In the past, photo editing was time consuming and tedious. Anything beyond simply lightening or darkening a picture meant hours of painstaking work. Something as simple as painting away a feature involved creating an entirely new picture, with the object being replaced by tiny bits cut out of other parts of the picture. The extensive work involved in, say, painting out one of Stalin’s former colleagues, probably took days.

The world of photo editing today is completely different. Paint programs like Photoshop make it easy to improve the features of a photograph, giving the photographer a bit more leeway with lighting and exposure. Unfortunately, they also make it very easy to change the photo, and present something that wasn’t really there when the picture was taken.

Photojournalists have a responsibility to present facts, not fiction. Editing the picture to correct a color cast is not the same as changing a dull grey sky to a brilliant red sunset. Adding smoke, or multiplying the number of people in a scene, do not make the picture more “dramatic” or “more representative” of what happened–they lie to the viewer, in the same way that putting a celebrity’s head onto another person’s body is a lie.

At what point does the photographer cross the line from “improving” a picture to “improving upon” it? When he adds or subtracts elements that change the message or meaning of the picture. Adding or removing information, even by simply cropping out damage or blurring critical information, is the line that photojournalists must not cross.

Keep these facts in mind when editing photos. If a picture is “artwork,” and not meant to be a scene of reality, then the artist is free to edit as he chooses. But a photojournalist is not an artist, and news photography is not supposed to be art.

In any business, promotion must be carried off well and good for you to be able to tell people how good your products are. This is also true in making chocolate. If you want to turn this hobby into money making venture, you can use postcards to lure people to come have a bite of your delicious treat.

Why Postcards?

This is affordable. And this can be done with the quality that you are looking for at rates you can definitely give way to. If you are new in the business and you don’t know anything about marketing, postcards will be a safe and also a good way to start.

You can reach your targeted list through this medium. Your chosen printing company can help you with this dilemma as most of them offer a targeted list at affordable prices. Now what you have to remember is to use this tool wisely.

Not because many people have benefited from its effectiveness, you will also gain the same. There are certain elements about postcards that must be taken into deep consideration for you to be able to use them to work towards your advantage.

First, you must know who your target market is. You can base a lot of your next decisions on this one. If you know who will be patronizing your products, you will be able to serve them better. You will know their preferences. For this reason, you will be able to tweak your ads, in this instance the postcards, according to their tastes, what they will like. And you will also be able to avoid what will turn them off.

Your product should be the basic pattern of your design. Depending on the images that you use, you will be able to achieve the perfect one that will appeal to your target market. Chocolates can be very tempting. So use all your photography talent for this reason. You must come up with photos that will justify what you have to offer your target market.

Match the design with a good headline, something that will make your audience hold on to your material. You must remember that you are in constant competition with other chocolate makers. And most of them may have used this tool before. So you must aim for your cards to be noticed and be seen by your target market.

Don’t forget to include your contact details on your cards. You don’t want people to be lured by your promotions only to be left hanging in the end with nowhere to go to ask for directions about you.

There are many tools that you can use to market you products. Many people love chocolates so you will not have a hard time finding a niche who will want to take a bite or more of your money making biz.

What are you waiting for? Start up that biz of making chocolate. If you are really good at it, you might as well share with other people your expertise. You never know what a good fortune is awaiting you for this trick that started out as a hobby. Postcards can be your ally to success. Just remember to follow the rules accordingly.

But you must also learn to bend it at times if you deem that it will work more appropriate for you.

In any discipline, you will have what many think of as “the purists”. Purists are those who revere the way things have always been done and view new innovations in the field as upstarts and obviously of poorer quality than the tried and true methods.

This is nowhere more true than photography. For decades the film and chemical processing method has undergone continual refinement to achieve higher and higher levels of sophistication and to find higher levels of quality. Small wonder that when the digital revolution came along, “the purists” were, to say the least, a bit snobby about the idea of professional photography moving in this direction.

But there are some genuine reasons to at least incorporate digital technology into your professional photography game plan. These reasons are compelling enough that more and more we are seeing the big studios going all digital. So if you are running an independent photography business or if you are “just” a photography hobbyist (and thank God for the hobbyists), you may have to think through the value of moving to digital processing yourself.

Ease of Use.

The amount of fuss and sheer “stuff” of doing a shoot digitally is dramatically less involved than using the older technologies. Witness how the digital revolution in photography has revolutionized the personal camera world. Now people can take as many pictures as they want and have them to review virtually instantaneously.

