Digital Focus: Take Great Portraits

Focusing, lighting, and shooting portraits, plus editing the background; saving JPEGs as TIFFs.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Taking Portraits the Digital Way

There's more to taking a good portrait than just asking someone to say "cheese." Good portraits--both the formal kind you make someone dress up for, as well as those casual portraits that look candid and relaxed--are all about FLB. You know, FLB: focus, lighting, and background. If you can control these three elements, you will amaze your friends with how great your portraits look. Of course, working digitally gives you an added advantage. You can tweak elements of the picture--like the focus and background--in ways that would be difficult or even impossible to do with a traditional camera.

Focus!

Let's start with focus, since it's an oft-neglected element of taking pictures. After all, everyone just assumes a good picture will be in focus. But the question you should ask yourself is this: What part of my photo needs to be in focus?

When you're taking a portrait, the one area that absolutely must be in focus is the eyes. You've heard the old saying, "the eyes are the window to the soul." Well, they're also the focal point of any portrait. Make sure the eyes are completely sharp by pointing the camera at your subject's face, locking the exposure (you can do that with most cameras by pressing the shutter release halfway down and holding it there with light finger pressure) and then composing the picture.

Let the Sun Do the Lighting

I'll be honest: I'm not a fan of pictures that are lit mostly by electronic flash. These photos tend to suffer from hot spots and harsh contrast that doesn't flatter the subject. Instead, I suggest that you try to take your pictures--especially portraits--with natural light. You'll get your best portraits outdoors, positioning your subject with the sun off to the side. Then set the flash to "fill" or "force" mode to eliminate any shadows on the face.

Blur the Background

Now for the last piece of the puzzle: the background. The trick is that the background really isn't important in a portrait. In fact, most portraits emphasize the subject by blurring the background. There are two ways to do that. The easy way is to set your camera to a small aperture value like f/2 or f/4. That will automatically blur the background for you.

If you can't get a blurry background when you shoot the portrait, fake it later. How? Open the picture in an image editor and blur the background while keeping the subject in sharp focus.

Getting Started: Begin by loading your picture into your favorite image editor (in my case, Paint Shop Pro) and selecting the appropriate tool. For this kind of job, I prefer using the Freehand tool, which looks like a lasso. In Paint Shop Pro, the Freehand tool has several modes; I suggest using Smart Edge, since you can use it to trace an irregularly shaped object--like a person's body. To activate Smart Edge, click the Freehand tool and then select Smart Edge from the Tool Options dialog box. You may have to open this dialog box by right-clicking the Tool Palette and choosing Tool Options from the menu.

Hint: It can be tricky to use the Freehand tool if you're not used to it. Draw a "lasso" around the edge you want to trace. When you get to the limits of what will easily fit in your lasso, hold the Shift key down, click a little further along the edge, and stretch out the lasso again. Repeat the process until you've gotten all the way around the subject.

Switch the Selection: Once the subject is fully selected--and you're sure you haven't selected a lot of the background in the process--it's time to pull a switch. It's the background that we want to blur, so choose Selections, Invert from Paint Shop Pro's menu. Now the background is selected, not the subject, and any commands we invoke won't affect the subject.

Blur It: Choose Blur from the Effects menu. You should see the background blur a bit. This is art, not science, so you may want to run this operation several times. When do you know you're done? You're done when the subject looks like it's floating above a fuzzy, indistinct backdrop. That's all there is to it. You can even blur the foreground as well as the background where appropriate. Try it--you'll find that with the right level of blurring, your portrait will look remarkably natural and put the emphasis on the subject, where it belongs.

Dave's Favorites: Free Image Editing With IrfanView

It's free. It's easy to use. It's like digital manna from heaven. IrfanView is a labor of love from Irfan Skiljan, a graduate of the Vienna University of Technology, and it's a great little image editing program that lets you do all the basics--resizing, cropping, sharpening, changing file format--without resorting to a commercial program like Paint Shop Pro or Adobe PhotoShop Elements.

IrfanView has a simple interface. The program's features are available from easy-to-understand menus, and there are no floating control boxes or arcane tool palettes to get in the way. Want to sharpen a fuzzy image? Just choose from the menu. Need to resize your picture? A dialog box lets you choose any arbitrary size or you can click on some common dimensions.

The program has a surprising number of useful features. There's an image browser that lets you look for pictures on your hard disk by scanning thumbnails. The program is TWAIN-complaint, so you can use it to capture images from a scanner or digital camera. It even has a batch-processing mode for renaming or converting a large number of images to a new file format all at once.

IrfanView isn't perfect, of course--the program's stripped-down simplicity means you'll need a more-sophisticated program for advanced image editing. But if you're new to digital photography, this free little program might be all you need for quite some time.

You can download IrfanView from the PCWorld.com Downloads section.

Q&A: How Do I Save a Picture as a TIFF File?

Twice recently in your newsletter, you have mentioned converting JPEG images to TIFF format. My problem is that I have no idea how to make this conversion. Is it simple or tough?

--Joe R. Patrick, Des Moines, Iowa

Unlike the task of ferrying the One Ring to Mordor, converting file formats is a snap, Joe. In fact, it's little more than a matter of choosing Save As from the File menu of whatever program you use to edit your digital image.

As I've suggested before, you may want to save your digital camera's JPEG pictures as TIFFs before you start editing them; that way, the JPEG's "lossy" compression scheme won't generate visible glitches in a photo when you save it over and over again.

Just open a picture in your image editor, choose Save As from the file menu, and look for the TIFF option in the list of file formats. Once you make a TIFF copy you can delete the JPEG version from your hard disk, since you won't need it anymore.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $10 and $100.

A gentle reminder, folks: We disqualify some really wonderful pictures every week because the submissions don't follow the rules. Be sure to include everything we ask for in your e-mail message, including a description of your picture and your complete contact information, or your entry is wasted!

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regs.

This week's Hot Pic: "Fireworks," by Teri Stoddard, Antioch, California

Sometimes you get lucky--like when you take a few snapshots and later discover that one of the pictures looks like it belongs in an art gallery. Teri Stoddard had such an experience when photographing some Independence Day fireworks in Sebastopol, California.

She says: "I used my Toshiba PDR-M71 to shoot fireworks. I didn't use any fancy settings; I just pointed and shot. The flash even went off! I liked the results, though. After I got home all I did was crop and trim."

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

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