Digital Focus: Punch Up Your Photos, Fit Photos On Screen

Create 'action photo' effects; post photos online and via e-mail.

Dave Johnson

Adding Depth of Field Digitally

Sports and wildlife photographers love shallow depth of field. The subject, whether it's Venus Williams swinging her racket, or a wolf giving chase to a rabbit, jumps right off the page when it's on top of a blurry background.

Traditional photographers get that dynamic effect by shooting with a fast shutter speed. Since the aperture must be wide open to accumulate enough light to make the shot, the background is rendered out of focus. You can try to mimic that technique yourself, but because you've got a digital camera, you can get the same effect digitally.

Selecting Your Subject

The trick to faking a shallow depth of field is to blur the background of your digital image while keeping the subject in sharp focus. That's really not difficult to do--but you need to learn how to carefully select an irregular object in your favorite image editor. Start by loading your picture into an image editor such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop Elements.

The best tool for this kind of job is the Lasso, sometimes called a Freehand or Magic Freehand tool. The Lasso typically has several modes; you can use it to simply outline the subject by hand, or allow it to "snap to" the outline of the subject as you draw around it. It takes a little practice, but getting proficient with the Lasso can really pay off.

The Old Switcheroo

Once the subject is fully selected--and you're sure you haven't been sloppy and selected much of the background--it's time to pull a switch. It's the background that we want to edit, so find the command in your image editor to reverse the selection. In Paint Shop Pro, for instance, you'd choose Invert from the Selections menu. Any commands we invoke from here on out won't affect the subject at all.

Blur It!

Now for the real magic: Blur the background. In Paint Shop Pro, do that by choosing Blur from the Effects menu. This is art, not science, so you may want to run this operation several times (Ctrl-Y is the shortcut to repeat the last command) until the background looks good and blurry. When do you know that you're done? You're done when the subject looks like it's floating sharply above a fuzzy, indistinct backdrop. That's all there is to it. Now you know how to give one of your photos that "action photo" snap.

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Mini Review: Club Photo

There was a time, about a year ago, when the Internet was overrun with photo storage Web sites. In the Crazy Eddie approach to Internet business ("everything is FREE!"), Web sites bent over backward to get us to store our digital pictures online, mainly in hopes of getting click-throughs on advertisements. Actual sales, such as photo developing, were a secondary concern.

My, how times change. These days, few photo storage sites remain. One of the survivors is Club Photo, and they're currently transitioning to a subscription service.

I hope these guys can stick it out for the long haul, because the site, even as it becomes a for-pay service, remains excellent. Club Photo allows you to create an unlimited number of unique photo albums, each storing any number of photos. You can establish separate portfolios for vacations, family shots, and sports or hobbies, for instance. Uploading photos is a snap--you can actually drag and drop them into the Web page--and visitors can view images as a slideshow or order prints (if you permit them).

Club Photo is keeping a free service in place, though such albums will only remain online for 90 days at a time. The new Gold and Platinum services are quite affordable ($25 and $35 per year, respectively) and make your albums permanent. Platinum service allows for more permanent albums (30 instead of 15) and deeper discounts on merchandise orders such as photo printing (10 percent off instead of 5 percent). Is it worth it? Yup. But for most folks, it looks like the Gold service is the better deal.

Q&A: Fitting E-Mailed Photos to the Screen

I frequently send images from my digital camera via e-mail. My problem is that friends complain that the images are way too big to fit on screen unless I send them in VGA (640 by 480) resolution. Is there some way to fit higher resolution pictures to the screen?

-- John Coburn, Santa Clara, California

I've got two answers for you. First, you could ask all your friends to go buy a copy of Windows XP. I've found that the image viewer that comes with this new version of Windows does a great job of sizing pictures to the screen--even megapixel photos sent via e-mail.

But if getting XP for all your friends is out of the question, I'm afraid you're stuck manually resizing images before you send them through e-mail. The problem is that most image display programs aren't smart enough to reduce the size of megapixel images so they'll fit on your screen; they just try to show you the picture at 100 percent magnification, which is probably way too big to fit on your monitor. As a result, you should resize your pictures to, say, 800 by 600 pixels before you attach them to e-mail messages.

Send your questions to question@bydavejohnson.com, and please be sure to let me know where you're from.

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 Hot Pic:

Centrum by Donald Chau, Vancouver, British Columbia

Here is what Donald has to say about this dizzying photograph: "This is a picture of the centrum on the Royal Caribbean cruise ship, 'Radiance of the Seas.'

"This shot was taken overlooking the centrum from deck fourteen down to deck four using a Canon PowerShot S300. The sculpture hanging over the lobby is called the 'Fandance II,' made by Warren Newton Seelig and Sheryl Gibson. In the evening, this sculpture is illuminated by various intensities and colors of light, which accentuate the curves of this atrium."