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Many a time I've looked through my photo albums and thought, "Why did I
take that picture?" Or, "How could I have made that picture better?" Most
people think, once you get the picture into your computer, there isn't much
you can do to really improve it...
For someone using SureThing Photo, there's much you can do to improve your
pictures. SureThing Photo gives you the ability to change the exposure, turn it
into a black and white or sepia image, and it also gives you the ability
to crop.
With today's latest crop of digital cameras we're getting reasonably priced
cameras with anywhere between 4 and 8 megapixels. This allows us to crop
images to half their original size and still get great 4x6 prints. The 8-megapixel
camera will yield great 8x10s even when cropped to half the original. Most
digital cameras come with a 3x zoom, this is a great tool for cropping photos
in camera, before you actually take the picture. But when you find that
zoom just wasn't enough, cropping can really work for you.
Cropping an image can mean the difference between a completely lackluster
photo and blockbuster photo. You can use cropping to cut out unwanted elements,
to give the picture a sense of direction, or to add to a photo's sense of
composition.
| A very common use of cropping can be simply
to get rid of an unwanted element in the picture. This picture is
a great example of that. The guy on the bottom right of the image
doesn't need to be in this photo. The photographer has no idea
who he is, but somehow, he made it into the photo. |
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Here is the photo after I cropped it. I
used the rule of thirds and kept the subject on the left third of
the photo. I liked the detail in the reef area on the right, which
is why I put her on the left. |
| Cropping can also be purely for composition. This photo
was taken by a colleague of mine. Late in the day in the dead of winter
on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, it doesn't look like a salvageable
shot, does it? First let's clean up the exposure and sharpen it a
bit, before cropping it for a very dramatic effect (below). |
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With a few simple tweaks in SureThing Photo, we've transformed a throw-away
image into one that, with some matting, perhaps, and the proper frame, would
look nice hanging on a wall.
So before you delete those images, try cropping them. You might find some
pixels in there worth keeping.
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Do you have a question about digital photography, photo editing or
SureThing Photo? Send an email to our resident photo guru Ben Douglas
at
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