Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (born Andrew Warhola) started as a commercial illustrator and contributed to fashion magazines in the 1950s.

In the 1960s he rose to fame as a pioneer of Pop Art with paintings of American products such as the Campbell soup cans and Coca Cola. He also painted portraits of icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.

He switched to silk screen prints to create "art" of mass-produced items but also to mass produce the art itself.

Two of his most famous silk screens are the images of Che Guevara, the latin american guerrilla revolutionary and film star Marilyn Monroe.

Hand creating this style of image can be done using the techniques described in the colour derivation photos discussed here a while back. But there is a free piece of Windows software that you can use to create your own Warhol-type images.

The link to the trial version of Andy is here and it requires only that you unzip the package onto your hard drive. There is no installation as such. Just double click the executable and it runs.

Use the File - Open dialogue or the Open icon to access your hard disk drive and locate an image to load. If your image is much over 2000 pixels wide, you will be asked if you want to reduce the size; say yes and the final image is about 2000 pixels in its biggest dimension.


Now just click on the Che button and voila - instant Andy Warhol "Che" styling on your photo. You can turn off various colour combinations if you don't like them with the check marks underneath each. If you want to try the "Marilyn" colour styling, click on the Marilyn button. By changing the width and height you can change the number of images across and vertically.


Don't restrict yourself to portraits. This works well with many landscapes as well.


Here is a photo of the Colliseum in Rome give the "Che" treatment.


p.s. The creator of the Andy Warhol Replicator has a much newer more powerful editor available - the Pop Art Studio. My only problem with it is the €49 price tag (about $65) which seems a little pricy for casual use.

Cropping for Effect

Cropping or trimming the edges of your photos is used for more than just ensuring that the store gets your prints right. You can also use cropping to correct your photos or to improve your photos. As you can see with this photo of Kylemore Abbey in Ireland, there is a path with tourists on the left side of the photo and a bald section of sky in the top right. Both are distractions from the main centre of interest. The bald sky in particular is so bright that it will draw your eyes to that corner of the photo and hold them there.

What we need to do is correct those parts of the photo. Since there is a lot of space around the actual photo of the abbey and with the water almost forming a path up to the abbey, we can crop the photo, eliminate the two distracting areas and strengthen the photo all in one step. A sample cropping is shown here.


And is applied. Looking at the resulting photo, you would never know that the distractions have been eliminated.


Don't forget to consider a vertical cropping too. Many photos lend themselves to unorthodox croppings - landscapes are generally considered to be horizontals but sometimes you can create a stronger photo taking or cropping the photo vertically.

Cropping in Picasa

One of the reasons I like Picasa is that it makes a lot of commonplace tasks easy. I generally crop 90% of my photos. Why? Because when I have them printed, I want to control what gets clipped off the edges of my prints. I don't like leaving it to automated machinery which may or may not get it right.

To crop an image in Picasa, double click it to open the editing screen. At the top left are the basic editing tools and at the top of the list is Crop.


Clicking on Crop brings you to another screen - really the left margin has been replaced with the cropping controls. The basic sizes 4x5, 5x7 and 8x10 are given and you also have the option of manually cropping - clipping the edges so that the final result is not a standard size.

Once you have chosen the size you want, click-hold-drag the mouse across the image to create a rectangle. Everything inside the rectangle is going to be kept; everything in dark gray is going to be lost. But...and it's a big but...Picasa will never willingly destroy your original photo. You can always restore the original photo and recrop it.


Click on the Preview button and you can see the immediate results of your cropping. After a few seconds you return to the cropping screen. If you like what you see click Apply. More likely, the cropping needs fine tuning. Put your mouse inside the light rectangle and you can drag it around to position it more accurately. Put your mouse on an edge and you can resize the rectangle - keeping the chosen proportions. In this example I've carefully clipped out the power lines at the top left.


When you are happy, click Apply and the image is cropped. Note though that you can click Recrop and start all over again if you want.

