My GPS Camera Phone

Yesterday, I posted a shot of the moon rising into a deep blue evening sky. It was reminiscent of some NASA photos I’ve seen where the blue sky turns to interstellar black. Now I’m here to tell you that what I posted was only part of the story – in other words, it really wasn’t a good photo at all. However, the magic of Photoshop allows you to make something out of nothing.

The source image was a whole lot more than a sky and moon. In fact, it was a parking lot (with a sky and moon):

Though I took the photo because I thought the sky was nice, the rest of it could stand to be eliminated. So that’s what I did. I selected a crop area that cut out everything that wasn’t sky, while still giving a decent placement to the moon:

The problem we have now is the noise generated by a low-quality, 2 mega-pixel camera phone. The file is saved as a JPG with high compression (to save space, I presume), which affects the overall quality of the photo. High compression produces poor color gradients and a pixellated look, so we need to eliminate this with a photo editing tool. Enter Photoshop magic.

As I posted recently, there’s a simple filter to smooth out gradients and reduce noise. This filter is appropriately named “Reduce Noise…” and can be found in the “Filter” menu under “Noise.” For this particular noise reduction, the settings I used were as follows:

• Strength: 10
• Preserve details: 0%
• Reduce color noise: 100%
• Sharpen details: 0%
• Remove JPEG artifact: checked

By using extreme settings, the color should smooth out nicely. You wouldn’t normally do this, but there’s no detail to preserve and we want the best smoothing possible before adjusting the levels. NOTE: Before applying the reduce noise filter, duplicate the background layer and switch off the new duplicate layer. You’ll need it later. Here’s the image with noise reduction applied:

Once the noise is worked out, we’ll add an adjustment layer to control the levels by going to “Layer->New adjustment layer->Levels…” Be sure that this layer is at the top. Adjust the settings to your liking. In my case, the blue becomes much more blue and the dark areas become almost black. Almost there:

Now wait, there was a moon in this image. What good is a noise reduction filter if it is going to blur everything out? Good question.

Remember that duplicate layer? Turn it on then outline the moon using the polygonal lasso or whatever you’re comfortable using. You will notice that the noise reduction didn’t apply to this layer because it wasn’t selected at the time, which means the moon is still visible. Once outlined, right-click (CMD-click in OS X) on the selection and the choose “Layer via copy.” Now the moon is resting on its own layer, hopefully above the noise reduced layer. You will know this immediately because the moon will suddenly be visible. Add a watermark and you’ve got a finished product:

If you own a Mac, you’ve got to check out the Preview program. There’s more to it than I expected.

Every so often, that award-winning photo you had envisioned turns out to be a waste bin liner. You thought the frame captured what your mind saw, but apparently not. Other factors like equipment and lighting may cause problems with the final product as well, but this shouldn’t leave you discouraged. There is a way.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to salvage a bad photo in three easy steps, using Picasa2 photo editing software. A little crop, saturation and sharpening goes a long way. So before you delete those photos, watch this!

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About a month ago, I discussed a the possibility of bunch of new things coming to My GPS Camera Phone. Today, I am happy to present one of those big additions – video tutorials on photo editing.

Being a visual person, I find it difficult to learn about graphics software by just looking at a user guide or a text tutorial. While there are many good tutorials out there, I haven’t seen many video-based ones. In an attempt to fill that void and to bring the mysteries of photo editing to the “regular guy/girl,” I’ll be creating and offering these short tutorials.

Each video will only run around three minutes, so watching them won’t require a huge block of time. I’m hoping to pass on helpful photo editing tips and software use methods so anyone can understand them. While you can’t make a bad picture good, you can make a good picture better. I hope to be able to show you how.

On to the tutorial!

How-to Prepare a Photo for the Web (Quick and Dirty) run time – 3:30
Learn how to quickly crop an image, adjust the levels and punch up those colors in three easy steps. Based in Adobe Photoshop® CS (not CS2 like I say in the video).

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