The winner of April 30th’s “Fix Your Photo Facebook Friday” is Robin Carlson with her photo of Barney the 9 year old foster dog from Basset Buddies Rescue. Barney is up for adoption and needs a fresh new profile photo for his personal ads to help him find a loving fur-ever home.
Here is the original photo as submitted on our Facebook page:
Barney’s photo won because it has a good overall composition and the exposure is pretty even and the scenery is very attractive . Even though the lighting is pretty “even”, it is evenly over-exposed. When a photo is over-exposed (too light), the white portions of fur will lose all of their detail and it is hard to totally get it back. So, in this photo, we have a case of “blown out highlights” and washed out colors.
Here are a few tips on how to take a photo of a dog when you are outdoors in the sunlight:
- Try to place the dog in an area that is totally shaded. Bright sun will cause a loss of detail in the light fur and only partial shade on the dog will make everything look uneven.
- Try taking photos in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is lower in the sky and is not so harsh.
- Since you are in the shade, you will have less light coming into your camera which will cause another set of problems. Your camera needs light to freeze movement. If you have low light and fast moving dogs, you get dark and blurry pictures. To avoid these problems, you will need to change a few settings on your camera to allow more light to come into it. These settings will be different depending on the type and quality of camera that you have.
- For simple point and shoot type cameras, you probably have a “kids and pets” setting. If not, look for a “sports” setting instead. When your camera is on one of these settings, it knows that whatever you are pointing at is going to be moving around like a maniac. So, it will know that it needs to automatically adjust some other technical settings to let more ambient light into the camera than normal so that it can use a fast shutter speed to produce a sharply focused photo.
- For advanced photographers with high end cameras, I would suggest the following settings. Set your ISO to 400 (any higher will produce a lot of digital noise). Use your Aperture Priority setting at around F5.6 (If you go any wider, you are going to have a very shallow depth of field and will lose detail on the fur. If you are doing a close-up and the dog has a long nose, you will lose focus on either the nose or the eyes at wide apertures).
After you get the photo out of the camera, you are probably going to want to do some clean-up to it. If you have a real basic photo editing software program, you would want to lower the brightness, increase the contrast, saturation and sharpness on this photo.
Advanced users may want to follow these steps in Photoshop
I mainly use filters from Topaz Labs for my photo editing. They have several sets of filters that specialize in different things. Now that I have them, I can’t live without them. I use at least one filter on every single photo that I edit. You can give them all a 30 day test drive for yourself by clicking here.
After opening the photo in Photoshop, I ran the Topaz Labs Adjust 4 filter and chose the ”Recovery-Highlight” option to try to recover some of the lost detail. I did manage to get a lot back but the whites are still blown out. Usually when this happens, I take the route of giving the photo a more “painterly feel” by increasing the contrast and saturation to offset the less interesting, damaged parts of the photo. I was able to do this within the Topaz filter by playing with the sliders to make a few slight adjustments to the default settings. This is what I got with about 60 seconds of playing around:
That made quite an improvement but it left it looking a little rough still. So, I ran another Topaz Labs filter in their “Clean” series which brought out a little more detail and defined the edges and fur a little more. After that filter was done processing, I bumped up the blacks a little and added a Vibrance adjustment layer at a value of +20.
The end results are not very photo-realistic but it makes for a much more interesting and attractive photo that will hopefully catch the eye of prospective adoptive families.
Don’t forget to submit your photo next Friday in our Facebook contest. Click here for details. Or just send us your photos directly and we will get back to you with a quote to fix them up for you. Click here for details on our photo adjustment services.
From now on, winners will be randomly drawn. I suppose it doesn’t make much sense to pick winners based on good photo quality if the point of this contest is to fix the photo!
by adogslifephoto
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