The Contact Sheet

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

The Contact Sheet

     The term "contact sheet" was carried over from photography into Photoshop, like manuy other photographic terms. A contact sheet was  a photograph of all the photograph frames from a session of taking photos. What you did was place the photos that were cut in strips above a piece of enlarging paper.   You then placed a sheet of clear glass over them and the paper to keep them fla. Then you exposed the paper and developed it.

    Because I have the toys that I present in my oldantiquetoys.blogspot.com for a short time, I take plenty of photographs to keep with me. I decided that for today's instalment, I'd show you a contact sheet.

   Photographers would create these contacts to view all of the images. They'd view them with a magnifying "loupe", one at a time, and edit them out.  Photographs or images that were out-of-focus, badly exposed, things in the frame that weren't supposed to be, and all other "rejects" were crossed out with a wax crayon or magic marker.

   The remaining "good photos" were then enlarged to let's say 4" x 6" sizes called "proofs" for the client to look at.  The contact below is the contact before the "editing". However, since I'm presenting you an image to fit a space on the blog, you won't be able to see the out-of-focus" images. Nevertheless, the contact sheet still has its' merits.

   I usually use  Photoshop CS4, the latest version, but I just discovered that this version no longer has a contact sheet. You need to go to Bridge, another Adobe program, in order to create the contact sheet. I don't know why they removed this feature, but perhaps Adobe found that there were many people like me who never used that feature.

 The Contact Sheet From the "Shoot" or Photo-session. 

 The Best of the Images From the Contact Sheet

 The Final Selected Images for 

the E-Bay Listing

     What Photoshop and other similar programs like that have done is to make the process of viewing the images of a "shoot" must faster. You really only need to open op the files, magnify them to a large size, then scrutinize each image, and keep it open or close it. From there, you can then "photoshop" the image fir the final "save". Don;t forget to save the file as a new file, so that you have the original. This is more important when you're working in "RAW"!

   I'll talk about "RAW" at some time in the future, bit for now, all of my images have been JPEG's. The main difference  between Raw and JPEG is that the RAW file is a much larger file, containging the individual "layers" of RGB, the colours used to create the image. Working with a RAW file offers you better control over the "small details"

So thanks for dropping by.

Have a great morning, afternoon, or evening, 

wherever you may be.