Advances in recent years have managed to allow for better point-and-shoots, quality wise, but still nowhere near comparable with even the low end DSLRs. The only disadvantages to a DSLR are their increased weight and size and, of course, the price. Sure, if you want to take photography to the next level you’re going to want to save some money and buy a DSLR but what if you just want to take photos of your family and maybe some nice textures to use in your designs? Does a DSLR’s quality justify the price if all you want is to take perpendicular shots of bark?

Maybe not. And this what this post is going to try to help out with: getting away with it and saving a pretty buck in the process. I am assuming you have a camera. Oh, and if you’ve spent more than 400$ on it, than I regretfully have to inform you that you’d have been better off with one of these.

These tips are guaranteed to help you take the best possible pictures with your point-and-shoot camera. Alright cheapos, let’s get this puppy going:

01

Never, ever, I mean n-e-v-e-r take night shots. P&S have really, really bad responses to light. Their sensors are very small [5 times smaller than a full frame sensor] and thus they distribute light inefficiently and in a night shot, where light is [duh!] scarce you’re gonna end up with a noisy, unrealistically lit photo. This is a big no-no.

02

As much as possible [to be read never] try not to use the flash. Turn on another light or get a lamp if you’re in a room and you need extra light but don’t turn that flash on. It spreads light unevenly, it creates the red eye effect and a kitty dies of sadness if you do. Just kidding about the kitty. Or am I?

03

Don’t touch that ISO! With a P&S any setting above 200 is going to give you serious noise.

Don’t touch that ISO! Seriously, when you first buy that blasted P&S turn it on, go to the ISO setting and if possible password code the ISO setting to it’s smallest possible value, usually 100. If you own a DSLR you’re probably going: “what? I play with my ISO settings all the time and the pics look just as good”. Yeah, with a DSLR. With a P&S any setting above 200 is going to give you serious noise. Go ahead, experiment. Take a picture with the ISO at it’s highest, usually 1600. Then check that out. No amount of Noise Reduction is going to solve that. So, again, do us all a favor: Don’t touch that ISO!

04

Try to take more pictures between 06:00 – 17:00 than 17:00 – 20:00. What’s that? No, I’m not nuts. Here’s why: because P&S have crappy sensors, you have to get as much light in there as possible. I found that light falls best for my camera between 10:00 and 14:00. That’s when I get the best possible pictures. But mornings are generally best. And no, sunsets are not ok. Light is scarce then, unlike mornings and you’re going to lose details and get loads of noise or really dark pics.

05

Work with your Exposure settings a lot. It’s the safest way to have control over how lit your picture is. And no, a Levels Adjustment in your preferred software after the picture has been taken is NOT the same thing.

06

If you just can’t get enough light to get a good pic, don’t fret. All’s not lost. Set your Exposure Time to whatever you need it to be, depending on the situation. Most P&S have a Drive Mode, otherwise known as a timer. Set your timer to something like 10 seconds and rest the camera on something flat so there’s nothing to move it. Usually the motion stabilizer in P&S is pretty shotty, to say the least, so don’t count on that to get rid of any motion blur.

All of these tips deal with in-camera settings, but for those of you that have a DIY thumb, the web has a few very good articles on doing your own price conscious paraphernalia:

DPS: DIY Lighting Hacks for Digital Photographers

Lifehacker: Top 10 DIY Photography Tools

Hope these tips help out with your future pictures and maybe get you to be more interested in photography, if you aren’t already. Until next time, my unsuspecting interwebbies, until next time!

I’ve seen a bunch of GREAT tutorials on zeh web about today’s topic and they’re all very informative and instructive, but I’ve yet to see a comprehensive one when it comes to us, the amateur photographer that either doesn’t have the budget or doesn’t feel it justified to spend 500$ – 1500$ on a DSLR camera. So this article is for us, the cheapskates, the amateurs, the people that want to learn but without breaking the bank. Hear, hear!

A week ago I got back to Cluj from a very nice week long vacation back in my home town. My girlfriend and I also decided to trek a bit on the very prominent landmark that is Mount Ceahlau. It’s 1907m above sea level at it’s highest and you can only get to the summit by foot, which is the way mountain climbing should be. You know, as in NOT with a car.