Cropping Ratios

When you send your photos to be printed and get them back are you sometimes surprised to discover parts of your photo are missing?

You probably don't realize that the images you print are not necessarily in the same proportions as the images your camera takes.

Many (most?) cameras take a photo which is the same proportions as 35mm which is 3 by 2 written 3x2. Why? Because 35mm photos are really 35mm long by 24mm wide. Dividing both 35 and 24 by 12 gives (almost) 3 and 2. So a 35mm photo has a 3 by 2 ratio.

All 4x6" photos are 3 by 2 because if you divide both 4 and 6 by 2, you get 2 and 3. Now we really don't care if the answer is 2x3 or 3x2 - the difference is really just the difference between the photo being upright (portrait) or sideways (landscape).

The problems start when you print larger than 4x6". Standard print sizes are named for the sizes of paper that are produced. Four by six inch prints are named so because the paper is 4" by 6". Companies like Kodak produce paper in several standard sizes: 4x6", 5x7", 8x10", 11x14", 16x20" and 20x24". There are others but most of use don't use anything much larger. Some sizes of prints are standard because you can fit them onto one of the standard sheets. For example you can fit two 3½x5" prints onto a single sheet of 5x7" paper. And you can fit four 4x5" prints onto a sheet of 8x10" paper.

A 5x7" print means that you have to "crop" or trim part of the photo to make it fit the paper. As you can see in this photo of the Swiss guard, part of the image will be lost when it's printed. Why? Because if you divide 5 by 2½ to bring it down for our 2x3 ratio, the 7 comes down to 2.8. It's too small for the 3 in the 2x3 ratio. A 5x7 is a 2x2.8 ratio.

Likewise if you print an 8x10" print, dividing 8 by 4 to get 2 means that when you divide the 10 by 4 you get 2½ and overall you get a 2x2.5 ratio. As you can see in the image below, more of the top and bottom get clipped in the print.

Now it looks and sounds like a big deal and if your arithmetic isn't too good, the it probably sounds like a lot of gobbelldygook too.

But with two simple "rules" you don't have to worry at all.

First, always take your photos with a little extra room around the edges. This way when you crop your photos you won't lose anything important.

Second, don't let the stores crop your photos - do it yourself. If you use Picasa, you should crop your own photos. Double click a photo to enter the editing routine and choose the Crop button from the Basic tools. There you have the choice of cropping sizes.

AutoStitch

Using AutoStitch to create panoramas is quite simple. The hardest part is taking the sequence of photos. Now this photo of the Pantheon would have been easy to take if only I had that $1000 wide angle lens - but since I don't I took a series of photos working from left to right and making sure that I overlapped in between photos. The recommendation is usually an overlap of 30%. A tripod is also recommended so that all the photos have the same vertical coverage. (I usually just "eyeball" the overlap and I don't usually lug a tripod unless I'm going to a specific shoot.)


Once you have the photos and you know where they are on your hard drive, open AutoStitch. It isn't much to look at but ...


The only thing you might want to change in the Options is the scaling. If you are going to print your photo at more than a 4x6" size, you will want to increase the scaling from 10% to 25% or even 50%. Be warned though that creating the panorama at these scalings will take much longer - time to go get a coffee.

If you have the scaling set, then the File menu - Open lets you select your photos. Be sure to change the view to Thumbnails so that you can see which photos you are choosing. You choose more than one by holding the Control key down as you click on photos. If they are in sequence as they are here, then click on the first and shift-click on the last to pick them all. Once you have selected all the photos, click Open and wait.

Eventually AutoStitch will open a window with the panorama created. The black areas are those for which AutoStitch had no information - I missed them when I took my photo sequence. That's why a tripod is recommended.


But with a little cropping and the addition of a blue sky and clouds borrowed from another photo, I have a very nice photo of the Pantheon, its Obelisk and the little piazza it occupies.

