Adjust Colors for Special Effects

Use color editing tools to turn day to dusk and emphasize elements of a scene.

Dave Johnson

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Feature: Adjust Colors for Special Effects

Many of the projects that I discuss in this column often involve some pretty sophisticated editing tools--making complex selections with the Magic Wand, working with multiple layers, and using transparency effects, for example.

This week I thought it might be fun to step back from that complexity and see what we can do with nothing more than the basic color controls in our image editing software. I'm not talking about just correcting the colors in a picture, mind you: We'll use color adjustments to change reality.

Turn Day Into Dusk

Take the time of day, for instance. What visual cues does a picture give us about when it was photographed? If it's obviously daylight in the scene, often it's the color of the image that says "midday" or "sunset." And that, believe it or not, is a snap to tweak by hand. Just grab a photo that you want to turn into a sunset shot, like this sample file.

After you've saved the image file to your hard drive, open it in your favorite image editing program. I'll use Jasc Paint Shop Pro for this example. To give the photo a late-day look, we need to add some red and remove some blue--that's what happens every evening when the sun nears the horizon. So choose Adjust, Color Balance, Red/Green/Blue from the menu. Now add a little extra red to the scene: Try setting red to 25. If that looks okay to you, continue by draining some blue as well. I set the picture's blue to-10 and got this result.

This technique can come in handy for situations in which you tried taking an end-of-day photo but it came out too "midday." Consider this shot, in which it's clearly dark enough for the city lights to be on, but the overall scene doesn't really feel like sunset. A little red and blue adjustment can make the picture feel more like dusk.

Saturate Selectively

Another simple technique that you can experiment with is selectively saturating colors in a picture.

If you've been reading this column for a while, you've probably already picked up a few saturation tricks. You know, for instance, that you can turn a color photo into a black-and-white by opening it in an image editor and choosing Adjust, Hue and Saturation, Hue/Saturation/Lightness, then dragging the saturation slider to-100. And, of course, you can drag the slider only part of the way and leave some color behind, which can also be an interesting effect.

What you might not know is that you can set the saturation of each color channel independently--and that lets you drain all the blue out of the scene while leaving the green intact, for instance.

I used a little trick to get the stretched car in this photo. I started with an ordinary photo, but I used Paint Shop Pro's perspective correction tool to make the building in the background appear flat and level. In the process, it elongated the car. Oddly, I like the overall effect. But what I want to do at this point is to draw more attention to the car. To do that, I'll desaturate the rest of the image.

Choose Adjust, Hue and Saturation, Hue/Saturation/Lightness. In the Edit menu in the middle of the dialog box, select Yellows. Drag the Saturation slider to-100, and you should see the color leak out of the building right away.

Do the same for greens, cyans, blues, and magentas. When you're done, you should have a picture that looks a lot like my final version.

Dave's Favorites: Recover Lost Photos With ImageRecall 3

For a digital photographer, there's probably nothing worse than taking a batch of pictures, getting home, and inexplicably finding that there's nothing on the media card to transfer to your computer. If this hasn't happened to you, count your blessings. I've had it happen to me only once: The media card suffered a full-blown hardware failure, and its contents are forever lost to me.

Many other problems are survivable, though: You might accidentally delete the pictures by pressing the wrong button on your camera, for instance. For these kinds of situations, it helps to have a program like FlashFixers' ImageRecall 3.

Last year, I reviewed ImageRecall and found that it was fast, easy to use, and reliable. The new version is even better.

ImageRecall 3 can scan any drive letter on your PC--which means you can recover deleted pictures from anywhere, even on your own hard drive. Just pop in the media (like a CompactFlash card or CD), start scanning, and ImageRecall quickly displays the most recently "lost" images on the card. Not satisfied? Ask for a deep scan and the program looks harder. When I tested ImageRecall 3, it easily found folders I erased using the camera's Delete feature, and the deep scan turned up dozens of pictures I had discarded weeks and even months ago.

By default, ImageRecall places your recovered photos in a folder in My Documents, but you can specify a different output folder. You can also fine-tune other options, like what kind of files to recover--the program seems to support just about every format imaginable, including JPEG, TIFF, several varieties of RAW, MP3, and various video formats.

Of course, ImageRecall 3 was unsuccessful with my totally dead card. I didn't expect it to work, though; I always insert that card when testing image recovery software just to see how the program reacts.

If you are ever unlucky enough to lose pictures, you're unlikely to find a better solution than ImageRecall 3. Go to FlashFixers to download a free trial, or buy the full version for $40.

Q&A: More About the Dates on Photos

A few weeks ago, reader Ken Runyan from Willits, California, asked about a problem with his photo organizer software changing the dates on his photos.

I've since gotten quite a bit of e-mail about this issue. Many of you wrote to suggest that Ken adopt some sort of file naming scheme, such as embedding the date taken in the photo's file name or in the folder in which the pictures are stored.

That approach works, but I don't generally recommend it. Why? Well, it's pretty cumbersome. You have to remember to name all your pictures according to the date you took them, when in fact the image files already have that information stored internally, ready to be read by photo organizer software. Another disadvantage: naming files by date can lead to some clumsy, hard-to-read file names. Personally, I'd rather name my pictures using descriptive text, like "soccer-practice-01.jpg" rather than have a batch of files named "021305-01.jpg," "021305-02.jpg," and so on.

Bottom line: If you don't already, I strongly suggest that you start using a photo organizer. Once you do, you can stop worrying about what folder you left your photos in and just think of your hard drive as one, huge, browsable photo album. And before we leave this subject for good, Dave Hargett from Toledo, Ohio, suggests that Ken may have been experiencing a slightly different problem than the one I wrote about.

Dave writes: "You were talking about data stored in the photo itself, but my guess is that Ken was referring to the dates on the files themselves."

That's an excellent point, Dave. If you edit a photo, the date on the file itself--the one that Windows uses to keep track of it--will change. There's nothing you can do about that, which is another good reason to manage your photos using the "date taken" stamp in a photo organizer.

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 $15 and $50.

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 regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Spilled Mercury," by Matt Wilson, Millville, New Jersey

About this week's winning photo, Matt writes: "This photograph is actually of water on the surface of a hot tub cover. After a rain shower on a very overcast day, I noticed that the rain had collected itself into an interesting pattern on the cover. I decided to give it a try and see what a photo would look like.

"Upon viewing the photo, I noticed that it kind of looked like spilled mercury, something that I had seen as a young boy, as my dad was a research chemist."

Matt took the photo with a Canon PowerShot Pro1.