Sickdayracing

Many people on the forum have asked me what camera I use and what steps I take in getting nice pictures so I have decided to make a quick tutorial on some basics on taking and editing pictures. I am by no means an expert; I only got started in photography a few months ago. Hopefully some of the more expert photographers on here with enlighten us all on how we can improve our pictures even more. The following will just be an outline on some basics.

Cameras: I use a Canon SD400 and Nikon D70 for my pictures. The Canon is a basic point and shoot and the D70 is a full-featured digital SLR. Both are great cameras. You can pretty much use any camera with a manual mode to get decent shots. On most digital cameras you can adjust the ISO, Shutter speeds, and aperture. As long as your camera has a manual mode you will be good to go. However, if your camera does not have adjustable shutter or aperture taking good pictures might be difficult. For point and shoot cameras I prefer Canon. They make excellent cameras and have a lot of adjustability. Their manufacturing quality and the materials used on the body are of the highest I have seen in point and shoot cameras. Nikon makes great cameras as well. Unfortunately if your camera does not have any manual settings you are out of luck. In addition to a decent camera, you will need a tripod. A tripod is essential in photography and is absolutely necessary for night shots.

Location: Just like real estate, location is very important. You do not want a backdrop where it distracts from the car. The car should be the point of focus in the picture. Do not pick a location where the backdrop overpowers the car.

Time: Sun down is usually a great time to take pictures because the great colors you can get. Night pictures are great to but require a little more practice to get good. I prefer not taking pictures during broad daylight because everything becomes too bright

Settings: Generally, you never want to use the flash on your camera, especially for night shots. For your ISO you want to select the lowest speed possible. With a low ISO you will have to use a longer shutter speed. On my Canon I can set my ISO as low as 50, with the Nikon as low at 100. You can use a higher ISO and use a slower shutter if you are not as steady but a higher ISO you will get a lot more noise in the picture. A tripod is very useful for daytime shots, and is necessary for night shots. You shutter speeds will vary depending on lighting. The only way to find the best shutter speed is to test different settings. Take a lot of pictures, chances are when you upload them you will only find a few really good ones.

Night Shots: The most difficult shots to get are night shots. It is essential to pick a location with white lighting. Lighting is the moist important aspect for night shots. You do not want to park the car directly under the light because it will wash out your picture. I try to park as far away from the actual light pole while still being in the light. Once you picked a place to take your shots from. Set the camera on the tripod. I find that taking pictures from about the mid height of the S2000 gives the nicest shots. Set you ISO to the lowest possible and take as many pictures as possible with different shutter speeds. Night shots will very from 1 to 10 seconds but 15+ seconds shutters are not uncommon depending on lighting.

Editing: No matter how well a picture is taken, it can always look better with some editing. Photoshop is most peoples tool of choice. It is a very powerful software and pretty easy to use. Along with Photoshop, I use the Neat Image plug in. Together they have given me great results.

To show the results of editing the picture I will include how it looks after every step. The following is the original image.



Open your image file in Photoshop to start. I will try to keep this as basic as possible. The first things I do are color adjustments. Photoshop is a very smart program and the automatic settings work very well. To start with the colors, go to Image -> Adjustments and you will find Auto Color, Auto Levels, and Auto Contrast here. Select all three and see how the picture looks. Usually it will come out good but you may need to skip one of them depending on your results. Here are the results after this step was taking



You can go further and select the Brightness/Contrast and do some fine tweaking there. This is how the picture looked after some fine adjustments with Brightness/Contrast



The next step is sharpening the picture. To do so go to Filters -> Sharpen -> Unsharpen Mask. To start you can try a 70% Amount and 6.0 on the radius. From there you can adjust it to your liking. My adjustment on the next picture as 56% and 9.8 radius. As you can see the picture got much sharper and a lot of details were brought out such as the ground. You can also see how much more defined the wheels look.



The bi product of sharpening is noise. You will notice a lot of additional noise in the picture now. For the final step I use Neat Image. Once you have installed the plug in you will see it in your Filters Selection. (Note: If you are using the free version off there website, you will have to resize the picture to 1024x786 before using it. To do so go to Image -> Image Size) To use Neat Image go to Filters -> Neat Image - > Reduce Noise. Once neat image is open use the automatic profile to profile the image. You can now go and adjust the noise levels to reduce noise and smooth out the picture. On this image I used 100% noise reduction and 20% on all the levels. Here is the result.



And to Compare to the original



So you can now see how tweaking can make a good picture a great picture. Just use some these basics steps and you shots should improve. If you guys any more questions feel free to ask.

crockey

Geat write up Thanks for the info

nVz2000

great tips!

mugenpower_s2k

very great professional tips!!

Flames60

Blah, blah, blah.....while those tips are very helpful, i just don't see the point in having to "cheat" in order to achieve nice photographs. NO, i'm not talking about the shutter speed and such, but using the photo editing programs. What you show after using those programs ISNT the real photograph you took. Showing pictures should be the original, to prove the beauty of the technique with the right camera---right results, no BS edits.

Just my 2 cents.

TriaXenginE

???

Kel

[QUOTE=Flames60,Jun 1 2005, 04:50 PM]Blah, blah, blah.....while those tips are very helpful, i just don't see the point in having to "cheat" in order to achieve nice photographs.

Sickdayracing

Agreed, the picture should portray what you actually see with the naked eye. The reason for editing is because digital cameras (Point and shoot in particular) are lacking in picture quality. The shots with the D70 are touched very slightly, if at all were as pictures from the SD400 (Like the ones above) take some work. I appreciate your comment.

Sickdayracing

Great Pic! But a few seconds in photoshop can work wonders

Flames60

All very good points here, but isn't one of the points about digital cameras is the quality. I'm not really looking to get into a big discussion here, but my digital camera takes amazing quality pictures on the point and shoot. In fact, those are the only pictures i take, because i don't know how to change the settings manually.

And yes, tweaking the photos DOES make the quality better...nice example with the badge. I just think there should be a seperate section or something.