Digital Photography Special Effects
With the advances in electronics and computer technology, you can add really creative special effects to your digital photographs. In general, there are two ways of adding special effects in your photographs.
- While taking the photograph
- After taking the photograph
Most of the advanced digital cameras today offer many inbuilt special effect features like trimming, resizing, black and white effects, blur effect, layering, framing etc. There is a wide range of special effects that digital photography supports. Whether you can master them and still concentrate on taking the photo is a different matter entirely!
Some of the more common special effects are:
- Strobe Photography
- Moving camera during exposure.
- Multiple Exposure
- Zooming during exposure
- Giving exciting backgrounds
- Creating abstract images etc.
Most digital photographers, from beginners to experts, use image editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Paintshop Pro for adding special effects to their digital photographs after they have taken them from their digital cameras.
For many photographers, taking the image and having it unchanged is fine but some creative photographers prefer manipulating the images. And it’s always safer to do this on a copy rather than the (only) original.
For this purpose they use image editing software to add special effects – these can either be enhancements to make the photos look more real or they can be decidedly unreal.
Some of the more spectacular special effects are:
- Dodging: an alternate term used for burning-in of a certain part of the image without affecting other parts of the image. The selected part is then manipulated by applying different filters.
- Colour Tones: the colour tone of the image can be changed to Sepia, Selenium or blue. It can be mixed up with different blurs for special effects. You can make as many combinations as you can.
- Dissolve: this sort of effect usually dissolves one picture in order to reveal another picture. Special effect creators usually set a length for the dissolve.
- Fade: this is the rise and fall of an image in or from blackness. This sort of effect is usually used to change one scene into another.
And there is a list of endless possibilities of special effects that can be added to a digital image or video using different image manipulating software. Nowadays, you really are only limited by your imagination.
