Cheap & Cheat Proffessional look Photography

Great to see someone taking the initiative to be a little creative with thier own shots, please do not take my info as an attack as it is not, it is merely helpful advice to help you with your efforts towards a more professional look from your own snaps.

Although the images shown are no doubt not the origianal image quality due to file size reduction for best viewing over the net I would like to point out a few tips to assist you and others on how to overcome some issues for your future efforts that you will notice are much closer to the professional quality!

There are 2 main issues with these particular shots that are easy to overcome, 1 is with the picture taking and the other is in the editing colour/black & white contrast.

1. Taking the Photo (baby amongst stuffed toys in this example but same rule applies to all)- with a full auto camera introduce more light, perhaps a bright tungsten light in the room with no light shade and use a much brighter light bulb in your lamp to concentrate on the point of focus, with a camera that has individual manual settings I would be looking to set the ISO value to 100, and if using aperture priority get as close as possible with the camera and be zoomed out all the way rather than having the camera further away and zooming in on the focal point, if using shutter priority and the light used in the the picture is the only lighting I would be looking at setting the shutter to around 100 or 1/100 depending on which your camera displays it as.

2. editing the photo to give a colour focus on black & white/sepia background - try to use software that allows you to create additional layers, I use photoshop but many others allow this these days, select the entire contents of the original photo when you have it open in your editing software and copy it, either create a new layer and paste your copied image to this layer (use duplicate layer if available), make sure the new layer is selected and use the eraser tool to erase the entire background from the new layer leaving only the part you wish to remain in colour, then select the original layer which contains the image you first opened and edit it to make it black & white or sepia and if done correctly you should end up with an image that is flawless around the colour subject and then save the edited image where you want it and with a file name you can recognise it by.

An example of point 2 can be seen if your click HERE which was also reduced for the net and a pic HERE that was taken using an extremely bright focused lamp for light and manual shutter setting of 520 with ISO set to 100

I have only just joined minti and will try to find the time to list many helpful tips shortly that might assist you in saving $$$ on professional photos.

What a great idea, many thanks for sharing this with us.

Regards Janice