Digital Photo Tips

Do you wonder how people got a photo with a collage of multiple photos?  Well, it is very easy to do if you download the Picasa 2 free software.

This is the working board on your Picasa 2 showing you a list of all the photos in your PC.  Just select the number of photos you want to be made into a collage.  A selection of 4-5 photos will be nice.

On the top menu, select Create > Picture collage

Next, you will get a choice of  collage to make like Picture Pile, Picture Gride, Contact Sheet and Multiple Exposure.  You can also choose the background colour, whether white, grey, black  or using one of the photo as background.

Just experiment with all the choices and have fun playing around .  I don’t normally make picture collages for my online sharing because I like my photos to be the biggest my page  can accomodate.

This is the Picture Grid option.  When you are satisfied, just click Create and there you have it, a photo with multiple shots.  Nice and easy, eh?  Here is the link to explain more about Picasa.

Sometimes a nice scene does not make a nice photo when taken at the wrong angle.  I found these giant joss-sticks lining along a busy road and stopped my car to snap a few pics.  These joss-sticks are offereings from the people for the hungry ghosts whom are expected to roam the earth tomorrow onwards.  :)  So, as you know, it is not an object for me to play around with and neither it is alright for me to hang around.

Hahaha, you certainly don’t want to mess about in a place where lorry loads of hungry souls are gathering to have their annual feast.  (I am a Christian, btw)  The  worshippers are actually setting up the stage, altar and other stuffs so I cannot spend too much time there.

So, upon getting home, I found that all my photo sucks.  This is because of the large mango tree at the back which added too much colour to the already colourful joss-sticks.  Therefore, I played with the Curves on Photoshop.

Three simple step

1. Fire up the Photoshop, get pic, click Image
2. Choose Adjustment
3. Pick Curves and start pulling those curvy line and see the photo changes colour

As you know, I am not pro so my photoshopping skills are limited to hues & saturation, curves and other basic stuffs.

Another blue photo.

And that concludes my most amateurish Photoshopping lesson for today.  Hahahaha, actually after acquiring Photoshop for so many years, I have never really play around with those buttons except for resizing and removing some spots on my face.  I hope to discover more functions and share them with the noobs like me!

A reminder to all photobugs, July 25th onwards will see Chinese operas sprouting around the neighbourhood.  This is a very good time to take photos of this very interesting subject.  You will have a chance to take a pic with the god of hades with his black face and long tongue plus bulging eyes.  They are usually represented in huge paper effigy, the height of a house.  Don’t forget to take photos of those joss-stick smoking and who knows, you may capture a ghost or two giving you the peace sign!  Good luck!  LOL.  But seriously, I will share in another post on how to take ghost photos or rather photo with apparition of a ghostly figure.

Majority of the younger generations probably never had their photos taken in black & white. But for those of us who are in our 30s and above, definitely have some babies photos taken in black & white film.

I still remember the excitement when I was about 10 years old when the first coloured photos appeared. (coloured photos available much earlier but we didn’t own a camera then. you can read the history of photography from
Wikipedia) Now, we view black and white and sepia photos as novelty. I know many wedding photographers adore taking wedding photos in sepia to achieve that antique look.

My cameras have the option of sepia and black & white. Once in a while, I twiddle with the button. I found it great to blur out messy background. However, you can easily turn your photos taken in colour to sepia or black & white with just a button. This way, you have an option to get a photo in colour, sepia or black & white. Otherwise, if you take a photo in black & white, you cannot turn it into colour photo.

A colour photo can be switched to B&W, back to colour and B&W or sepia.

So have fun playing around with Picasa 2 (link button available on the right bar) and create that special feel to your photos. It is a refreshing change to all the colour photos we see.

If you want inspirations for black & white photos composition, do check out Flickr. Flickr has a host of black & white photographs pool. I haven’t join any because their B&W photos look mighty artistic, so shy to join.

Long time ago, there were coloured filters like red, green and (i can’t remember!) which you can attach to the camera to create that different moods. But nowadays, with digital camera and photo editing softwares, you just need to tweak with a button.

Picasa one-touch button for changing your photos. 

Most digital cameras come with a selection of sepia, black & white and colours photos. I hardly bother to change the setting on the camera because I can easily do so using photo editing software.

Sepia makes this photo looks olden. A lot of wedding photographers like to use this sepia tone when taking photos of the bridge and groom and their traditional Chinese wedding garb.

Just another regular photo with green trees and blue walls. This is the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion which is not accessible to tourists unless they pay RM12 for the guided tour and the time is limited to twice a day at 11 am and 3 pm. *roll eyes* Such limited time and high fee (hey, the Penang Musuem charges only RM1 for entrance fee, ok?), how to visit?

If the sky looks purplish a bit, it is because I had adjusted the colour a bit to make the building blue-r than it is.

This is the MTV style of using extreme colours. It wasn’t easy to take these photos because the Punjabi guard who was manning the gate kept repeating ‘Tak boleh masuk’ eventhough I was only standing on the perimeter.

So, do experiment with those colour tuning buttons on your photo.

Mistakes are easily rectified with the Undo button.  Happy sepia-ing.

Do you find photo editing software too confusing for you? Words like rasterized, layers, curves, saturation, RGB and etc may not be in every one vocab. Does the your digital camera comes with its own photo editing software CD-rom? I have two cameras which provide their own photo-editing softwares. However it was the camera shop’s sales personnel who highly recommended Picasa from Google to me.

Though I do know how to play around with Adobe Photoshop CS2, Paintshop Pro and also Picture It! (original, licensed software that comes with my original, licensed Microsoft Office Suite ) and other freeware like Irfan View, Photostylist etc etc, I still love Picasa because it is kids’ friendly. All my children, including my three years old toddler know how to manipulate photos with it.

Let’s see what we can do with the crop button. Cropping a photo means trimming it, sort of like take a scissors and cut the part you do not like. Snip, snip off the edges a bit and voila, your photo looks less cluttered and there aren’t ugly objects to distract.

Before cropping with Picasa

I snapped this random photo this morning while my toddler and I were waiting for my husband to bring the car. We were at the EPF (Employees Provident Fund) office tower. It is located by the sea and my son was standing there along the esplanade.

I like the curves of the and the way my toddler was leaning against them. So, snap, snap like every proud mom would do. But I notice that the proportion isn’t right and the background with the hydrant and the coconut tree trunks plus the lam-posts don’t match the mood.

So, one click with Picasa crop button and I get this.

After cropping with Picasa

I read about this 1/3 rule in photos. It means, try to form your photo in the proportion of 1/3. Eg. 1/3 of the sea, 2/3 of the sky. Avoid the 50/50 proportion which is too mundane. Over here, it is one third of the grass (because I can’t go back any further as I want to avoid the stiff, steely, lamp posts) and two third of the pavement which have some nice shadows of coconut leaves.

So, enjoy cropping your photos. With Picasa, you don’t have to worry about making mistakes because you can always “Un-do’ and get back the original picture. What are you waiting for? Go enjoy playing the maestro in the darkroom with Picasa. Errm…you can just download it from the link on my right side bar. Free!