Before you Shoot
When choosing the perfect setting for your photos, you need mother nature on your side. Any photographer will tell you that natural lighting is everything. Golden Hour provides you with a heads up on the best time of day to schedule your photo shoot. According to the author, "The Golden Hour (sometimes referred to as the Magic Hour) is often defined as the first and last hour of sunlight in the day when the special quality of light yields particularly beautiful photographs."
When entering the site, Golden Hour automatically locates you based on your connection's IP address and calculates your desired times as shown below.
While you're looking around, I recommend taking a moment to check out the author's personal photo gallery. He displays numerous examples of the different ways you can use the first or last moments of light to enhance your photographs.
Once Your Photos Are Taken
Get creative. Don't be afraid that you're altering the moment. Enhanced photos are still your photos, but have the opportunity to bring out the best qualities in them. Objects of nature or of sentimental value are perfect targets for the following programs, putting emphasis on what means most to the photographer.Photoshop Express
Photoshop Express offers easy to use editing tools online, great for users who want instant, one-click results without clogging up your hard drive with downloads. Once you create an account, you can upload just one photo, or up to 2GB of photos to their server.
Basic editing tools give you simple options such as cropping and correcting red eye. If your photos need adjustment, you can alter the lighting or soften the focus. More advanced options to allow you to change hue, pop color, tint, sketch, distort, and convert to black and white.
For example, the photo below is an original copy of the photo.
Using Photoshop's advanced editing tools, I have chosen an orange hue to enhance the photo below:
Picasa (by Google)
*Stand-alone program - Requires downloading.* This program has a little bit of everything. Picasa offers Organization, Edits, Sharing, Export to Blogger, Slide Shows, Photo Collage, and Movies. This program automatically synchronizes with user defined photo folders, so you don't have to manually.
Next, the program can perform a wealth of edits, both simple and advanced. Below, I spent about 30 seconds to use the focal Black & White function to really make the focal point of the photo "pop".
Next, the program can perform a wealth of edits, both simple and advanced. Below, I spent about 30 seconds to use the focal Black & White function to really make the focal point of the photo "pop".
Using the same original photo as before:
Focal Black & White allows you to preserve color in an area of the photo that you wish to define.
Tintii
Another program that allows you to enhance hues of color is Tintii (by Indii). I love the idea being able to highlight rich, colorful, single objects, but don't want to pay for a professional editing program (which can be quite costly). After experimenting with this program, I liked the end result of certain photos, but only a select few. Personally, I wasn't as impressed as I thought I would be overall. I had to make sure to find photos with bright colorful objects, but those objects had to be the only ones of it's color for the full effect to be pulled off (example: A vivid purple flower was beautiful, as long as nothing else in the photo had any purple hues that would also be highlighted as well). The few I had archived that I used turn out great.
Photo Storage
After you go hog wild capturing every footstep of your precious angel (or dog, or favorite tree [or whatever floats your boat]), upload and save it to an online album (or, if you are like me, you have taken over 11,000 photos of your first born. For this high volume, I'd recommend an external hard drive or a home server). The last thing you need is for your computer to take a nose dive and you lose everything you worked for, edits or no edits.Some of the above mentioned editing sites also host their own free photo storage for your photos (Photoshop and Picasa). These sites, along with others such as Flickr and Photobucket, allow photo storage that can be shared with others. Websites like Shutterfly and Snapfish not only allow you to store and share, but also shop and purchase your photos either directly from their company or by using local partner companies to receive and print your orders.
P.S. I now challenge you to spend an afternoon capturing snapshots of your own. Create beautiful enhancements to add to your photo books. And hey, share them with me. I'll gladly feature them.
