Tips for enhancing pictures

[Ishi]

Hello, happy new year to you on this forum.

 

I took these pictures and I was wondering how I could perhaps make these pictures look more sharp and crisp like if they had been edited using Lightroom. Is it possible to make a wallpaper-quality image from them if we are to use only Paint.NET and its plugins? I don't want a resource intensive program so I had to rely  to Paint.NET with its simplicity and ease of use. I was hoping I could produce some professional edits. I'm still learning myself. I had resized them to make viewing easier on this thread. How would you approach editing these images? Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

[TrevorOutlaw]

Hello, Ishi.  My advice to you would be to read photography tutorials (Picture Correct is a great website to learn tips, tricks, and techniques).  In addition, learning how to correct color balance utilizing your camera and buying good quality grey card which will calibrate your camera's white balance sensor is another step.

 

Here, I took your first photograph and edited it slightly.

 

 

I used a couple of techniques that was on this forum, and I am not sure if it's buried in the tutorial graveyard.

 

What I did was:

1. Increase the width and height of the photograph by 1,000 pixels, keeping portion the same.
2. Filled the white space around the photograph with a light grey color.
3. Using Levels within the Adjustment menu, I changed the color slightly.
4. Changed back the size of the photograph to its original dimension.
5. Duplicated the layer and ran the default Emboss at its factory default setting. 
6. Finally, I changed the blending mode to Overlay and flattened the image.

For more advanced technique, my challenge to you is to look at Photoshop tutorials, try to match the technique utilized by Photoshop with PDN.  It is possible.

[dipstick]

You can certainly improve any image in PDN using various filters and blending modes. Since you mentioned wanting to get effects like "Lightroom", I suggest you check out DarkTable. It is immensely powerful and free, I use it in Linux mostly for my RAW images. You can check out many of the available tutorials for darkTable on YouTube for guidance. 

 

Here is an example of an image I shot in RAW, then edited in DarkTable:

 

Edited January 1, 2019 by dipstick

[HyReZ]

If your camera supports the option; it is best to save the sensor image data as RAW. When RAW is used; the captured image data is not process nor compressed when it is saved. RAW data files are larger because of this, but you have more latitude to work with when you use apps such as Lightroom, Darktable, or RawTherapee.

I use the Olympus PEN EPL1 for most of my photographic projects. I shoot in RAW to 32Gbyte SD cards. I save data from the card at the end of that days work to my 4 Tbyte storage drive. There is no app that can recover data that was never there in the first place. It is good to have as much data as you can so that you can compress or process the image to your own personal standard later and still have an non-manipulated image to work with, if or when you need to re-edit.

To improve an image is a work of art! You are supplying qualities to a digital canvas that was never there to begin with.

Edited January 1, 2019 by HyReZ
inserting additional information

[MJW]

One filter I'd suggest trying is the Laplacian pyramid filter. The first control (Contrast neighborhood size), which increases the local contrast, is especially useful for adding a sort of vibrancy to photos.

[Ishi]

@TrevorOutlaw That was interesting. I would try those steps and see where its most suitable. I'm however used to the Curves+ and Levels adjustments.

 

@dipstick and @HyReZ, the camera that I use don't support RAW format. I've seen a video where Darktable was mentioned. And Rawtherepee, I have that lying around. Tested it again yesterday but I don't understand how to use it just yet.

 

@MJW I do have Laplacian Pyramid Filter. Its one of my favorites. In fact I even used it on a PDN video I did.

[BoltBait]

On 12/31/2018 at 9:29 PM, Ishi said:

Tips for enhancing pictures

 

1. Learn the photographic rule of thirds

2. Learn how to control depth of field using your camera's manual aperture setting.

3. Install my plugin pack and look in the Effects > Photo menu for "Combined Adjustments" and "Sharpen Landscape" (plus others)