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I mentioned back in January, I would present a tutorial on 'Editing Quilt Photos for the Web', and here is Part 1. I will introduce you to a few Paint Shop Pro tools and tricks that will help tidy up those less than ideal shots so that your quilts or blocks can be shown in all their glory.
There are very few of us that can afford professional photography equipment; but, a photo editing program like Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photshop Elements or the free open source program called 'The Gimp', can solve a lot of your photo problems at a fraction of the cost.
Below, is the picture Anne R. sent me back in December of her first 'The Blessings' quilt block. I was thrilled to get this picture because Anne did everything right using the tools at hand and it would only require a few steps in Paint Shop Pro to fix it up.
So, what did Anne do right? First, she used natural light and given she took the picture inside, likely very close to a window, on an overcast winter day in Winnipeg, the result isn't bad. I can see the colours of the fabric are true and not distorted by incandescent or fluorescent lighting; so, all I would really need to do is fix the brightness and, perhaps, the contrast of the photo.
Secondly, (experience helps me determine this) is that she has laid the block flat on a table and has stood as close as she could and, likely, tried to position her camera over the block. I can tell this from the slight distortion in perspective; however, this is easily fixed in PSP and fixing this will be the first step I take to make the photo ready for my blog.
If you have a photo editing program, I suggest you right click on this original picture and do a 'Save Image As' and save it to your hard drive or put it into your 'My Pictures' folder. You can then try out each step in the tutorial as I describe them.
So, with the original picture open in the workspace, I first make a duplicate of the image (remember the PSP mantra? "Never, never, never edit using my master image") and I close the original picture. Now, I want to find the 'Perspective Correction' Tool on the Tools Toolbar and it may be hidden. In my older PSP version, it is in the second grouping from the top on the toolbar. In the newer 'X' versions, it is in a grouping in the sixth position on the toolbar. You may have to click the black arrow to get the fly-out menu. After you have clicked on the Perspective Correction (PC) tool, the PC Tool Options palette with appear above the workspace. Go the 'Presets' Button and click on the black arrow and then click on the 'Reset to Default' arrow. The default settings are fine for our purposes.
As soon as we activate the PC tool, a red box will appear in our duplicate photo. Now, move your cursor over to one of the box's corner circles and you will notice your cursor changes. Do a left click, hold and drag the box corner to the nearest corner of the block's background material.
In the picture above, I have positioned three of the corners and am working on the fourth. You can see how the cursor changes appearance when positioned over the box's corner. When you have all four box corners in position, click on the 'Apply' button (check mark) located beside the 'Presets' button.
You can see in the combination image above the slight change in perspective made to the photo. The correction has resulted in a white space being created on the lower sides of the photo (red arrow); however, the wreath, which was my concern, is now less distorted. In some photos, using the PC tool can be quite dramatic depending on the amount of correction needed and this new white space can be startling which is why you should do your perspective correction before you crop your image.
Cropping the image is the next step. Click on the Crop Tool (#1 above) and then go to 'Presets' and 'Reset to Default'. You can adjust the Crop Tool box by moving your cursor over the sides, left clicking, holding and dragging. As you can see, I have ensured the cropping box is a perfect square (#2) and the centre of the cropping box is centred over the block.When satisfied, click the 'Apply' button (#3).At this point, you can 'Save' you new image and move onto the next step.
At this stage, I suggest you make a duplicate of this your new cropped image. As I mentioned above, because I can tell the colours in the orginal picture have not been distorted, I believe I will only need to brighten the picture to obtain the result I want.To do this, click 'Adjust' on the menu bar and move down to 'Brightness and Contrast' for the fly-out menu and click on 'Brightness/Contrast..."
Click on the 'Reset to Default' button (red arrow) and try different Brightness and Contrast settings (clicking on the large arrow in the setting boxes well give you a slide bar to quickly adjust the settings). I eventually decided the settings above gave me the result I wanted. When you have your settings, click 'OK'.
After correcting the Brightness and Contrast, I resized my photo image setting the resolution to 72 pixels/inch and then chose the dimensions I wanted, clicked 'OK' and sharpened and saved the image. At this point, you can make a .jpeg using the 'Jpeg Optomiser.'
The overall result is not too bad. It is still a little 'muddy' (my term) in the corners, but this is acceptable. I can take advantage of a few more tools in PSP to clean up these 'muddy' corners but I will save those for Part 2.
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