Image Manipulation
Resize Your Images Online
In this day and age a lot more people are using digital cameras to take photos. It is certainly a lot more convenient and cheaper than the traditional film camera.
Whenever you go to buy a digital camera, the sales assistant will probably tell you that you need a camera with a lot of megapixels to take the best photos – 6 megapixels and above are now common place for consumer level cameras. Whilst it is true to some extent, we are going to explore how you use the image files from your Digital Camera.
If you are taking your images primarily for printing or to get developed at your local photo lab, then you need to ensure that your camera is configured to take the pictures at its maximum resolution and quality. At maximum quality the file size will increase. Typically a 4 megapixel image will be around 1.4 Meg in size. But let’s face it, the cost of flash cards has decreased in recent times and the lack of space on your memory card shouldn’t be a consideration for not taking the highest quality images your camera is capable of.
Adobe Lightroom Available
For those who don't know. Lightroom is an application that allows you to process and manage your image files.
As a Rawshooter Premium purchaser I am entitled to a free copy of the new Adobe Lightroom product due for release shortly (according to post on the Adobe forums it should be available by 23rd of February 2007). I have just downloaded the 30 day trial copy to get started.
Replacing The Sky - Gimp
There are times when it may be desirable to replace the sky with another one which is visually more appealing. Perhaps the sky is blown and appears white or it is just plain dreary!
You could use the technique that I described in the article about Removing Image Backgrounds which uses the quick mask. You would of course need to go one step further than described in that article. You would need to add another layer (ctrl + L - will open the layers dialog box) below the main picture and paste the new sky into this layer. It will be visible on all the transparent parts of the image.
With the example images below I used a different but equally effective technique to achieve the required result.
Original Image
New Sky
Panoramic Pictures
Looking to create some high quality high resolution panoramic images? There are many methods and software packages available to do this. Some better than others!
Around 12 months ago we started looking at the available options. We wanted a way of producing consistently high quality pictures from multiple images stitched together with a seamless transition between the images. The expectation was that we wanted to do this on a shoe-string budget! A lot of different products were evaluated before we decided on the best one for the job.
For the impatient we have a couple of images to show you on one of our other websites. Just click on the below image to be taken to the panoramic album at NZ Digital Images - this particular image is 27 Mega Pixels or 9000 x 3000 pixels and made by stitching together 4 images. There are only a couple of pictures on display at the moment but we will be adding some more shortly.
Removing Image Backgrounds - Gimp
In 6 easy steps...
There are times when it is desirable to remove the background from images. This tutorial will take you through the process step-by-step using the freely available gimp software. This tutorial assumes you are running the Windows version, but the concept applies equally to other versions of the gimp and other photo editing software such as Photoshop.
The assumption is that you have a basic understanding of how to use the gimp.