Exposure Correction in Picasa

Although PhotoFiltre gives me more control over exposure control, Picasa will often do the same job with just one button. Double-click your photo to access the editing mode and click on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Picasa will then do its best guess at correcting your exposure, contrast and colour balance all in one go. And generally it does a good job as you can see here.


But sometimes I don't like the colour correction. It just seems to be a little too much - too much contrast, too much colour saturation, too much colour shift. In Picasa once you've made a correction, all you have to do is use the Undo button to reverse the last corrections. So if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't lucky for you, Undo it and then try the "Auto Contrast" and the "Auto Colour" buttons. 'Auto Contrast' adjusts the contrast without touching the colour balance. "Auto Colour" takes a best guess at the lighting and adjusts it so that whites come out as whites rather than pale yellows, oranges, blues or greens.

Basic Exposure Correction using Gamma

Gamma is a measure of the brightness and contrast of an image. By adjusting the gamma you can adjust the midtones (those between the brightest and the darkest tones) without damaging details in the highlight and shadow areas. With a program like PhotoFiltre, you can adjust the gamma from the main toolbar. Gamma is symbolized by the capital Greek letter, Γ. Below you can see a view of the Roman skyline before and after gamma correction.

In PhotoFiltre the gamma control is on the main toolbar as shown here. Just clicking it one or two or possibly three times will result in the photo being "lightened". There is some correction in contrast but not much.


I generally find that adjusting just the gamma leaves the image looking "flat", i.e. without sufficient contrast. To correct that (and because I find that I prefer slightly contrasty images), click on the contrast tool two or three times.

Software You Need

I'm a firm believer in not spending money if I don't have to. It's not that I won't but if something free will do the job I need to do, then free is it.

My second belief is that the majority of people are NOT computer oriented. They are ordinary folks who like to take photos of their children, of their grandchildren, of their trips. They want to be able to put their photos on their computer and work with them. They don't want to become computer experts - they just want results. Where do my beliefs originate? In the night school general-interest classes on "Digital Photo Editing" and "Learning to Use Your Digital Camera" that I teach.

When it comes to working with my photos in Windows, my primary tools are:

• Picasa from Google which is a superb tool for organizing your photos on your computer, for simple fixes and simple edits, and especially for creating backups of your photos to CDs or DVDs. I teach many, many people who are lost when it comes to creating backkups and Picasa keeps it simple.

• PhotoFiltre, a French editing program (with an English version). This photo of the Arch of Constantine just outside the Colliseum was corrected for exposure, had the perspective straightened, was colour enhanced, had a canvas filter applied, had the edges "blurred" and was labelled - all in PhotoFiltre in under five minutes!
  
  PhotoFiltre actually comes in two versions - the free one and a more advanced version called PhotoFiltre Studio which sells for a very reasonable 29 Euro. PhotoFiltre Studio supports layers which give far more control to the photo editing process than software that does not use layers but Studio does not implement them at a level that I would feel comfortable recommending it over other software.

• Autostitch which is a graduate school project from University of British Columbia and is my all-time favourite for creating panoramas. The following panorama of Honolulu started life as a series of 7 photos taken in sequence from left to right. Autostitch then took the individual photos, matched them up, blended the edges and created the panoramic composite. Not bad for a free program and a lot easier than using many of the more expensive programs.

Emailing Photos

The problem with email photos is they usually are too large to see in the email. You need to resize them smaller.
In Windows XP this is simple.
First find your photo on your hard disk drive.
Click on it and then click on the "E-mail this file" in the left side menu. If you need to send more than one photo you can click on the first one and then hold the Control key down as you click on the other images. Let the Control key up before you click on "E-mail".


Windows will open a small window usually at the top of the screen which offers to make the pictures smaller.

If you click on the "Show more options" link you can then choose the size of the reduced image.
I generally choose "Small (fits in a 640 by 480 window)". Choose the larger sizes if you want the recipient to be able to make a 4x6" print.

When you click OK your email program will open with the image or images attached.