Digital Focus: Punch Up the Color
Exposure control, all about zooms, a cool free program, and our first photo contest winner.Dave Johnson
Your Digital Camera's Secret Exposure Control
By and large, digital cameras all tend to have the same problem--a mediocre exposure meter that seems to bleed all the excitement out of your pictures.
What am I talking about? Well, try this: Flip through a magazine. Look at a calendar. Glance at some postcards. Whether you're looking at photos of a fire-red rose or the deep, silky black shadows in a sunset silhouette, they all have one thing in common--vibrant colors that leap off the page. You might conclude that the photographer was some sort of genius, because you tried to take the same shot and all you got were murky, dull hues.
Chances are, the photographer who took those great photos is no rocket scientist--and I'm going to show you how to get the same results by tweaking the exposure meter on your digital camera.
Exposure Meters 101
The exposure meter is an important part of your digital camera. It measures the light entering the camera lens and calculates two key factors: how long to leave the shutter open and how large to set the aperture. It's that mix of shutter speed and aperture that adds up to a properly exposed picture.
The process is similar to the way your old 35mm film camera works--but with an important twist. Most film cameras divide the viewfinder into a bunch of regions and set the exposure by carefully noting how much light comes in from as many as a dozen different places in your scene. Most of the time, it's a very reliable way to properly expose the picture. Most digital cameras, in contrast, take a single measurement--an average, essentially--of the light falling across most of the shot.
As a result, a digital camera's exposure meter is easily fooled, and that's where your pictures can go wrong. A picture that's slightly under- or over-exposed will have dull, uninteresting colors. If you are taking a picture of a black dog against a field of freshly fallen snow, for instance, the exposure meter might recoil from all the bright white snow and increase the shutter speed too much--turning Blackie into an anonymous dark blob, devoid of features. I'm assuming, of course, that Blackie isn't usually an anonymous dark blob, devoid of features.
So take control! In this situation, you could activate your camera's spot meter. The spot meter only measures a pinpoint of light in the very center of the viewfinder--where Blackie happens to be patiently waiting for a photo followed by a dog treat. The spot meter will measure the light falling on the dog and properly expose the picture. What about the snow? Well, you guessed it--it might end up being a bit bleached. But that's okay, since the dog is the star of this picture. You can mitigate this effect by getting closer, filling the frame with the dog--but obviously there will be times when you want to stay farther away for the sake of the picture's composition.
You get the idea. If you're taking a wedding picture in a grassy field, the dark grass could cause the camera to err by slowing the shutter speed and over-exposing the white wedding dress. A spot meter on the dress could solve that problem too.
Where's the Spot Meter?
On many digital cameras, you'll find it buried in the camera's menu system somewhere in the manual exposure options. Other cameras conveniently place a spot meter button right on the camera body for easy access. Some inexpensive, all-auto digital cameras don't have metering alternatives at all. Sounds like a good time to upgrade.
And don't forget that you've got a digital camera--which means you can eyeball your picture in the LCD display right after you take the shot. You're not burning film, so experiment. Take the picture with the normal metering mode and again with the spot meter, and keep the one you like best.
Mini Review: Album To Go 2.0
Looking for a high-tech way to show off your digital pictures? Throw away your wallet and use your Palm handheld instead. Any Palm OS device--like the Palm V, Sony CLIE, Handspring Visor, or even the Kyocera Smartphone--becomes a convenient picture viewer with a free program called Album To Go from Club Photo.
Using the elegant Windows-based image loader, you can just drag and drop your favorite images from the desktop to your Palm--they're transferred at the next HotSync. The program works with both grayscale and color Palm devices, though pictures certainly look best on color handhelds--especially the 16-bit Visor Prism. Even so, the screen's small 160-by-160-pixel display is a far cry from a full-size computer monitor. That may not be a problem, though, if you're just trying to show some snapshots to a fellow passenger on a flight to L.A.
You can arrange your images into folders, view all your pictures via thumbnails, or even run a slideshow. The elegant interface is a nice break from the text-based list views that every other Palm program seems to use.
On the downside, the program uses the most convoluted registration process ever devised by humans. The program is free, but you need to record the Palm's serial number (good luck distinguishing 1s from Ls from Is) and enter it on an online form that failed to work properly when I tested it with Internet Explorer 5.0. Then Club Photo e-mails you a file that you need to install on your Palm, or else the program locks up after 30 days. Voting in Palm Beach County is less confusing. It's worth the effort, though--Album To Go 2.0 is a gorgeous way to show off your digital images, whether you carry a wallet or not.
Q&A: Optical Versus Digital Zoom
What's the difference between an optical zoom and a digital zoom?
--Susan Job
Oh, just a few things like image quality and some razzle-dazzle marketing. An optical zoom is exactly what you expect it to be: By moving the optics around inside the camera, you can increase or decrease the lens's magnification. When made properly, optical zooms offer consistently high-quality results.
Digital zooms, on the other hand, are the high-tech equivalent of pure evil. Turn on the 2X zoom and your camera just grabs the pixels in the middle of the viewfinder and enlarges them, giving you a pixely, ugly mess--like looking at a low-res photo through a magnifying glass. Camera manufacturers include digital zooms to beef up the camera's specs, but I recommend you avoid using the digital zoom feature. Heck, if you need to, you can always enlarge an image on the PC and get the same results.
Send your questions to dave@bydavejohnson.com.
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.
Here's how to enter:
Send us your photograph in JPG format at a resolution no larger than 640 by 480 pixels to hotpic@pcworld.com. Larger entries 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 of the photo 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 Winning Hot Pic:
Big Ben by Kristina Dorey
Kristina says: "There's more to this picture than meets the eye. When I was in London last summer, big, ugly, yellow construction cranes flanked either side of the tower. So after getting home from vacation, I popped the picture into Photoshop and used the clone tool to erase the cranes right out of the shot. I like this picture now because you can hardly tell I doctored the shot."