About Dirty Dog Images

Over the past year, I noticed a lot of “dirty dog” images on Facebook, Flickr, Google+ and even commercial websites. No hanky panky involved but rather images with poor exposure, awkward tinting, horizon line out of kilter, and too many in need of simple cropping.

Then I took a careful look at my own portfolio of pictures and discovered a lot of dirty dog paws in my own albums. Almost 30% of recent photos would need serious cleaning and post-processing.

Presentation © Jacques Surveyer

What is a Dirty Dog image?

A Dirty Dog image is not deliberately done.

In fact they look pretty good on first inspection.

A dirty dog shot is a victim of our new automated cameras. In trying to take a good shot sometimes cameras miscalculate or average and produce less than average images.

All cameras - smartphone, point-and-shoot [or compacts], even pro SLRs – are responsible for their share of dirty dogs.

But so are wee-photographers.

How do Dirty Dog Images Occur?There are 4 principal causes

1 – automated cameras have helped to eliminate the gross errors – out-of-focus, blurred images, badly under-or-overexposed shots, etc. But that is what lets so-so shots sneak through. Cameras are averaging the exposure, white balance or f-stop on scene. It works maybe 3 out of 5 times but.....

2 – much photo-taking today is of the instant variety. Spur of the moment with the subject disappearing. Alas, photo preparation/composition time is not minutes but a few seconds.

3 – action shots change photo dynamics very quickly – what worked before suddenly is no longer operative.

4 – while our eyes deceive us, the camera tells the dirty truth. So in many shots what we “actually see” is different in reality. Optical illusions and eyes adapting in a darkened theater are examples

2 Ways to Clean-up Dirty Dog Images

Pre-shoot tools like flash, tripod, umbrella,etc

Post-shoot photofinishing

Emphasis in this lecture is fixing by Post Editing

PhotoFinishing tools are now very good yet many are free

Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom are still the premium tools But their annual costs and constant updates are onerous So four photo editors will be considered here: Two free PC photo editors- Art Weaver and Photoscape Two free online photo editors: Pixlr and Snapshot

Why do Photofinishing ?

If you are printing the images, the photo store or your printer won't do the corrections – the resulting prints won't be as pleasing as they could be.

If you are using the images on your website as portfolio, product or even news event shots – why lower your brand image with dirty dog photos?

As my OCAD photo professor used to say -

“Great photography is 1 part luck, 1 part pre-shoot preparation and all the rest is fabulous photofinishing.” Of course, he taught photofinishing.

Finally, because many of the photo edit and finishing tools are free and the photofinishing tricks are easy to learn.... why not add the elbow grease of invisibly polished photos.

Dirty Dog Image 1 – Underexposed Image

Original Facebook Image Improved Image

Despite automation, cameras tend to average the exposure over the whole image often underexposing the subject as above.

Use a fill flash on your camera. Or postshoot, free editors have basic Curves or Brightness/Contrast tools to do the fix. But better are Flash-Fill tools as in Photoshop or Paintshop Pro.

Dirty Dog Image 2 – Overexposed Image

Original Travel Image Improved Image

Like blurred shots, over-exposed images are very difficult to correct. Levels or the Curves commands help somewhat but unless you have the camera raw image the corrections tend to leave a high contrast or darker image.

Dirty Dog Image 3 – Not Cropped to Center of Interest

Original Facebook Image Improved Image

Cropping to the center of interest is one of the easiest photo finishing operations to do. All 3 of our free photo editors have robust cropping tools often with guides to find the Rule of 3rds or Golden Ratio crops. Also take advantage to crop out offending interlopers or objects that are just distractions.

Using Pixlr for Cropping Correction

Note the Crop command has very useful Rule of Thirds guidelines to help make a better crop of the image. In general, Pixlr Editor is one of the most complete free, online photo editors.

Dirty Dog Image 4 – Artificial Lighting Mistint

Original Realtor Image Improved Image

Artificial lighting mis-tints occur most often with incandescent and fluorescent lamps .Most cameras have colorcast corrections or use lens filters. Postshoot, the correction is simple using the Levels tool available in most photo editors.

Using Art Weaver to correct Tint Brightness

Art Weaver has Level command for sophisticated brightness/contrast and color tinting corrections. It is free, runs on PC and has Photoshop look & feel

Dirty Dog Image 5 – Dusk, Dawn, Rainy Day Hues

Original Realtor Image Improved Image

A blue or cool tint occurs at dawn, dusk, snowy and rainy days. Now sometimes you do not want to correct the tint. But other times the correction improves the picture's appeal. But be careful - if you color-correct for one in a series of shots you should do all the rest as well. Again the Levels tool available everywhere makes for an easy fix.

Dirty Dog Image 6 – Tilted out of Kilter

Original Flickr Image Improved Image

4 corrections were made to the image above. First, the tilt was rotated out. Next the subject was zoomed into. While the front wheel of the car in the upper left was cropped out. Finally fillflash was applied to the darkened part of the street scene.

Dirty Dog Image 7 – High Noise in Photo

Original Facebook Image Improved Image

Noise in an image is avoided by using flash fill if possible. Post photo clean-up is difficult as in over-exposure or out-of-focus images. Try using smoothing filters and then downsize the image by 50% or more.

Dirty Dog Image 8 – Unwanted Blemishes + Inclusions

Original Travel Image Improved Image

Touch ups usually are associated with people portraits and landscapes. There are a wealth of brushes, cloners and touch up tools available. Several were used to eliminate the streaks and trailing debris in this fireworks shot.

Splash-up provides Online Touch-ups

Splashup is free online & has brushes, masks, eraser, etc for touch-ups.

Dirty Dog Image 9 – Soft Edges

1)Top-left is original 2)Top-right shows the soft edges in blow-up 3)Bottom-left uses Sharpening and 4)Bottom right use advanced 2 layer sharpening. Normally sharpening brightens the image as in (3) but advanced method darkens as in (4)

Dirty Dog Image 10 – Lost in Gray

Lost in gray occurs in low-light, beach-side or underexposed photos. Preshoot solution is use of fill flash or umbrella. The Post-shoot remedy is a mask around the area of interest, Flash fill, sharpening, and gentle saturation increase while the background is blurred and slightly darkened.

Photoscape is free, very versatile Photo Editor

Photoscape is the Swiss Army Knife of photo finishing – so very useful.

Dirty Dog Images are Stragglers

- They show up at Murphy time – almost randomly but at worst possible moment you discover the shaggy dog look

- They seem good enough at first glance

- They are due to a number of causes including both human and automatic camera errors.

- Most can be fixed with pre-shoot planning or post-shoot photo editing

- This presentation highlights 2 free online photo editors and 2 free PC photo finishing tools which can handle most photo editing tasks.

Summary: Brushing up DirtyDog Images

They seem good enough at first glance;

But as seen there are easy photofinishing options to fix them.

And you don't have to spend a fortune to do the brush-ups

because there are lots of free photo editors for DIY fixes

and many of the photofinishing techniques are easy to do.

Check out the many self-help photofinishing sites

HongKiat.com

ThePhotoFinishes.com

DigitalCameraWorld.com