Photo by Just Fab using a version of the do-it-yourself scrim.

It’s senior portrait season, and that means people are looking for easy ways to take better portraits outdoors.  Direct light is the double-edged of outdoor portrait photography.  On one hand, it produces beautiful, rich, saturated backgrounds.  On the other hand, it produces harsh shadows on the face - a big no-no for proper portrait photography. For better portraits, you want diffuse directional light.  This is the purpose of using a soft box indoors - you’re able to use a bright light while softening it to eliminate its harsh qualities.  But how to you diffuse the sun?

Enter the do-it-yourself scrim, which lets you shoot outdoors in direct sunlight while softening the sun enough to produce sharp portraits.  The best part?  It can be produced for under $30.

Here’s what you need to purchase:

• 3 ten foot sections of PVC Piping
• 4 T Connectors
• 2 90-Degree Connectors
• White Nylon Shower Curtain

That’s it.  Cut two sections four feet in length.  These will serve as the two, perpendicular horizontal parts of the frame.  Then, cut two five foot sections for the side of the frame, two 16-inch sections for the legs and four nine-inch sections for the base.  You end up with something like this:

This should give you enough support for the frame to be freestanding.  The shower curtain you purchased will act as the diffusing material.  For an inelegant solution, you can simply drape it over the frame.  Or, if you’re nitpicky, you can cut and tack it so it looks a little more professional.

How do you use it?  Position your subject so they’re facing at a right angle to the sun.   Stick your new do-it-yourself scrim between them and the sun.  The shower curtain acts as a diffuser, casting softer shadows across the face and improving the quality of the portrait.  At the same time, the background is still bright and saturated.

For better results, use in the early morning or evening - the so-called “golden hours”.  This will keep your background from being washed out from a bright sun and the sun is at a greater angle, making your scrim more effective.

Be sure to come back and post your results!  This will be a great addition to the toolkit for parents looking to take senior photos, and might save the need for hiring a professional.  Good luck!

The do-it-yourself scrim was refined from an original concept by Just Fab.  Thanks for the inspiration!

If you have an iPhone, the flurry of recent development for the new Apps Store produced a nice, cheap photography tool for the novice- to intermediate-level photographer.  Meet Photocalc, an app that gives you an easy way to calculate some of the more complicated variables involved in taking a photograph.

The app, which costs $2.99, comes with three different calculators - an exposure, depth-of-field and flash calculator.  The exposure calculator isn’t the most useful thing in the world - most digital cameras can do the same thing with metering, obviously - but if you’re trying to teach yourself to be a full manual shooter and to recognize the light conditions quickly, it can be helpful.  Of greater use is the depth-of-field calculator, which combines focal length, distance and aperture to tell you how much of your photograph will be in focus.  It’s a handy way of making sure your photo is as sharp as you want, and depth-of-field is difficult to gauge when looking at images on a camera’s tiny LCD screen.

There’s also a handy reference mode with a glossary of common photographic terms and rules.  But the coolest feature is the sunrise/sunset mode.  Photocalc uses the iPod’s autolocation feature to automatically determine your location and give the sunrise and sunset for a given day.  If you’re trying get that perfect “golden hour” of light, this is a great feature to have.

It also works with the iPod touch, though you lose the autolocate feature.  Check out more at the Photocalc site.  For less than a price of a cup of coffee, it’s definitely a good add to your toolbox.

Check them out after the jump.

1. FoxSaver
Click here to download.

Away from your browser for a bit? Turn it into a screen-saver of photos on your hard drive with this extension.

2. ExifViewer
Click here to download.

Ever see a cool shot and wonder how they took it? The information is often stored on the EXIF data attached to an image. This handy plugin lets you view that data without having to download the image to your computer.

3. PicLens
Click here to download.

Instead of creating a slideshow of your images, this makes a slideshow out of all the images on the page. It’s a easy, quick and attractive way to browse through sites like Flickr and Google Images.

4. Fireuploader
Click here to download.

A great tool to upload images to a number of popular photo sharing sites - all from the same interface. From the extension site:

Upload files/photos/videos to Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, Box.net (1GB of free space), Facebook, Webshots and OmniDrive in this version. You can add multiple files to the queue.

5. Picnik
Click here to download.

Want a quick and dirty editing job? This adds a menu command to Firefox to send an image to online photo editing software (covered here), where you can make a number of basic adjustments to the tone and lighting of an image.

Photo by Senmu

I’m moving to Chicago today, so excuse the lack of a morning article. It should be business as usual on Wednesday.

Instead, check out this tutorial by Sam Lu on how to use the Auto Align and Auto Blend features in Adobe Photoshop to seamlessly stitch together a series of images. I’ve struggled to create panoramas either by hand or with some third party tool, but the results from Lu’s process look promising. I’m eager to take a couple images and try it out.

If you’ve used this process before, let me know what you think of it in the comments. People on Lu’s site seem pleased with their own results.

Auto-Align tutorial (via gosammy.com)

SimCam (via Photonhead).

An S-shaped curve boosts contrast in your digital images.

