Macro Photography tips for Point and Shoot Cameras V

Hey People!
How are you today?

It rained very heavy last night and sent a cool breeze all over but the morning sun made all the signs of last night's rain disappear...just saw a white throated kingfisher and a crow in an aerial fight, ran to grab my camera but it was too late by then. OK, then lets put the personal talk aside and concentrate on the last and final topic of Macro photography.

To understand this discussion today you need to check my last posts too.

Today we are going to discuss the last but not the least topic of our Macro photography discussion.

5.POST PROCESSING

This may seem useless to few but trust me the editing which we do after a shot is equally important as the shot itself, but there are a few pictures which have been so perfectly framed that they do not need any editing at all. Trust me there are not many such pictures.

Now that I'm talking about editing and all do not be  afraid that I'm emphasizing on very difficult editing tools, but rather I'd like to introduce you all to the very basic editing tool by GOOGLE which is freely available and not much explored by everyone. 

Ah! yes, you all guessed it right...I'm talking about the PICASA software. Take my word people this the best laymen photo editing tool available, it does not require technical expertise to do the editing. All the techniques are very clearly written and the thumbnails show the post processing effect and you can undo any thing you have done, is it not very easy people?

You can download the Picasa software here.

Now the most basic adjustment we can do to make the picture lively is to adjust the color, contrsat, brightness etc 

I would like to illustrate what Picasa does to a picture when used subtly

The two pictures above are the same(Very tiny seed dispersal of wild Asteraceae flowers) but the later has been processed appropriately in picasa.

The tools I used here are Tuning and Cropping.

Tuning: I have increased the contrast and the shadow in the picture. Which eliminated the dullness and brought the rich color of the plant and its background but got a bit overexposed due to the usage of flash.

Cropping: The picture has been appropriately cropped to show in the detail of seed dispersal as well as to get the required closeness.

When cropped the picture becomes quite big and the unwanted things in the picture can be eliminated to showcase what we intended to.

While capturing this picture it was windy and I had to use flash which restricted me from going very close to the plant as that would cast a shadow which is very undesirable , hence took the picture from a distance and rather thought of cropping it later to show the parts only in perfect focus.

There are many other modes in picasa which you can explore and this software also allows us to upload and store our picture online with our gmail account or separate picasa account, isn't it a wonderful thing? So, why the delay my dear friends start clicking and have fun editing to give those dramatic effects to your pictures which you have been dreaming of all these days.

Good luck with photographing the best Macro shots ever people.

Keep smiling and Happy clicking

Cheers,
Deepthi Nannam