Probably the biggest leap forward in the use of digital photography is that you can do re-shoots quickly, easily and for virtually no cost. If you conduct a portrait session with a customer, you can have the “stills” of the session available almost as soon as the session is done. If a shot was good but not perfect, you can correct it and re-shoot immediately saving huge amounts of time and improving the chances you will get the portfolio you want and that the customer wants on the first session.

Rapid Customer Service.

The impression we get when a technology delivers so much value to the public is that quality will go down. But, amazingly, this is not the case with digital photography. If anything, the quality of the photographs is as good or better than any we could do with prior technologies. And the cost both to you as the photographer and to your customer drops off so dramatically that the age old complaint the customer has had about professional photographs costing too much can be eliminated making the customer want to use your services more often.

Digital photography, being a child of the internet and the digital revolution that has swept our lives via personal computers, can be delivered in a myriad of ways and at a speed that was unheard of prior to the arrival of this technology. We can deliver the photos via email, by posting them to an online gallery or by burning them to a DVD or CD so the customer can order lots more shots for the same cost and have them delivered in a way that easy to view and store.

Editing

Editing has similarly moved from the realm of the back room wizards to something any of us can do due to the sophisticated computer programs, such as Photoshop, that we can use to improve the pictures we take. It is really amazing the effects that can be imposed on a picture with this software. But more importantly we can so much more easily correct minor problems with a photograph so what might have been a lost session can be improved to become acceptable with some clever use of digital editing.

In virtually every way, digital photography, delivery and editing is superior to the way “the purists” would have us hold on to. It makes our lives as photographers easier, faster and more profitable. But above all, this is something our customers want us to use. They get to enjoy their pictures so much faster, at a more reasonable cost and the pictures can be emailed to friends and posted on their family web sites which is fun for everyone. So despite our desire to be “purists”, every reason we need is there to convince us that digital photography is the way to go.

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Before digital photography came of age, photographs had to go through the darkroom. Like cars on a conveyor belt, each image had to go through a series of steps, all the way through the development and printing process. Digital photography doesn’t require a darkroom, but it does help to keep that conveyor belt in mind, and run each picture through the same process, or Workflow.

Everyone develops a workflow that’s best for them, and a process that makes perfect sense to one photographer will be hopelessly confusing to another one.

First, the pictures have to be transferred from the camera. Most cameras have an Upload feature, where the camera is plugged directly into the computer. Plugging the chip into a chip reader also works well. Archive off a master collection, so that you don’t overwrite the original with the edited version.

Second, filter the collection. Delete the accidental shot of the photographer’s knee and the portrait where the baby crawled out of the frame.

Next, make the edits that will apply to the entire image. Color balance, contrast, brightness, and cropping, for example. If you’re working with RAW images, you have a lot more control at this stage.

Once the large adjustments are made, it’s time to focus on the smaller ones. Are there areas of the picture that could use cloning (like painting away the electrical wires passing through the subject’s head)? Would a little bit of background blur make the subject stand out better?

When you’re satisfied with all of the large and small scale edits, it’s time for one final sharpening step, like using Unsharp Mask. Multiple sharpening steps will make a picture look terrible, so only do it once. Save the edited and sharpened version under it’s own name, and then save a JPG compressed copy for emailing and web work.

The best Wildlife photography will always show a crystal-clear animal against a blurry background. This is done by using just the right combination of lens, aperture, and shutter speed, and really helps to make the subject stand out. If a background of branches and leaves were as sharply focused as the bird in the foreground, it would be very easy to lose the bird in the background “noise.”

You can use photo editing techniques to achieve the same effect.

Load your picture into your favorite photo editing program. Using a selection tool like a “Lasso,” select the foreground image, the “animal” that has to be set off from the “leaves and branches.” Once it’s selected, “Invert” the selection. Most photo editing programs have this option. In effect, it means “swap the selected areas for the unselected ones.” By inverting, you’ll select only the background of your image. If your program has the feature, you might also consider Feathering your selection. This helps to break up the outline of the selection, so that it doesn’t have such a sharp edge to it.

Once the background is highlighted, use a tool called Gaussian Blur. This is a specific type of blurring routine designed to imitate the blurring that happens in traditional photography. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the settings, but remember that a little bit of blur–leaving the background out of focus, but recognizable–is better than a lot.

A related photo technique is called Panning. Focus on a moving object, like a racecar, and keep the camera pointed at that object as it goes by. Done properly, the racecar will be in focus, while the crowd behind it will be blurred. This kind of blur is called Motion blur, or sometimes Radial blur. Using Radial instead of Gaussian will make your subject appear to be racing past the background.