The magic of post-processing: turn your odd shots artistic!

The magic of post-processing: turn your odd shots artistic!

One of the grandest examples of artistic photography

Photography is getting more popular by the day, and as we move headlong into the future, crowded with increasing mobile devices capable of shooting excellent photos, nearly everyone is turning into a photographer nowadays. However, this improvement has a dark side as well. Because of short attention span, most novice photographers simply don't bother to understand the art of photography. Another major problem is that, most of us simply don't have enough time to consider all attributes of a potential shot. We simply love to find an attractive scene, and click the 'shoot' button on our devices. While this certainly makes you advance by trial-and-error, oftentimes good quality shots are ruined, when you later sadly discover that the shot is somehow not straightened, or has improper brightness/contrast balance.

But in this digital age of computing, with the power of versatile software solutions in our hands, we can utilize even those oddly taken shots, and turn them into crafty, neat, artistic masterpieces. Not every photo can be modified thus, but a good many can! And what's better is, you have your original photo intact in the case you don't like the result. This gives us tremendous flexibility of experimentation with different colour schemes, contrast and brightness adjustments, white balance and other, more advanced customizations.

So, first of all, there are a few basic points we should consider, to get a sketch of what artistic photography is.

What is artistic photography? 

An example image, produced with GIMP's tiling
feature

Basically, a photo is a two-dimensional, still medium that helps others perceive what you want them to. It is, in a way, a system of broadcasting your thoughts and expression to a wider audience. Every photo should, most importantly, have a message. This 'message' can be anything. For example, when you're shooting a tree in a forest, how you take the shot depends on what you want your shot to convey. If you prefer to convey a message of loneliness, the silent beauty of nature, be sure to capture a single tree, and isolate all others from your frame. Similarly, if you instead prefer to show the forest as a whole, unified entity, be sure to capture a number of trees inside your frame. This is in a way a very abstract concept, but at least some people will get to see what you want them to see.

Thus, the most important questions to ask yourself when you're planning a shot is "What do I want this shot to convey?". Once we start asking ourselves this simple question, we happen to start taking more time for taking a single shot. However, this reduction in 'quantity' is compensated by the improvement in 'quality' of every shot. Most novice photographers take as many shots as possible, depicting a single subject. However, almost always, all these shots are just ordinary, and some are simply ruined. If we take more time in selecting our subject, the number of photos will be less, but the average quality of each, from an artistic standpoint, will be much better.

Abstraction, a powerful tool 

This is another important and effective method of plunging into the depths of the artistic side of photography. Abstraction has a multitude of definitions, but roughly speaking, it is the art of relating an 'abstract' concept to your shot. This 'abstract' concept is most commonly a feeling, something that can be perceived by the mind, but not 'seen' by the eye. For example, the shot above creates a feeling of loneliness in our minds, as we see the tree (the main subject here) standing alone in the midst of the field. The same perspective is shown using different colouring schemes, which creates a feeling of changing times (because our brains are hardwired to relate changes in ambient light with change in time).

Similarly, the shot shown below creates a feeling of silence. With a high contrast applied via post-processing, the addition of a black border complementing the lighter background and the sky shown through a single tree, we get a profound feeling of silence and self-introspection.

The descent of dusk

Now, although different photographers and viewers regard abstractions differently, one of the most universal methods of creating it is by using a high level of contrast. Why exactly? The answer is simple, when we are applying a higher level of contrast, we get a combination of lighter and darker regions, which automatically causes a dynamic change in the perspective.

An example shot 

So, given below is a rather odd shot I took at Eliot Park, Kolkata. As you can clearly see, lighting is poor, and we hardly make head and tail of anything in the foreground. Although the foreground certainly has a tinge of green, we can only see that if we focus hard enough. For these reasons, the image is not visually pleasing, thereby defeating the purpose of the shot itself.

A ruined shot

Now, in order to turn it into something artistic, we must use a certain image-processing software. As you are most certainly aware, Adobe Photoshop is currently the most popular one out there. However, it is costly, and in my opinion one should not turn to piracy. Therefore the easier and better solution is to try something free, and preferably open-source. Thankfully, we have GIMP, GNU Image Manipulation Program, which does the job efficiently. It is almost equivalent to photoshop, and even has a few unique cards up its sleeve, which even photoshop and other commercial software lack. You can learn more about GIMP HERE, and if you wish to install it, simply download the version your OS supports from HERE. Or else, you can try any software that simply works for you.

So, after opening the shot with GIMP, it looks like this.

After opening it with GIMP

It's almost needless to say that there has been no improvement yet. So, let us consider the possibilities. We would like to convey a picture of the sky in the background through the foreground. This is a simple trick, which virtually reverses the background and the foreground. For this, let us increase contrast first, upto 20%. Now, brightness is reduced to 90% of the original value. The result looks like this:

Changed applied

Now, the afternoon sky is displayed here. So, it would be cool to make it appear slightly more bluish. We can do this using 'colour balance' option in GIMP. This also escalates the image to another level of abstraction. Since the right side of the background (the sky) is more 'normal', while the left side is filled with bright, white pixels, increasing bluishness would make the transition more visible along the right. Thus, from a simple setup of two primary colours, white and black (although black is the absence if any colour), we get a tinge of blue to spice up the scene. Notice how the lower portion of the image simply turns jet black as we proceed. Ideal for adding a written caption to highlight the message conveyed by our shot. Although it is optional, this process greatly improves the quality of your result in the case you intend to post it on social media. I am adding a white text to contrast with the jet black background. Usually a proverb, phrase or poetic line does the trick. After adding the line, here's the result.

Text added

Now, we can add a border to emphasize the contents of our shot. GIMP already sports a neat bordering utility, which I'll be using. If you're using GIMP, simply go to Filters=>Decoration=>Add border, and you'll get it. A deep-blue border, with devel 45, would be the ideal option (the original image is 16 MP, by the way). So, after merging all the layers and exporting the shot, we have something like this:

The final result, for now

Although many would feel that there's hardly anything special about this shot, it's certainly better than the original one. Now that we've reached the end of our small tutorial, let us learn some more things about post-processing.

UPDATE: Sorry for the typo, it would have been 'leafy' and not 'leapy'. 

Utilities for improving your shot during post-processing 

1. Cropping: If your shot is large enough, you can select smaller portions of it to convey a wholly different meaning. If you're familiar with Nokia's PureView technology, you possibly know that PureView on Nokia's windows-powered smartphones has a resolution of 41 megapixels. Since the resolution is so high, digital zooming doesn't affect the overall quality of the shot. You can simply take a large photo, and then grab smaller chunks from it to create wholly different shots.

Most of us are not fortunate enough to get our hands on a 41 MP camera yet (mine being a 16 MP one), but that doesn't mean we can't use cropping. Cropping can be used to remove unnecessary elements from the frame.

2. Tiling: Tiling is the process of diving your image into multiple smaller segments. Often, we can create tiles which are actually smaller versions of the same image, and create a feeling of multiple images knit together. In GIMP, this is done via Filter=>Map=>Small tiles option. The first shot that I produced in this tutorial is an example of tiled shot. You can learn more about tiling HERE.

These are just the basics, and once we start practising more, we will be able to trace our own progress. So, best of luck with post-processing and artistic photography!