Digital Focus: How to Correct Colors

One tool, many tricks. Plus: bean bags to help with difficult shots.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Correcting Colors Digitally

Half of the art to tweaking a digital photo is in knowing when it's good enough to stop. I often think about the Apollo astronaut who, after ignoring a bevy of alarms in his capsule while orbiting the earth, explained that there's no situation so bad you can't make it worse by doing the wrong thing.

After spending an hour messing with a photo, I often find that I like the original best and simply dump all my changes. But there are certainly a lot of situations in which you can improve your photo just by messing with the colors. This is especially true if you scan a 35mm picture: Prints processed by labs often have a pronounced color shift and tend to look a bit red, green, or blue. Or the colors in your picture may lack a little punch, as if they were shot in a drab, lifeless world (you know, like New Jersey). If that sounds like any of your pictures, open your image editor and get ready to try a few tweaks.

I'm just kidding, by the way--I grew up in Jersey.

Start With the Histogram

Your image editor's histogram adjustment tool is your best friend; I explained how to use the histogram to increase the colors and contrast in your image back in an earlier newsletter.

I'll typically start with the histogram and then size up the results. If it still lacks a certain something, I'll move on to saturation.

Get Saturated

In simple terms, saturation is the intensity of the colors in an image. There are many shades of red, for instance--red can be so bright it looks radioactive or so pale it's almost gray. Indeed, most image editors let you dial in a specific level of saturation. You can use this tool to suck all the color out of a picture and turn it into a gray-scale image, or make it shine so bright you need sunglasses just to look at it.

In Paint Shop Pro, you can find the Saturation tool by selecting Colors, Adjust, Hue/Saturation/Lightness. In the Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialog box you can adjust the saturation of specific colors or change all of the colors at once. (In the dialog box, the image on the left is the original and the image on the right shows your changes.) I typically increase the saturation of the entire image, but you can experiment with tweaking just the yellow, red, or blue by using the Edit menu. For our purposes, leave the Edit menu on Master and drag the Saturation slider up to 25. That increases the saturation of all the colors in the image by 25 percent. Experiment with the slider until you find the right color intensity for your image.

Eliminate a Color Cast

Does your picture seem a little blue? Unless you happen to be Frankie Vali, that may not be the look you're going for. A color cast--when the entire image looks just a bit too blue or too red--can happen if your digital camera's white balance was set for the wrong kind of lighting or if your 35mm print wasn't developed properly before you scanned it. Either way, there are a couple ways to correct it.

For these tweaks, I'll use Adobe Photoshop Elements, a great little image editor. Based on the e-mail I get, it seems to be the editor many of you have purchased. Photoshop Elements (and its big brother, Photoshop) includes a simple color cast correction tool that my usual image editor, Paint Shop Pro, unfortunately lacks.

Photoshop Elements provides two very cool ways to change the colors in your photo. The first one is easiest: Select Enhance, Color, Color Cast. You'll see a Color Cast Correction dialog box, which tells you to click a part of your picture that should be white, black, or gray. That's it--just click the eyedropper pointer in the white of someone's eye or on a pair of black pants, for instance, and the image is instantly color-corrected.

If the color cast tool doesn't produce the result you want, try the second option instead: the Variations tool. In Adobe Photoshop Elements, it's located in Enhance, Variations; in Photoshop, select Adjust, Variations. The Variations dialog box shows alternatives to your current image--each one with slightly more of one particular color, from subtle to fairly pronounced. Click one of the variations and it moves to the center of the dialog box, surrounded by new color variations. Just click on variations until you add or remove the right combination of colors and the picture looks right to you.

Dave's Favorites: Bean-Bag Camera Supports

A few weeks ago I suggested investing in a tripod--those three-legged gadgets are wonderful for steadying your camera. The problem with tripods, of course, is that they're bulky, a pain to carry around, and heavier ones always tend to work better than lighter ones. What to do?

Carry a bean bag instead.

I'm not suggesting bean bags as the ultimate, full-time replacement for tripods, but I have run into situations when they can steady the camera in a pinch. If you have something you'd like to set the camera on, such as a fence post, a boulder, or even the ground, try putting a bean bag under the camera. It'll conform to the shape of the camera as well as to whatever you're placing the camera on, and the bag's dense clump of beans will help steady the camera as you press the shutter release.

And if you don't have a bean bag, improvise. As a scuba diver, for instance, I always have bags of soft weights when I go on dive trips. They're filled with small beads of lead shot, and aside from being a lot heavier, they act a lot like bean bags.

Finally, if you want a bean bag that has been designed especially for photographers, check out The Pod, a bean bag-style camera support with a tripod bolt sticking out of the top. It costs about $15.

Q&A: Why Won't My Printer Use the USB Port?

I have a Kodak DC 4800 camera, an HP Photo Smart 1000 printer, and a Dell Dimension computer. Until recently, the printer was connected using the parallel cable, but I recently bought a USB cable and hooked that up instead. Now, when I try to print, the computer simply says, "Can't find the printer. Check cable connections," which I do and still can not get a connection. The parallel cable works fine, but I would rather use the USB cable. Any suggestions?

--Dave Morken, Detroit, Michigan

I think I know what the problem is, Dave. It sounds like the printer driver needs to be reinstalled so that your PC knows to print via the USB port instead of the parallel connection. You see, the computer still thinks that it should be using the parallel cable to print--and the parallel cable is gone. That's why it asks you to verify that the cable is connected properly. I'd do this:

1. Find the original CD-ROM with the printer driver, or download the driver from Hewlett-Packard's Web site. You should also round up installation instructions--you may need them.
2. Uninstall the printer driver. Try using the Add/Remove Programs list in the Windows Control Panel; if you don't see the printer listed there, try inserting the printer's CD-ROM. Often, you'll have an opportunity to uninstall the printer driver from there. If all else fails, check the printer's user guide.
3. Follow the printer manual's instructions for installing the driver. You may need to install the driver first, then let it automatically detect the USB cable as you attach it to the PC, or perhaps connect the USB cable first and then install the driver. It depends upon the printer.

After you reinstall the driver, I think your USB printing trouble will go away.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $10 and $100.

A gentle reminder, folks: We disqualify some really wonderful pictures every week because the submissions don't follow the rules. Be sure to include everything we ask for in your e-mail message, including a description of your picture and your complete contact information, or your entry is wasted!

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regs.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Frozen in Time," by Guy Palmiotto, Rockaway, New Jersey

Guy writes: "My picture is called 'Frozen in Time.' It is an oak leaf that was frozen in ice on a local lake in rural Pennsylvania. I photographed it with a Nikon Coolpix 5000 in its Auto Program mode. I think this picture shows how nature can preserve a moment and keep in frozen in time."

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

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