Sprucing up a digital photo

[scienceguy8]

I know this doesn't have anything to do with Wesnoth, but this is the Art Workshop, the place for all non-mainline art, so I'd say it's close.

This is a picture of my mother and father taken with a cheap digital camera. As you can see, it is too bright. I have had success playing around with the Exposure and Brightness sliders in iPhoto, but I want to know if you guys have any better solutions. Also, the photo looks a little blurry, especially if you look at the snowflake design on my mother's sweatshirt. I think I may have jerked the camera when I took the picture. Any solutions for that? I have iPhoto, which can do some basic color adjustments, cropping, rotation, and red eye removal, and GIMP, which I still need practice with.

[Urs]

Well, I think GIMP is the better option of the two. Play around with it. Look for "Sharpen" options and anything where you can darken the highlights (lighting).

I quickly played with it in Photoshop Elements (which has roughly the feature set of the GIMP):
BTW, was this the pics native resolution or did you scale it down to post it?

Overall, in the end, it's the first shot with the camera that matters. Digital processing can only do so much.

[Sgt. Groovy]

As Urs said, there are limits to post-processing. The problem here is that lot of the faces are "burnt through," there are plain white areas where the information about the features is just lost and can't be brought back.

Here's my shot at it with GIMP. Generally, the "Colors -> Levels" is a better way to adjust the brightness and contrast. You can learn about it in this in-house tutorial. There's also the problem that while the faces are overexposed, the rest of it really isn't. I solved this by first copying the layer and applying the levels on the copy, by moving the middle tick way up, about 4/5, so that the faces become darker and better defined. This will of course also darken the rest of the image way too much, but I solved that problem be selectively combining the adjusted layer back with the original, so that the lighter areas will be selected from the darkened layer, and the darker parts from the original. This can be done with "Script-fu -> Photokit -> Dynamic Range Extender" (it's a plug-in that can be downloaded from the GIMP plugin registry). Dynamic range extension is a worthy subject to learn about, and actually we have an in-house tutorial about that as well.

Finally I merged the layers and applied "Filters -> Enhance -> Sharpen" on it with a value of 30.

[Redeth]

Heavily filtered, had to play with highlights/midtones/shadows to bring up the darker areas and ease the brighter ones. Sharpening gets rid of the blurriness but you still get double edges (like a "ghost image") which you'll need to deal with manually. The smudge tool could do the trick.

[zookeeper]

Here's what I have. Basically just duplicated the original, applied some various sharpening/edge/contrast/etc filters to it and overlayed it on the original.

[IndieTrannie]

Well at least you'll get to take your pick science guy.

Heres mine, I used some tricks I picked up from my typesetting days.

Edit - well if we're going to go into detail on how we made these
Photoshop 7
Copy it onto a new layer
Filter unsharp mask, 65% amount, 1.7 pixel radius no threshold.
Copy onto new layer
Ctrl - m to bring up curves, tweak the top of the curve to the left to increase facial contrast, tweak the bottom of the curve to the right to darken the background elements. It should look way overdone, so you set the blending mode to luminosity.
Make a new layer and fill it in black. Select the brightest areas of the photo and expand by 1 pixel, fill that white and give it a gaussian blur of at least 3.5 pixels.
Take a 1000px brush at 25% on white and click to make the black a bit grayer. Select the darkest parts of the photo and fill them in black. Set opacity of the layer to 5-7%.
Go down to the next to bottom layer and switch to the clone stamp tool. Press alt and select the man's neck, change the tools blending to 25% and use to add some color around the forehead. Just mix up the sampling points and keep adding color to all parts of the faces.
Switch to a paintbrush at about 10px use white with 15% opacity and paint back in the absolute brightest parts to saturate the color out of the highlights.

Optional step at any point, use the patch tool to select parts of the timestamp with similar background coloring, then drag the selection over a similarly colored area. Voila no timestamp.

Save the psd, tweak anything you don't like, then save a png.