Now that you have completed the photography course, you should have some greater 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.
Online learning
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.
Project assignment
You are asked to load several of your edited images into your Google Docs space. We would like them to be resized to 800 pixels wide (to reduce file size) and cropped for good composition. We would also like you to use your image editing software to apply a filter to at least one of the images. You can use any image editor which you are familiar with, but we favor IrfanView becuse it works well and is free software. IrfanView is Windows software, but can (like our gardenCAD software) be made to work on a Mac with an additional tool such as Parallels or Crossover.
Image editing
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 and after 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 also 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 images, 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.
Project submissions
We want you to upload at least a couple of your images to an 'images' folder in your Google Docs landscape area. Here is one Byron McCusker. He has used IrfanView to add text to images and create a 'ghosted' image from a photograph of a Strezlitzia. Note how close this is to a hand drawing. Clearly, IrfanView is a tool with great potential for a landscape designer.
