Digital Focus: Repair Bad Photos
Photo fixing made easy, buying used cameras, and our latest photo contest winner.Dave Johnson
Everyone's got 'em--those awful pictures you don't show anyone because they came out too dark, too bright, or some ugly shade of green. But don't throw them away--you can easily salvage many of your bad pictures. And while they may never be good enough to frame in the family room, you can probably post them on Web pages or send them to friends in electronic greeting cards.
To get started, you'll need some kind of image editing program to tweak your photos. My favorites include Adobe PhotoShop LE, Adobe PhotoShop Elements, Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photo-Paint, and Ulead PhotoExpress. If you're just getting started, it doesn't matter much which program you use; they all have the power to make minor changes to your pictures.
Level a Crooked Picture
There's nothing quite as annoying as a crooked picture, especially when the horizon or some other straight line goes through your scene. Luckily, you can straighten it out in a heartbeat. Use the rotate tool in your image editor and specify how much to spin the picture. But here's a secret: Most errors, even seemingly egregious ones, are rarely off by more than a degree or two. Try rotating the image and, if you didn't get it quite right, undo your edit and try again. Always start over using the Undo tool; if you keep rotating and rotating an image, you'll introduce visible errors into the picture.
Brighten a Gloomy Photo
Maybe the flash didn't reach the subject, or perhaps the camera underexposed the subject because of a bright background. I've even tested cameras that seem predisposed to under-exposing pictures a bit. But a little brightness can salvage images that are visibly too dark. Don't use the brightness and contrast tools, though: The gamma control is a much better option.
Why gamma? Aside from the fact that it has a cool name, gamma adjustments affect the mid-tone of an image more than the extreme dark and light ends of the spectrum. That means you can brighten skin tones without washing out deep shadows or overexposing the sky. In other words, gamma has less chance of ruining your photo through over-correction.
Adjust Your Color Balance
Pictures that are a little too blue or green or red can be fixed, but it takes a creative eye and a steady hand to do it well. To fix out-of-sync colors, you'll need to open the color balancing tools in your image editor. Usually, you'll see a dialog box that displays three sliders--one for each of the primary colors.
If your picture is too blue, pull back on the blue slider a little, and increase the red and green sliders by the same small amount. If it's too red, decrease the red but increase green and blue. You get the idea--but whatever you do, be conservative and only move the sliders a little. You'll probably never have to change the colors in an image by more than about 10 percent. If you do, you probably took the picture on Mars, and it's worth saving for that reason alone.
Mini Review: Eyemodule2
As any secret agent will tell you, there's nothing cooler than a pocket-size camera. Actually, a pocket-size death ray would be pretty neat too, but that's a topic for another newsletter. If you're looking for what might just be the smallest, coolest-looking digital camera ever, though, check out the $200 Eyemodule2 from Block Products.
The Eyemodule2 is an expansion module for the Handspring Visor, a handheld organizer that runs on the Palm operating system. The Visor's Springboard slot enables the PDA to run a large number of peripherals, such as GPS receivers, MP3 players, wireless modems, and more. The Eyemodule2, though, captures 640-by-480-pixel and 160-by-160-pixel images, as well as short MPEG video clips, on the Visor's memory card.
You can share your images with other Palm device users--a program called BugMe Messenger, for instance, lets you e-mail your Eyemodule images with ease. The files are also transferred to the PC when you HotSync, meaning you can share and print the images as if the Eyemodule2 were any typical digital camera.
The Eyemodule2 is a dramatic improvement over the original Eyemodule, which limited images to the Palm's 160-pixel resolution, and the results were of extremely poor quality anyway (we panned the original). Eyemodule2 images are dramatically better--especially in VGA resolution--but even so, any traditional digital camera will do better.
The real appeal here is the ability to turn the Visor into a camera. The ability to take short videos is also great, but there's no sound, and just a few seconds of video can run most Visors completely out of memory. If you are a die-hard Visor user and a real gadget addict, the Eyemodule2 is a winner. Otherwise, though, you're better off with your digital camera.
Q&A: Buying Used Digital Cameras
There are lots of older digital cameras available on EBay. I'm thinking of buying one--should I?
-- Rob Nevarro
I've noticed some good prices there myself, and it's tempting. But remember how quickly digital cameras have evolved in the last few years. The top-of-the-line camera of 1999 will lack some features that we take for granted today. More important, it may lack resolution. Shop smart, and make sure that any used camera you buy has the megapixel punch you need to take the pictures you'd like to capture. Also, you might want to check the accessories--does it still have a lens cap, memory card, and battery charger? Those items should affect the price.
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 Hot Pic:
Car Trails by Nancy Capstone
Nancy says: "This shot was taken with an Olympus e-10. I set the camera up on a tripod shortly after sunset and took about two dozen pictures with various long exposure settings. As the sky changed color, I got some very interesting, deep blues, and I kept the shots that also included some nice light trails from the cars that passed in front of me. I think this exposure was around two seconds."