Anyway, the idea is we took a few pictures of the scenery and they were all nice and swell, even though we own a pretty old, low end, point-and-shoot camera. But as we reached the final stage of the track to the summit we got to a place that’s known as “Jgheabul cu Hotar” [a loose translation would be The Marked Ravine]. It’s a very nice portion of the track and a worthwhile climb there as one can see the highest peek above the plateau [Toaca, 1907m] and also the surrounding valley. So we thought, hey, what a good picture this would make! But as you can see below, the moment I tried to capture the sky, everything darkened. This is a normal and omnipresent problem with point-and-shoot cameras. Because their sensors are not as sensible to light as a professional camera you simply aren’t going to get that great picture.

01

Not in a single shot that is!

Because capturing more of the mountain and less of the sky meant the camera was able to adjust it’s light sensitivity and get all the nice details from the trees and rocks as you can see below. But not from the sky!

02

This is where pre-processing ends. It’s about as much as you can do to ensure a good result at home. There are a few more tips on how to get ok-ish photos from your 99$ camera, but more on those in another tutorial.

Ok, so we have our two photos, one with a great sky but crappy landscape and the other with no sky and good scenery. Let’s start performing a bit of photographic surgery, shall we?

! Note: click the pictures to see the large versions with all the details.

03

I overlapped the two photos, keeping the one with the good scenery in front and the one with the good sky in the back.

I know you might not understand much out of this one but what I did was I moved the top layer, the one with the good scenery and bad sky, higher so that it’s treeline was above the treeline of the layer beneath it. This is so that when I’ll be masking out the bad sky, all that remains underneath is the good sky and none of the old, dark scenery.

04

When you need to mask something out, take a large brush [I used 50px] and do a rough masking out. It really saves time.

Here’s something a lot of people don’t tell you: when you need to mask something out, take a large brush [I used 50px] and do a rough masking out. It saves time and if you zoom in a bit this can be a very good stress reliever. Just pound away with that mouse ’till there’s nothing left! Then you can get to the detailed stuff.
This is a technique I picked up from motion graphics and especially movie effects. It’s called making a Junk Matte and the guy I first heard this from a while back is Aharon Rabinowitz. Check out his awesome After Effects tutorials on Creative Cow.

05

As you can see this is now looking pretty good! Sure, the lighting is off and there’s a blue tint on the whole picture but the point is that is looks like ONE picture, not a comp[osition].

So let’s carry on and give this picture the quality it deserves.

06

First things first: you can’t have quality output if your input is bad to start with, so let’s fix the all important lighting with a Levels Adjustment. Tightening the histogram of the image almost always is the most important step in any picture improvement.

There are many ways that blue tint could have been taken out but sometimes you have to try out a few until you like the result. For my picture I think a Color Balance with a -30 Blue set to Midtones works quite well.

Also, I liked the blue tint on the sky so I masked out the lower part of the sky on the Color Balance layer with a Black-White gradient.

07

Sometimes, with pictures like this, point-and-shoot cameras will get a vignette. Depending on your model it will be either a dark or light one. Our camera added a dark vignette in the top and top right side of the picture but it’s something easily solved by choosing a very soft, large white brush and clicking just a few times in that general area. Then, turn the opacity down to the point where it all looks uniform, like the cloud in our picture looks now.

This is something hard for beginners to notice so take a moment from editing and go do something else, then when you come back, put the picture in fullscreen mode and try to see if you can spot a vignette, but remember, it doesn’t always happen so don’t fix something that’s not broken.

08

Using Stefan’s Sharpen method, of which I’ve talked about in the “Jump for Joy” tutorial I cleared the picture of virtually all camera blur. Stefan’s method works particularly well with scenery photos and portraits so check that out!

As for the final treatments I almost always like to play around with Blending Modes. What I did was I duplicated the picture and set it to Soft Light with 50% opacity. Then I added yet another duplicate of the picture and set it to screen to brighten things up a bit, but I masked out this layer with a gradient to prevent overburning the sky. Then I just lowered the saturation of the trees in the lower left side of the picture to keep everything below psychedelic levels and that’s it!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. It’s always fun to do this sort of thing, especially knowing that the camera that took these pictures is … let’s just say less than capable. That’s it from me for now, but be sure to check out the next tutorial where I’ll be going over photo shooting techniques and tips for the ultra budget-aware!