Indoor Photo Tricks

How to shoot in a room that has a brightly lit window--no mean feat.

Dave Johnson

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Indoor Photo Tricks

There's nothing trickier for a digital camera than taking a picture inside a room with a brightly lit window. You have to feel sorry for the camera. It tries hard, to be sure; but digital cameras simply don't have the exposure latitude to properly expose the dark scene in the room and the bright view out the window at the same time. Your camera can give you only one or the other. This week, let's see what we can do about it.

Capturing the Great Outdoors

Suppose you're a real estate agent trying to capture a beautiful view through the kitchen window. You want it to be perfectly clear that there's a majestic mountain view out back. You frame the scene, putting the window in the middle of the viewfinder, and take the shot.

The mountains look great, but the room itself is so dark that it looks like midnight. What went wrong? In a nutshell, the camera's exposure meter correctly exposed the bright outdoors and consequently underexposed the room itself.

Brightening the Room

All is not lost, though. You can brighten the room in an image editor, improving the picture overall. Before you do that, you should isolate the room from the window. Why? Because if you brighten the entire scene, you'll "blow out" the window, ruining the properly exposed mountains.

If you're using Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, find and click the Freehand Selection Tool, which is in the toolbar on the left, in the fifth slot from the top. (Since it shares its cubby with the Selection and Magic Lasso, you may need to pick it from the list. Just click the drop-down arrow on the right side of the cubby and select Freehand Selection Tool.) Set the Selection type to Edge Seeker using the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen, then set the Feather control to 10 pixels.

Next, use the tool to separate the contents of the window from the rest of the image. Select the bright areas inside the window, clicking each time you have to change direction to follow the sill and curtains. You'll create a "fence" around all of the outdoors elements in the scene. Double-click to close your loop. When the window is completely enclosed, choose Selections, Invert from the menu. You've just selected everything except the window--now we can modify the scene without blowing out the mountain view.

To brighten the room, choose Adjust, Brightness and Contrast, Gamma Correction from the menu. Make sure that the Link box is checked, then drag any of the sliders to about 1.90 (the other two sliders will follow) and click OK to effect the change. If you prefer, you can use the zoom controls in the Gamma Correction dialog box to zoom way out and see the effect before you click OK. If you don't like the effect, you can always choose Undo from the Edit menu and try again with different settings. The end result is that the room's interior is brightened a bit, while the view is untouched.

Combining Two Views

There are actually many ways to get a better shot than the one we've been working with in this lesson. After all, you probably noticed that after brightening the scene, the room is very noisy. Those stray multicolored pixels are the cost of adding light that didn't exist in real life. Instead, you might consider making a composite.

For this we need two identical compositions of a scene. One picture is properly exposed for the highlights, the other for the darker regions. Then use an image editor to combine them afterwards. To create the composite, I'll use the original shot plus a brighter one in which I set the camera to capture the interior.

I took the bright picture first, pointing the camera at the wall near the light switch and setting my camera's auto-exposure lock. Then I recomposed the shot, locked the tripod in place, and took the picture. I took the other shot by letting the camera set the exposure for the window, which was already front and center.

To create a composite image, load both pictures into an editor (I'm using Paint Shop Pro for this example). Go into the dark picture and use a selection tool like Freehand to outline the entire window, just like we did earlier. When it's selected, choose Edit, Copy from the menu and switch to the light picture. Now paste the properly exposed window on top of the overexposed window using whatever method you prefer--I suggest using Edit, Paste, As New Layer. While my finished product could use some fine tuning, you can see the advantage of compositing to get the full dynamic range of a scene into a photo.

Dave's Favorites: Show Pics on a Palm With SplashPhoto

Time was, when you wanted pictures of your kin, you'd draw a pictograph on a cave wall. Then we got all civilized and hired Renaissance painters to make family portraits. That was fine until someone discovered you could record realistic images on sheets of paper laced with light-sensitive grains of silver. But these days, cool people show off their pics via PDA--no more oil paintings or wallet-sized photos. But which image viewer should you choose? If you have a Palm device, my money is on a $30 program from SplashData.

I've lauded SplashPhoto in the past. But the newest version is such a dramatic improvement that I had to mention it again. SplashData has streamlined an already elegant interface and added the ability to view digital images just by inserting a Secure Digital card with JPEG images into the PDA, no file conversion needed.

The program starts in Windows, where the SplashPhoto Desktop displays all of the images stored on your PDA, both in internal memory and on expansion cards. Want to add a photo to the PDA? Just drag and drop it into the SplashData Desktop, and it'll appear on the Palm after the next HotSync--complete with text notes and categorized however you like. You can view images on your PDA by tapping on them or setting up a slide show to display images from any selected category.

What's impressive about SplashPhoto is its thoroughness. It can display JPEG, bitmap, and GIF images directly, so you can pop a compatible memory card into the PDA and view pictures immediately. There's no limit to how many pictures or categories SplashPhoto can handle, and you can do handy tricks like recategorizing a batch of images in a single step from either the Palm or from Windows. SplashPhoto even keeps track of multiple memory cards without getting confused.

And then there's the best news of all: When you copy images to the PDA, you can resize them to the size of the screen or copy full-resolution images. SplashPhoto handles a mish-mash of fit-to-screen and large digital images with aplomb. You can view big images at full size and pan around to see details, or fit the image to the screen. What more could you ask for?

Some image viewers handle full-resolution images. Others are designed to display pictures that fit the PDA screen. SplashPhoto does both, and a heck of a lot more to boot. Bottom line: It's the only image viewer for the Palm OS worth considering. Go to the company's Web site to learn more about SplashPhoto, or to buy a copy.

Q&A: Making Better Collage Cutouts

Dave, I have a question concerning photo shapes in collages. I use Adobe Photo Deluxe to edit my digital photos, and I can theoretically cut the photos into different shapes using that program. However, even after I have cut a photo into an oval or circle, it still has a square background in the final collage. I've seen collages in which the shape of each photo is different. How can I do that?

--Wendy Windus, Pittsford, Vermont

You're in luck, Wendy! It sounds to me like you are trying to accomplish pretty much the same thing that I did in a recent Digital Focus.

In that feature, I explained how to isolate a subject and save it with a transparent background. What you're interested in is the transparent background; after you "cut out" your photo, you want to use your image editing program to save the new image as a GIF with the area outside of the cutout set as the transparent color. I don't know if Adobe Photo Deluxe is capable of doing that--it's a rather old program. You might want to consider upgrading to a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Both of those programs have this capability.

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: "Sea Shell," by Joseph Wichnick, Middletown, New Jersey

Joseph says: "I shot this photo with a 3.2-megapixel Sony Cyber-Shot in late September at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The camera was only about 5 inches off the sand. I was fortunate enough to get the right timing, catching the moment when a wave approached the shell. The only editing I performed was on the horizon; I erased a fisherman standing in the distance." Admittedly, Joseph took the gamble that a particularly large incoming wave would not wash over (and probably ruin) his camera, but I think you'll agree that his results were fantastic.