It is always best to compose your photograph in the viewfinder and ensure that the exposure is optimum at the time of taking the shot. However, in the real world, it is not always possible to get everything right the first time and some adjustments are needed to best present the final digital image.

The easiest and most obvious one would be cropping the image to highlight the subject and to remove unwanted  background.

The next would be to alter the exposure for something that is either under or over exposed. Sometimes, however, there are parts that are underexpose while other parts are all right or overexposed. In this exercise I will show one method of dealing with that situation.

Another adjustment that is fun to do is getting rid of unwanted objects, especially in the foreground of the picture. The technique for doing this requires you to shoot at least two shots of the target scene, separated either in time or in angle of the shot in order to get an alternative background to paste over the unwanted foreground objects. This will also be illustrated in this exercise.

For illustration purposes I took a couple of shots of an historic building in Ponsonby Road, Auckland. I pass by this building fairly often and have had more than one go at getting a nice photograph of it. The challenges are : --

1) The building is on the corner of a busy intersection with roadworks signs, traffic signs, vehicles obstructing the view and difficulty in finding a safe place from which to take the photographs.

2) The front of the building faces South, which in the Southern hemisphere means that the sun is always in the wrong position with problems of light and shadow, washed out colours, overexposed sky and underexposed building, etc.

The time of the day when I took these shots was not optimum, but I felt that it was adequate for this exercise. The traffic was not too intense, and I was able to get close enough and have some gaps in the traffic in which to take the shots. With dual shots, it is important that the lighting between one shot and the other has not changed - something that happens rather rapidly when there is patchy cloud cover. On this day the sky was partly cloudy but I think I managed to get similarly exposed shots both times.

Note the contrast in light between the sky and the building, which is in deep shadow. That will be a challenge to correct but I will use a selective mask to enable the lightening of the shadows without changing the brightness of the sky or brighter parts of the building itself.

Here is the starting photograph, with power-poles, power-lines, light-poles, traffic-lights and road-signs detracting from the subject of the photograph - an historic home now occupied by the ASB Trust. I will call this photograph 'Photo A' in this tutorial.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/lh/photo/jVn0HCG1uCK3NeTdQADG4A][img]http://lh3.ggpht.com/paulgtaylor91/SNzIpfVZEVI/AAAAAAAAC2Y/Q2HaP64Wz1ws144/1557_100_5164.JPG

Original Photograph to be cleaned up for presentation.

Taking another shot from a slightly different angle and a few moments later, provided me with the necessary 'background' to cover over, hopefully, the unsightly bits in the foreground. I will call this photograph 'Photo B' in this tutorial.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/lh/photo/8hwBlCokFW957017mUWHfw][img]http://lh4.ggpht.com/paulgtaylor91/SNzI1z2cxlI/AAAAAAAAC2g/Odxd-an2264/s144/1558_100_5165.JPG

Supplementary Photograph to be used to copy and paste over unwanted foreground objects in original photograph.

I will use a combination of copy and paste from the second to the first photograph and cloning, if necessary, to clean up the first photograph to presentation quality.

Paul