Digital Focus: Create Eye-Catching Color Effects

Spice up your photos and make them distinctive.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Enhance Your Photos With Eye-Catching Color Effects

Pictures of sunsets, kids on horseback, and sunflowers are a dime a dozen. That's not to say your puppy in the lilacs isn't the coolest photo ever stored on a Memory Stick, but face it: The odds are good your friends have seen it all before. So how can you spice up your photos and make them look truly distinctive? There are a lot of cool digital tricks you can play, but some of the easiest to do and most visually remarkable involve simple color changes.

There are all sorts of color changes you can try on your photos. You can convert them to black and white, for instance, or try your hand at a nice sepia tone. Many digital cameras let you do this before the pictures even make it to the PC; if yours doesn't, a good image processor like Paint Shop Pro or Adobe PhotoShop Elements has the tools you need. Let's give it a shot.

Go Black and White

Judging from the evolution of movies, television, and newspapers, most folks consider color to be better than black and white. But photographers don't always see it that way: Black and white images can have a certain elegance and drama that color renders inert. You can easily convert your digital images to the format that made Ansel Adams famous.

In Paint Shop Pro, for instance, just open the file and choose Colors, Grey Scale from the menu. I suggest that you save the color-reduced image using a different file name, though, since you may someday need the original full-color version for something else.

Old-Fashioned Sepia

Sepia is a brownish hue that's common to old photographs. The dyes used to print those old black-and-white images actually made them look more like brown and white. If you want a nostalgic look in your photo, give it a sepia tone.

You can concoct your own sepia effect in Paint Shop Pro. Open the picture you want to convert, then choose Colors, Adjust, Hue/Saturation/Lightness from the menu. To see your changes as you make them, make sure the Proof button is selected (it's the eye in the middle of the dialog box).

In the Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialog box, click the Colorize check box and grab the saturation slider (it's the one on the left). As you drag it up, watch the tone of the image change. You should find that a saturation level close to 30 generates a pleasant effect, but feel free to experiment.

Add a Blast of Saturation

Much of the time I find that digital cameras keep the color a bit muted. That's fine, but it doesn't hurt to liven things up. Some digital cameras have a saturation level adjustment built into the menu, and you can choose to take your pictures with enhanced color saturation. However, I prefer to adjust saturation manually in my image editor.

In Paint Shop Pro, open your picture and choose Colors, Adjust, Hue/Saturation/Lightness from the menu--just as if you were going to do the sepia trick. In the Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialog box, make sure that the Colorize box is not checked, then drag the saturation slider up to a value like 10 or 20. You should immediately see the colors come alive in your picture. It's easy to oversaturate your image and make it look like it was photographed on Mars, so be careful not to go overboard.

Once you get comfortable with saturation, try something even wackier. The Edit menu above the color wheel is usually set to Master--that means you're changing the saturation of all the colors at once. You can change the saturation of specific color channels in a picture, though. Try lowering the saturation of the red channel to 0, but increase blue to 10, for instance. You might be surprised at the result: In a seemingly monochrome picture, certain elements come alive with color.

Dave's Favorites: Dave's Own Book

Please indulge me. I've been writing this newsletter for over a year without shamelessly self-promoting any of my own photography books, work-from-home-get-rich-quick schemes, hand-crafted pottery, or bundt cake recipes. I'm entitled to one week off for good behavior, right?

So I want to call your attention to the fact that the second edition of my best-seller, How to Do Everything With Your Digital Camera, has been released.

I was very proud of the original edition of this book, and thus excited to revise it with new material for today's crop of digital cameras. It has chapters that explain the basics of photography--like lighting, composition, and exposure--as well as chapters on using your digital camera, working with digital files, and printing with an ink jet printer. The meat of the book focuses on how to edit images in an image processing program like Paint Shop Pro. I explain how to resize, crop, recolor, and optimize your photos, as well as perform a number of special effects.

The second edition includes all that stuff, but it also adds a bunch of new editing techniques and features a section on color. It's my hope that the book--combined with this newsletter--should be almost everything you ever need to master your digital camera.

How to Do Everything With Your Digital Camera makes a great gift; I suggest buying a dozen copies and giving them away at birthdays, anniversaries, neighborhood BBQs, and bankruptcy hearings. You can find it at Amazon.com.

Q&A: An Easier Way to Add Borders to Photos

Recently, you gave some advice on how to extend the size of an image in Paint Shop Pro to add white space for a caption. My problem: I'm burning decades worth of photos and slides onto CD-ROM, and your method is labor-intensive. Are you aware of a captioning process more suitable for annotating hundreds of images?

--Gerald Jeanes, Washington, DC

Ask, and ye shall receive. There are many ways to add white space under a photo for captioning, and I have just the technique for you. What you want is to use batch processing to automate the process: Just launch a program and come back an hour later, at which point all of your photos will be modified and ready for captioning.

If you use Paint Shop Pro, grab a copy of Jasc Software's Image Robot. It's an application that lets you "program" Paint Shop Pro to automatically repeat the same set of edits on many images.

Once you've installed Image Robot, open Paint Shop Pro and use the Add Borders command to set the bottom border to an appropriate size (try 100 pixels for starters) and choose a background color. Then add Set Output Options to the list of tasks and specify how you'd like to save the files. When you steer this script to your hundreds of photos, they'll all get the caption border you so badly crave--with almost no effort on your part.

You can get Image Robot for about $89 at Jasc Software's Web site.

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: "Cobblestone Rose," by Angela Covington, Joplin, Missouri

Angela says, "There is a really cool song that we sing at our church called 'Above All' by Lenny LeBlanc. It has a line in it that says 'Like a rose, trampled on the ground, He took the fall and thought of me above all.'

"I thought it would make a pretty picture to have a rose trampled, but I couldn't bear to just ruin the rose without getting some other shots of it. We have a really quaint-looking furniture shop by our house and that is where I took the picture.... There is an awning that is lattice on the building and I thought it would make a pretty picture with the shadows showing through. My sister thought it wouldn't work, but she guessed wrong!"

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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