Contrast can make or break your image, and it’s something that a lot of photographers are just plain getting wrong. Take a look around Flickr - the site is rife with examples of poorly-processed images. Either the images are hazy and lacking contrast, or the photographer played around with curves or levels so much that the photo just looks over-saturated and fake.

Part of my job on the paper I work for is preparing images for print. Here’s the technique I use in Adobe Photoshop to fix contrast on a digital photo, but the same technique works in GIMP or any other image editor that has a curves palette. See how after the jump.

[eminimall]

To illustrate this technique, I’m going to use a pretty image from Harvinder, one of the photographers in the Cheapshooter Flickr Group. This is a very nice portrait shot, but it suffers from a few problems with contrast. The quality of the lighting lends me to think this was shot on an overcast day. The nice, diffused quality of the lighting resulted in a photograph that has few shadows, but the intensity and vibrancy of the image was hurt as a result.

Luckily, this is an easy fix in curves. Basically, we want to make the darks darker and the lights lighter, expanding the contrast of the image. When we load up the curves controls in your favorite image editor, we are presented with a straight line. To improve the contrast of a photo, we’re going to morph this into an S-shape like the one that appears below.

To create this shape, click on the section of the curve that runs through the box in the lower left-hand corner of the palette. This creates a point in the shadows region of the image. Drag it down to darken up those grays and blacks in the photo. To do the same for the highlights, add a point in section of the upper right-hand corner of the image and drag it upwards. The point in the middle controls your midtones, and this usually benefits from a slight shift upwards in a situation like this.

What’s the effect on the image? Here’s the same photo by Harvindar after a curves contrast adjustment:

Notice how much crisper the image looks with just a few easy adjustments to the curves. The colors and contrast are a lot stronger, making Harvinder’s image that much better.

These are subtle adjustments, but they make a big difference. It’s easy to miss the grayish haze that victimizes a lot of digital photos, but you’ll always notice how much better they look after a few minutes with curves. Just be careful not to overdo it. If you get overzealous with dragging your shadow or highlight points around, you’re libel to lose a lot of detail to blown-out highlights or blackened shadows. A little bit goes a long way.

What other fixes do you have for contrast? Let me know in the comments.

Digital workflow is everything that takes place after you click the shutter.

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about one of the most important processes in photography today, something that doesn’t involve apertures, shutter speeds or cameras at all –digital workflow. The digital workflow is everything that happens after you click the shutter, and it’s something that most of us end up spending a lot of time on.

Having a good digital workflow affects the quality of your photos. I’m going to guide you through the basic tenets how a professional may go their post-processing, and make a few suggestions for ways to set up an effective and efficient digital workflow of your own at little or no cost.

Pick it up after the jump.

There are three big steps in any photographer’s digital workflow.

Organization

With the capacity and price of flash memory today, photographers are taking a lot more photos. I know in my own experience, it’s not uncommon for me to take upwards of several hundred photographs during the course of just a few assignments. There’s nothing wrong with this - those exposures don’t cost me a dime. But if I don’t have a strong organizational system in place, all those extra photos are going to cost me a lot of time down the road.

This is why the first step in the digital workflow is so important. Nothing’s worse than having tons of photos scattered at random on your computer, never to be seen again. Professionals use software like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to avoid this problem. Packages like Lightroom contain utilities that download your photographs from your digital camera, organize them into photos and rename them automatically to something a little more descriptive than, say, IMG_0195. They also contain editing tools to make common adjustments without having to load up a dedicated graphics-editing package.

Unfortunately, Lightroom retails for nearly $300. A good budget alternative for an amateur digital workflow is Picasa, free photo organization software from Google. While Picasa certainly does not have the fine editing control and filtering features of a package like Lightroom, it does provide a basic way to get all your photos in the same place and view them quickly. It even supports most RAW formats.

Picasa’s user interface.

Picasa includes tools to rate photographs and then filter by rating, allowing you to see only the best photographs in a collection quickly. You can rename photographs quickly and organize them into different albums. The editing features aren’t much, but they may satisfy photographers looking for a quick fix. For a free software package, Picasa is a surprisingly good start to any budget photographer’s digital workflow.

2. Editing

Picasa or Lightroom provides you the means to choose which photographs continue on in your digital workflow to the editing stage. When it comes time to edit, the unquestioned and unparalleled professional choice is Adobe Photoshop. There really is no substitute for Photoshop’s many tools to edit the exposure, color and detail in a digital photo. However, you have to pay for that level of control - a personal license for Photoshop costs $649.

Photoshop’s so useful that’s its difficult to recommend against it, even for photographers on a budget. Still, if you can’t afford Photoshop’s price tag, check out GIMP - a free, open-source alternative. GIMP includes a rich feature set as well, and there are tons of tutorials online for it that show you how to do common editing tasks. All the essential tools for post-processing - curves and levels in particular - are a part of GIMP, making it a strong choice for a cheap digital workflow.

GIMP is an able open-source alternative to replace Photoshop in your digital workflow.

