By Mike McDowell

A great advantage with the digiscoping technique is the ability to enhance and manipulate your pictures with image editing software.  From subtle color, brightness and contrast alterations to sharpening or blurring certain areas can make your pictures aesthetically more pleasing.  Although somewhat subjective, the power of digital processing can make a good picture even better, but it really can't make a bad picture good.   To take good pictures will require more practice in the field!

You don't have to be an expert!  In this article I will run through several basic digital manipulation improvements I have implemented in my digiscoped bird images.   Most image editing software packages include the functions and filters discussed herein.  For the purpose of this article, I am assuming a context of web publishing and email dissemination, but not printing.  I will save printing for a future article.  Important Note:  Software screen images embedded in this article may vary from image processing software you are using.

The Orginal Image

Once you have loaded an orginal image into imaging editing software, spend a few moments inspecting it.  Is it too dark?  Too light?  Are background areas too grainy?  Is the subject composed well (centered?)  For web publishing or sending your images via email, one thing you will definitely need to do is make the file smaller.  With the digital camera settings I use, my orginal images are approximately 1 megabyte - much too large for web publishing and email transfer because of long download times.

Crop and Compose

The first edit I usually perform is to crop the image, if necessary, so that the bird (or subject) is composed to my personal liking.  You may choose to center the bird, or perhaps it will look better off to one side because of other interesting compositional elements like a tree branch, flower or lighting.

Unsharp Mask

Once the composition is determined, I will consider how sharp the image is.  If the focus was pretty good, I will often perform an unsharp mask filter to enhance detail with the following settings:

While unsharp mask is a very handy tool, it can't save an image that is too much out of focus. 

Brightness, Contrast and Color Balance

Often times digiscoping a subject in a high contrast environment will produce magenta color fringing.  This is called chromatic aberration and is an artifact of telescopes spotting scopes with glass lenses.  An easy way to decrease the excess amount of magenta you may see along the edges of branches or the bird is to make adjustments with the Hue/Saturation tool.   Generally, I will select magenta and change the saturation and brightness levels to -100 (or whatever the lowest value is for your software). 

Some magenta may remain, but you have to be careful not to repeat this step as your image may begin to look grainy.

At this point make any adjustments to brightness, contrast and color balance to meet your fancy. 

Resizing the Image

What dimension, resolution file size, file format to make your image is up to you, but here are a few guidelines:

• JPEG compressed format will allow the best results for color and file size.
• Try to keep the file under 150KB for fast transfer times.
• A landscape oriented image should be between 600 to 800 pixels wide, while a portrait oriented image around 350 to 450 pixels wide.

Often times I will test to see if an image benefits from having a 50% sharpness applied to it.  If it becomes too grainy with jagged edges, you can always undo the sharpness or use the fade tool to decrease the effect.

Background Adjustments

After applying an unsharp mask and sharpness filter, you may find that your background has become grainy.  Another filter I have found useful for correcting this effect is the despeckle filter.  Use the lasso tool to select the background area you wish to apply the filter to, and then select to despeckle.  In addition to smoothening the area, it will also help to reduce the file size.

Save it!

Your image is now ready to be published to your web page, or perhaps emailed to your family and friends.  It's helpful to keep in mind while you're editing your images that you can often save, make duplicates or undo in the event you choose a filter or effect that is undesirable.  And lastly, remember there is no single "right way" to post-process your images.  Experiment...that's half the fun!  When in doubt, stick with that looks good to you!