Contrast and Saturation
This is the 5th diary in my iPhone Lessons series.
The human eye is an incredible thing, it can detect a wide range of light. Your brain takes the light information that comes from your eye and interprets the light in ways no camera can duplicate. Most photographers have a goal of reproducing on a 2D piece of paper what they were looking at in 3D through their eyes. Unfortunately that's not an easy task.
Since photography was invented people have been tweaking their images in the dark room, and now on the computer, to get an image that best duplicates what they were looking at when they took the original picture. Most pictures we take come out a bit flat compared to what we were looking at in person. While there are many things you can do to adjust the image on the computer to better reflect what you saw, today I'm only going to go over Contrast and Saturation.
Contrast is the difference in brightness between the light and dark areas of your image. As I've said before, your image should have black in it somewhere and white. If it doesn't, then you need to adjust the contrast of your picture.
Saturation has to do with the vividness and the intensity of your picture.
On your iPhone if you simply use the Photos app's "Auto-Enhance" feature the app will adjust your contrast and saturation to what it thinks is the best setting. It does a pretty good job most of the time. When I need more control than the Photos app offers I usually use either PS Express or the iPhoto app. You can also upload your images to a site like Photobucket or Flickr, they offer online photo editing tools that do a pretty good job. Of course you can also transfer your images to your computer and use programs like Photoshop, Aperture or iPhoto as well.
Below the squiggle I've got before and after examples of pictures I've adjusted the contrast and/or saturation on. In some case the effect is subtle, in other cases more obvious. Basically you adjust the image until it looks good to you, trying to match what you were looking at when you took the picture.
Before:
In this image I just did a slight adjustment to the saturation. That made the purples and yellows in the lily pop out a bit. It's a subtle change, but just enough to make a difference.
After:
Before:
The first image does look good, but then compare it to the second image where I've tweaked both the contrast and the saturation. Specifically look at the blacks in the background. Notice how in the before image the blacks aren't really black compared to the after picture? When making adjustments to your prints pay attention to the black areas of the photo.
After:
Before:
In this shot I had adjusted the saturation on my iPhone to make the yellows pop out. Once I uploaded it to Photobucket I noticed that the blacks were a bit muted as well and adjusted the contrast using the PB online tools.
After:
Before:
The first image is just a bit flat, by moving up the contrast and saturation a bit the bud now pops. The colors are richer, it really makes a difference.
After:
Before:
I shot this image using HDR so the contrast was real good from the start, later I adjusted the saturation a bit to get the yellows and whites to pop.
After:
Before:
Beer. Really, is there anything else I need to say here? An IPA from Pizza Port Carlsbad.
After:
Before:
My son at the beach. I did all the adjustments for this shot in Photoshop so I'm not sure how much I tweaked exactly.
After:
Before:
With this image notice that correcting the contrast and saturation helped but also notice that in the first image there is a green/blue tint to the whole picture. I fixed that in the bottom image by correcting the White Balance. That will be the topic of my next diary.
After: