I am so happy that so many of you are participating in the challenges. I've been having fun getting to know you and seeing so many of your adorable kids. You all are rocking the catchlight and camera-tilt challenge, so keep up the good work! Here are some more tips based on your comments:
For indoor and low-light situations, make sure your ISO is increased which should also increase shutter speed in most settings. Again, read your camera's manual on how to do this if you're not sure. Even point-and-shoot cameras should allow you to increase ISO and, therefore, shutter speed in low light, and you should also be able to kill the flash if you want to use only available light. Read those manuals, ladies!
And someone else (Jennifer L, I think) wanted to know more about how to change the size of your images for posting to the internet. In Photoshop (I have CS2), go to Image>Image Size and you'll see what your image is currently sized to. (In PSE 6.0, go to Image>Resize>Image Size.) Change (or keep) the resolution to 72, change the pixel dimensions to 600 on the longest side, and at the bottom under Resample Image select Bicubic Sharper. Also, make sure the Constrain Proportions box is checked. I think you can also use these same settings for posting your layouts as well. And for cropping your photos, see an example below.
To get your photos to look crisp and clear, sharpening is hugely helpful. In Photoshop CS2, I use a combination of a USM (unsharp mask) and Smart Sharpen. The USM is one of the first things I do, and it's commonly referred to as a "defog". The settings I use for this are 20,15,0 (Amount, Radius, Threshhold). Then I do a Smart Sharpen at 70,1.4 after all of my other edits have been done. In CS2, the sharpen functions can be found at Filter>Sharpen. For PSE 6.0 users, you can use Enhance>Auto Sharpen, or Enhance>Unsharp Mask. After the USM defog at 20,25,0, do another USM as the last edit at 100,2,0. I'll post some sharpening before and after examples tomorrow.
Also, my photos don't always look perfect straight out of the camera (or SOOC). In fact, that photo of my daughter from Friday looked like this SOOC:
after cropping, defogging, levels and curves, noise reduction and Smart Sharpen, I got what I posted below. The SOOC version is still a nice photo, but just a few tweaks in a photo editor made this photo really stand out. Nearly all photographers these days do a variety of edits to their photos, and although about 90% of great photography is knowing your camera, how to properly expose a shot and the "eye" for composition, today's digital photographer relies on photo editing to perfect their images.
Some other great places to go for photography and editing information are my personal blog linked to the left, and Elisha Snow's blog, also linked on the left. The photography message board at 2Peas is also chock full of great info and resources, and the folks at I Love Photography (ILP) have a great thing going on there, as well.
So, I'm going to leave you with the challenge of cropping and sharpening your catchlight photos if you haven't already done that. Also, try resizing your image for posting per my instructions above if you haven't tried that before. If you don't have a photo editing program, consider Photoshop Elements. It's a fabulous program and it's reasonably priced at about $90.
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