned never to throw a picture away. If I thought it was good enough out in the field, some day I might be able to use it for something.

Such is the case with this picture:

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Two ravens/crows/grackles…. being all lovey dovey. I watched them for about five minutes, taking 18 pictures. That one used a 28-300mm lens at 300mm…. looks like a bunch of trees with two black, oblong dots in it. Since it was taken with a Canon 550D set at its highest resolution (5184 x 3456 pixels), I knew that I could crop it at the computer (Lightroom 4 is my favorite cropping program) and possibly get a nice picture:

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Not a bad picture…. but a lot of noise. It would require some more computer work to make a good picture out of it. Unfortunately, after cropping the 5184 x 3456 image, the cropped image was only 874 x 582 pixels. Enough for the Internet but not for printing.

Last night as I was studying (I spend a little time each day studying Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 4, PaintShop Pro X4, Photo-Paint X5, and DRAW! X5), I discovered upsizing in Photoshop CS5. Pretty cool.

I resized my big picture from 5184 x 3456 pixels at 72 dpi to 5184 x 3456 at 300 dpi. By resizing instead of cropping, I was able to keep the original resolution but now had a picture that was one third its printing size. Nowhere on the Internet will you need a 300 dpi picture…. 72 dpi is just fine. For printing you want about 200 dpi. I was playing around so I chose 300 dpi.

Once I had the smaller picture at the high resolution, I cropped to get just the two love birds. That crop, however, left me with a small picture at high resolution, a picture much too small to use anywhere. So I upsized it in Photoshop…. twice. First I upsized it by 300% and then I upsized the resulting picture by another 200%. Here’s what I got:

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The second picture has much less noise in it, better contrast, and better sharpness. Still needs a little more work, but the basics are much better to start with. What’s even more amazing is that the double-upsized picture is  larger than the original, 5592 x 4104 pixels at 300 dpi resolution (7.17 MB). After recovering some branch detail, some shadow detail in the birds, and adding some contrast, with that size and resolution, I could print a nice poster.

If you have Photoshop CS5, explore and learn. It’s a powerful program.