Salvaging a Crappy Photo (Part 1)

Let's say, for example, that you went to a rock concert with your friends.  After the show, you waited in line for autographs, and you even got a picture with the band.  Unfortunately, when you go home to look at the pictures on your computer, you notice that the picture of you with the band is dark and slightly blurry.  The venue had bad lighting and your friend didn't use flash, so now your only picture with the band sucks.

I would be willing to bet that this scenario is fairly common.  You have one shot of a once-in-a-lifetime situation, and the photo ends up looking like crap. This always sucks, but there are a few simple things you can do to salvage the photo rather than deleting it.  For this post, I will use a picture I took of my dog over Christmas.  It was a cute shot that I tried to take, but the room where I was shooting it had only lamplight.  In my case, I purposely didn't use flash because I didn't want my dog's eyes to glow.  When I got the picture off of my camera, I liked the composition of the shot, but not the lighting/clarity.

Here are the steps I followed to salvage this photo and make it something a little more presentable.  I did not show the photos for each step because many of them are extremely subtle changes, and I didn't want to post near-identical photos for some of the later steps.

1) The original:

2) In either Picnik, iPhoto, or other basic photo-editing software, the first thing I would generally recommend trying is adjusting the Shadows setting.  Already, the picture is much better due to the fact that you can actually see my dog's face.  However, now the colors are a little washed out.

3) If you want to lighten the picture further, try increasing the exposure slightly.  I wouldn't recommend maxing out the "lighten shadows" option because it tends to make the photo grainy.

4)  Next, in iPhoto, I barely increased the contrast, definition, highlights, and sharpness to improve the clarity a little bit.  With any photo, you'll want to take it easy with definition/sharpness.  If you over-sharpen a photo, it honestly looks terrible.  Sometimes a little blur is actually preferable.

5) Finally, because I wasn't satisfied with the colors in the picture, I increased the saturation slightly (plus adjusted the exposure a tiny bit more).  I've found that with most photos that I edit, you actually make the picture look clearer by messing with the colors rather than definition/sharpness.

So, the picture is still not spectacular, but it's greatly improved compared to the original.  If the color still doesn't satisfy you, you can use black&white or sepia effects to mask the bad color.  In general, if you want to save a photo, using heavy effects can somewhat hide the fact that the photo is not very high quality.  Here's an example of the result if I use "Faded Daguerrotype" from Curves on Picnik:

In conclusion, to briefly summarize my main points:

If your photo too dark: Mess around with Shadows or Exposure for the bulk of the lightening process.  If the photo begins to look extremely grainy, back off of the effect a little bit.

If you photo is too blurry: Experiment with contrast, saturation, highlights and other color effects first.  Often, you can solve the problem without even touching the sharpness or definition levels.  If you do need to use sharpen or define, DO NOT overdo it.  A little blur is actually more attractive (in my opinion) than an unnaturally over-sharpened shot.

As you can see from the blog title, I plan to have more posts on this topic.  I'll round up some more subpar photos and get those posts up as soon as possible!

Don't Overlook Featured/Seasonal Effects

For those of you who turn to Picnik for much of your photo editing, you may have noticed that in the "Create" tab there is always a section with "Featured" effects.  These usually correlate with whichever season (sports and nature), holiday, or other major event is coming up.  After the event has passed, these effects are then relocated to the "Seasonal" tab.  If you're anything like me, you largely ignore these featured effects.  Many of them seem tacky, such as the effect that provides dorky St. Patrick's Day clipart or the bunny filter that was featured around Easter.  However, over time I have learned that not all of these seasonal effects are cheesy and unusable for anything other than comedy.

Surprisingly, many of these effects are quite cool. A personal favorite of mine is "Scary Movies" in the Halloween section.  We actually used Scary Movies for a couple pictures of my brother.  If you follow my blog at all, you may recognize both pics from my earlier post on taking your own senior pictures and making your own invitations.

My brother's graduation invitation minus the invitation information.  Text was added when he got closer to the date of graduation. 

One of my brother's senior pictures.  The photo was taken by my sister, but was edited by me.

Ialso used Scary Movies on one of my own photographs to give it a slightly different feel.  Below I have two identical pictures of a swingset that is at a school playground near my house. The first pic is edited with more typical coloring, and the second uses the seasonal effect.

This photo was edited using the Lomo-ish effect, faded slightly.

The same photo edited with Scary Movies.

Personally, even though the orange sky is artificial, I prefer it to the original.  I like the spookier, red/orange tone in the sky better than the typical blue.  Another interesting feature that I used recently was the "Space Textures" feature.  I was looking for a wackier editing option, so I gave it a try.  Using a combination of Posterize and Space Textures, I turned a picture of my eye into something that looked more like a painting than a photograph:

It's true that the majority of these featured effects will not generally provide you with a terribly natural-looking photography in most cases, but they're still worth a try!  You may be surprised by how interesting some of these effects can be if you use them in the correct situation. Nearly every holiday has at least one texture/effect that is applicable year-round.

For those of you who aren't sure where to find the Featured or Seasonal section on Picnik, I have provided screenshots for you below (click to enlarge):

As you can see, this section is easy enough to find.  Featured effects should show up before anything else when you go to the "Create" tab.  The featured effects will rotate out depending on the time of year, but remember that you can always find them again in the Seasonal section.

Season is the little calendar icon under the create tab.  All of the featured effects are stored here, even when they are out of season.

I wish I could give you a full list of featured/seasonal effects that might be reasonable for editing year-round, but as you can see from the photo of the Seasonal section, there are too many to sort through.  I will say, though, that I have had a lot of luck with Halloween in the past: Scary Movies, Halloween Textures, and even VampiraScope are all workable.  Other than that, I invite you to dig around on your own to figure out which effects suit you the best!