Brighten up, Girlfriend

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Hey everyone, nice to see you all again, plus some shiny new faces this year! January is shaping up to set another record, thanks to you.

My friend Lacey Chabert was desperately in need of help. She recently posted up an awful looking picture and no one stepped up to bail out her poor photographer, who faces the possibility of getting kicked out of the family for the goof. Luckily this kind of thing can be recovered pretty easily. After I fixed it, I noticed it turned out MUCH better than a lot of the pictures I fix for my family, so I thought I'd share the process with you AND save everyone's fave girl from the hassle of editing her Christmas card list.

I'm no Photoshopping genius, I'm just a guy who can adjust some sliders on readily available photo enhancement software to make pictures look better. I'll be using a program called ACDSee Pro, but this kind of functionality is available in most photo editing software, and some of it is even free or comes with your camera!

One key piece of advice to all you budding photographers that I had to learn the hard way when I screwed up some really important pictures when I first got a digital camera: be sure to use a flash when indoors, because the camera thinks it's a lot darker inside than you do. Your eyes adjust, a camera lens doesn't. Though most photos can be recovered to some degree, many can't, and few turn out this good. Best to just use the flash.

Okay, so check this out, guys:

Final Photo: We got lucky here.
The colors are vibrant! It's just
like being there for realsies!
Read on to see how this happened.

Original Photo: Much too dark,
all details are hidden.
(As always, click to embiggenate)

Overdone Photo: It's too bright
and grainy. This is what you
usually get from this process.
It's better than nothing!

How did we get such a fantastic result? Check these out!

First we go to Process, then Edit, then Lighting, and see this. These sliders
each affect a certain light tone range, kind of like the equalizer on a stereo.

Let's adjust sliders! Wheeeeeeeee!!!

...Preferably the correct ones. But don't sweat it, you can undo.

A little experimenting to see what does what.

Don't be afraid to experiment; all Human progress depends on it. 

It's amazing what you can find out by trying new things!

I'll swear with my dying breath (which might be sooner than you think if
Lacey gets a hold of me), IT'S NOT DANDRUFF!! (I think. I wasn't there.)

So there you have it.

If I really wanted to get fancy, I could blend together some of the pixels on Lacey's coat to get rid of the washouts, maybe added some sharpness or some blur and then pulled a few other processing tricks, but I didn't want to spend that much time on it before her check cleared.

And even though ACDSee isn't paying me to say this (though they should), I highly recommend you get ACDSee. It's primarily a photo manager, and it makes finding, sorting, organizing, and displaying your pictures very easy. It also lets you do some basic editing and processing too, but not quite to the Photoshop level. I've used it for many years, and consequently can't stand the built-in picture display thingy built into Windows. ACDSee has spoiled me. You don't have to get the Pro version, the regular version will let you adjust light levels and do pretty much anything you can think of to a picture, but the Pro version lets you feel special for having paid more for it.

So, all's right with the world. You all now know to use the flash on your cameras and what to do if you forget. Lacey finally gets to see her valuable family picture as it was meant to be seen. Her photographer gets out of hot water. And we here at Mopjockey.com had the pleasure to entertain you, as we do from time to time.

Check out our Facebook page (and hit the LIKE button, huh? it's only fair), or sign up to follow through Google/Blogspot on the left side of the page, or add yourself as a follower on Twitter, which we just got around to adding. And leave a comment somewhere if you want to see more articles like this.

BTW, li'l sis, call me when you have a minute. Got my new number? Same as the old number.

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