One problem with GIMP is a lack of native support for RAW files. If you shoot in RAW, check out a free RAW editor like Silkypix to replace Photoshop’s Camera RAW in your own digital workflow.

An important thing to mention is that no matter what image editor you are using, be sure to save your files at their maximum quality level. TIFF is preferable because it is a lossless image format, but it takes up a lot of space. If you need to save to JPEG, save with the highest quality settings. This ensures your best photographs won’t lose any quality as a result of editing.

3. Archiving

Nearly every photographer will shoot beyond the capacity of their hard drive sooner or later, especially if they have a lot of photographs saved as TIFF or RAW files. The last step in the digital workflow is finding somewhere to store all those shots.

Both professionals and amateurs can accomplish this fairly cheaply. Backing up to DVDs is a good solution, offering you a lot of storage for a relatively cheap price. A second, portable hard drive can work as well, but it’s a good idea to look at remote storage via the web for some added redundancy. Sites like Flickr have begun to offer unlimited storage
for a yearly fee of $25, but the size of any individual photo is capped at 10mb, a size most uncompressed files exceed. A site like Box.net offers online storage for any purpose, with prices starting at $25 a year for two gigabytes of storage and a 50MB file size limit. Neither of these are perfect solutions, but in combination with backup on DVDs and hard drives, they can provide an added peace of mind that you won’t lose your most valuable shots, no matter what happens.

Every photographer approaches their digital workflow differently, and these are very broad steps I’ve outlined here. If you want a rigid, exhaustive ultra-detailed routine to follow, you can find complete digital workflows down to individual cropping and white balance correction routines at sites like Luminous Landscape. I think that following any one individual’s routine down to the letter is silly - you have to find what works for you. Just remember it doesn’t have to be an expensive process. There are always budget alternatives, even beyond the few I’ve provided in this article. It’s up to you to see what makes sense to use in your own digital workflow - both in terms of time and money.

Adobe Photoshop isn’t the only option for every photographer in every situation. With licenses running hundreds of dollars, Photoshop is an expensive investment for nearly any photographer, and sometimes all a photo needs is a few tweaks.

Enter the online photo editors. Over the past year, a number of different tools have popped up online, offering convenience and a surprisingly rich feature set without costing a dime. With online photo editors, uploading, editing and saving are all handled through a browser, eliminating the need for any downloads. Can these online photo editors match the power of Photoshop? No, and they don’t try. But they do what they are meant to do - offer photographers the means to perform a few common tweaks to a batch of photos from any computer anywhere in the world. And some have convinient options that the Photoshop jockey can only dream of.

Here are the top three online photo editors that I’ve used in the past.

fauxto - online image editing en masse
www.fauxto.com

Fauxto is the poor man’s Photoshop of online photo editors. One look at the program’s interface should show why, but Fauxto also offers the most potential for serious editing of any of the online options. It is one of the only online photo editors that support both layers and layer effects, and also one of the few programs capable of zooming in to a specific area of the photo. Fauxto also includes an eyedropper, selection and smudge tool among the more common set of brush and pencil tools — all capabilities that are difficult to find in any other online photo editor.

While Fauxto does include some filters, there’s no set of quick fixes like in other online photo editors. Fixing red eye, for example, would be much more of a challenge in Fauxto than with other online photo editors. Fauxto seems designed primarily for people who want to do something to their photos, rather than simply correct a few common problems in a set of photos. Fauxto is the most advanced online photo editor by far, but it is missing some of the ease of the other options.

picnik - edit photos the easy way
www.picnik.com

Picnik is probably the most popular online photo editor at the moment, bolstered by close integration with both Facebook, Picasa and Flickr. This is probably the coolest feature in Picnik - the ability to both edit and save photos directly to a Facebook profile or a Flickr/Picasa account. It’s a one-step process that can make sharing your photos a lot easier.

In terms of editing, Picnik offers a fine set of corrective tools, certainly more than the typical online photo editor. The edit tab within the online interface allows you to adjust exposure, color, red eye, as well as sharpen, resize and crop. Many of the choices also include an autofix option, which lets Picnik decide the optimal settings for your image. Picnik also includes a creative zone where photographers can add vignetting, borders, selective coloring or other cool effects to their photos.

Picnik doesn’t offer the depth of editing control that other online photo editors do, but its collection of quick fixes make most common adjustments a breeze. The feature to save to Facebook and photo sharing websites is something that even Photoshop users will be jealous of.

phixr online photo editor
www.phixr.com

Phixr’s online interface is by far the least elegant of the three online photo editors presented here, but it does get a mention for the sheer number of sites it is capable of saving to. Photographers can save directly from Phixr to one of 12 different sites, including Imagebucket, Livejournal and - uniquely - Costco, making ordering prints that much easier.

While the site’s design is clunky and often painful to use, Phixr does have a good compliment of tools, including some fun effects that will make a photo look like a lomograph or a Polaroid. I wouldn’t recommend it over either of the other online photo editors, but users who will be doing a lot of saving to the web should give it some consideration.