Now that you have completed the photography course, you should have some confidence in taking suitable photos of landscape designs, feature plants, construction details etc. We suspect that there will come a time when you need to 'touch up' the images you have taken. For that, you need to master the use of an image editing tool. An image editor can be used to perform colour balancing, cropping for better composition, changing colour space, removing unwanted backgrounds, changing file size etc.
There are many such software tools in this category - Photoshop from Adobe Systems is the best known, Gimp competes very well with photoshop, but we will use IrfanView, a great tool, one that is free for non commercial use.
Here is an example of what can be done with an image editor such as IrfanView. The figures below show an image before (top) and after editing.
before editing
after editing - we have cropped to follow the rule of thirds and adjusted the colour balance of the image.
Being able to improve the quality of images in this way is we believe, a useful skill. A word of warning - note the words of one of our landscape students who is a professional photographer
"I don't use an image editor because I take a great deal of trouble to take well composed, well lit photos every time!"
Be that as it may, you will definiely need to use an image editor at some stage, especially to re-sample images ready to insert into CAD drawings. If you do not resample, the GardenCAD environment becomes too bloated to work with. The IrfanView interface is shown in the figure below. As you can see, there is a lot to learn, that's why we want you to take the formal course.
Please visit this web site:
http://www.gardencad.net/plantsel
and take the second course there - "An Introduction to Image Editing with IrfanView'. An unlock code is required to enter the course - please send us an email request for your code.