Digital Focus: Improve the Background in Your Photos

Use an image editor to enhance the skies. Plus: E-mail pictures faster.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Punch Up the Sky

Digital photography and digital trickery go hand in hand. Even if you just change the color balance or contrast in an image, you're tweaking reality. And sometimes more aggressive action is called for. Take the sky, for instance. I bet that if you browse through your photos, you'll find that most of your outdoor shots lack a certain punch--the sky is washed out, cloudless, or just a little boring.

There's a good reason for that. When you compose a photograph, you usually concentrate on the primary subject and pay little heed to the surroundings. Since the sky is a lot brighter than your subject, the camera over-exposes it--your skies end up looking a little bleached. By adding some snap back into your skies, you can improve so-so photos dramatically.

Multiply Your Sky

The easiest way to fix a bleached sky is to "multiply" it. We're going to open a photo, select the sky, and copy it the clipboard. Then we'll paste copies of the sky back into the image, using a seldom used tool to "multiply" the colors in each layer of sky to produce deeper, darker hues. This technique is ideal if there's even a little blue peeking through your sky, because it's so easy to do.

For starters, find a picture with a pale, weak sky and open it in an image editor like Paint Shop Pro. Here's one I found--skies rarely come more anemic than this.

Meet the Wand

Now we'll use the Magic Wand tool to select the sky in the photo. The Magic Wand is one of my favorite selection tools because it grabs parts of a photo that share similar colors.

On my default installation of Paint Shop Pro 7.0, the Magic Wand is the eighth tool down on the vertical tool bar (it resembles a wand with a glowing end). Click the Magic Wand to select it, then right-click to invoke an options menu. Select Tool Options. If the Tool Options--Magic Wand dialog box doesn't seem to be open, it's likely nested near the edge of the photo; hover your mouse pointer over it and it will pop open. Setting the Tolerance value determines how sensitive the wand is to color changes. Set it to 10, for instance, and it will select only a small region in the immediate vicinity of where you clicked; use a tolerance of 30 and each click will select a much larger area with broader color changes. For our purposes, set the tolerance to about 25--you can experiment and change this value if you want to. Close the dialog box.

Now we're ready to select the sky. Click the middle of the sky: You should see selection marks appear around a big blotch of sky. But you probably didn't get the whole sky. We'll use the Shift key to add multiple Magic Wand selections together. Look for parts of the sky that aren't selected and click on them, being sure to hold down the Shift key with each click. If the skyline is irregular, you may want to zoom in (click View and choose your zoom level) to see what you're doing.

Copy and Paste

Done? Good. Make sure that you've selected the entire sky--you can zoom in and pan around the image to double-check. Copy the selected sky to the clipboard by pressing Ctrl-C or selecting Edit, Copy.

Now choose Edit, Paste and add the sky into the picture as a new layer. In Paint Shop Pro you'd select Edit, Paste, As New Layer. You can tell that there are two copies of the sky in the picture because you can actually grab the sky layer that's in the foreground and drag it around. Position the new sky so that it lines up perfectly with the original sky underneath. This part can be rather tricky. It may help to zoom in further and make sure you choose one very detailed area to line up.

Be Clever and Multiply

Now for the magic trick that makes all this effort worthwhile: the multiply effect. In Paint Shop Pro, choose Layers, Properties from the menu and you'll see the Layer Properties dialog box. Set the Blend mode to Multiply. When you click OK, you should see the colors in your sky immediately deepen. (If you're using Adobe PhotoShop, go to Layer, Layer Style, Blending Options.)

Not enough change to suit you? Here's where your artistic judgment comes in. Since the sky is already copied into your clipboard, you can continue to paste new layers into your image until you get the deep and colorful effect you're looking for. My image looks much better after multiplying four layers of sky.

Remember, though: Every time you paste in a new layer, be sure to set the blend for that new layer to Multiply. You can use this technique to transform an anemic, pale blue sky into an angry, stormy scene in minutes.

Or Just Replace It

That's not the only way to punch up a lame sky. Next week I'll show you how to steal the a sky from another photo.

Dave's Favorites: Paint Photos With Jasc Virtual Painter 3

My dad's skill with a pencil and a napkin are legendary. Give him a few minutes, and he can sketch something that you'd swear belongs in an art gallery. I, on the other hand, have less artistic flair than those elephants that paint with their trunks. That's okay, though. Equipped with Jasc Virtual Painter 3, I can convert a digital image into a painted masterpiece.

Virtual Painter is a collection of twelve filters for Paint Shop Pro, Adobe PhotoShop, or any other image editing program that recognizes the standard graphic plug-in format. Using this library of filters, you can convert images into convincing replicas of hand-painted images. You can choose from styles including pastel, watercolor, silk screen, line art, or colored pencil, and vary the media from paper to canvas to wood or even cork.

All of the filters work the same way. You can automate the entire process and create a painting with a click, or vary the intensity of the effect and specify "focal points" in the photo to render in more detail. While a few of the effects--like triangles and pointillism--have limited appeal, most of the other effects are superb.

Virtual Painter 3 is a toy; there's no doubt about it. If you're looking for new and clever things to do with your digital images, Virtual Painter is sure to inspire you. But I've also found you can use this program for serious work. You can use it to create logos and other business art from your existing stockpile of digital photos, and processed images can look good on greeting cards and t-shirts as well. All in all, Virtual Painter 3 is $45 well spent.

Q&A: E-Mail Pictures Faster

My dad e-mails megapixel photos to me that take forever to download even though I have a PC with a 2-GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. What can he or I change so that pictures upload and download faster?

--Ron Johnson, Mobile, Alabama

That's a good question, Ron, because it lets me point out a common misconception: The speed and memory configuration of your PC have very little to do with how quickly you can download pictures in e-mail or from the Internet. The only thing that really counts is how fast your Internet connection is. If you have a typical dial-up connection using a modem and a phone line, you can upgrade to a broadband digital subscriber line or cable modem connection (if it's available in your area--if it's not, check out a satellite connection). That'll speed up your download times significantly.

A cheaper and easier solution, though, is for your dad to simply reduce the size of his photos before he sends them to you. That's easy to do in almost any image editing program. Just look for a "resize" or "resample" option and shrink the image from its megapixel size down to about 640 by 480 pixels. There's no reason to get all those extra pixels most of the time anyway, unless you're planning to print the images he sends you.

Your dad should use the "save as" option and save the smaller image with a different file name. If he shrinks the image and then saves it as the original file, all those extra pixels are lost forever and he won't be able to print the pictures at high resolution.

One last tip: Some people compress pictures with a program like WinZip to squeeze them through the Internet pipeline faster. While zipping a picture won't make things worse, it often doesn't make things any better, either. Pictures in JPEG format are already highly compressed, so the zip process has virtually no effect. Other formats, like uncompressed TIFF, do benefit from WinZip compression, though.

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: "Duck Party," by Dan Brandenburg, Lexington, Kentucky

Dan says that he took this photo using a Sony Mavica at a large charity rubber duck race in Richmond, Kentucky, early last year.

I am as impressed by the photo itself--which is visually striking, yet just plain silly--as I am by the fact that there is such a thing as a charity rubber duck race.

Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For February, we chose "Ice Dragon," a photo that makes you believe you're looking at a deliberate sculpture--but the photographer assures us that it's just a trick of the ice. "Ice Dragon" was photographed by Mary Amburgey, of Loveland, Ohio. Mary has won a PC World CD-carrying case. Congratulations to all the other weekly winners, as well.

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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