FIVE-PARAGRAPH ESSAY

 

You know how great those models look on the covers of magazines? And the photographs in nature magazines look too good to be true, too, don’t they? Well, in almost every case, the photographs are too good to be true! That’s because of the ability almost all graphic designers have today to edit photographs. In fact, altering digital photographs is easy to do by improving their lighting, by removing unwanted parts, and by moving something from one place in a photograph to another place.

One common way to alter photographs is by improving the lighting. Suppose you want to put four photographs of farms in South Dakota on the same page. Three of the photos were taken during the day and one near twilight. Somehow, the twilight photo just stands out too much on the page. Its slightly darker lighting draws more attention to it than you want. All you need to do is enter your photo editing program, choose the right entry from a menu, and move a slider back and forth: as you move the slider, the photo gets magically lighter or darker. Move the slider to the right place, and you now have a photo that matches the others!


Another common way to alter photos is by removing unwanted parts. The name for this is cropping. Suppose you’re taking a picture of a great mountain scene in the West—the kind that will take your viewers back to a time when civilization didn’t exist. Unfortunately, there’s a telephone pole on the far left edge of the photo. Again, all you have to do is enter your photo editing program and choose the right entry from a menu. With a couple clicks of the mouse,
you can cut off that left edge of the photo. Voila! It’s the year 1800 once more!


Perhaps the most interesting way to alter a photo is by actually moving part of it to someplace else on the photo. The name for that is cloning. Suppose that great nature photo had an airplane contrail in the sky above the mountains. The contrail spoils the “nothing here but nature” feeling from the rest of the photo. You can’t crop out all the sky—the photo just wouldn’t look right. Instead, you want to replace the white contrail with some of the nice blue sky right next to the contrail. Back to the menu, make the right choice, and simply copy some nearby sky over the contrail. What a lovely sky! Or suppose one of those photos of a South Dakota farm had a beer can peeking through the long grass? All you need to do is select some nearby grass and copy it over the beer can— instant litter control! Or, finally, suppose that great-looking model had an unfortunate facial blemish. Click! It’s gone— replaced by the beautiful peaches and cream skin right next to it. Happens every day.


So altering digital photos can be a snap. You can change their lighting, remove unwanted parts, or even replace one part with another. The next time you look at a photo in a magazine or newspaper, think about it: the odds are, a photo editor has been clicking away!