Digital Focus: Quick Fixes for Bad Pictures
Brightening, whitening, and straightening are just a few of the tricks in our bag.Dave Johnson
Feature: Quick Fixes for Bad Pictures
Believe it or not, even professional photographers take more bad pictures than good ones--just as the greatest hitters in the history of baseball failed in six to seven out of ten at bats. So chances are you've got a few stinkers on your hard disk. But before you press the Delete key, ask yourself if some of those pictures can be fixed. Unlike the sluggers' unsuccessful at bats, you have a second chance to salvage some of your failed photographic opportunities. Using a few simple techniques, you can reclaim crooked, washed out, off-color, and badly composed photos. This week, let's review some tricks you can employ to salvage some of your less-favorite pics.
One-Step Fix
If you're lucky enough to have Paint Shop Pro 8, you should get familiar with the One Step Photo Fix control. It's accessible via the Enhance Photo button in the toolbar atop the screen. The One Step Photo Fix runs a variety of filters on your picture, including color correction, sharpening, contrast adjustment, and saturation enhancement. While auto-fix controls in some image editors can sometimes make an image worse, this one is extraordinary: It almost always manages to improve my disappointing photos. It's particularly effective at eliminating color casts, such as those you'll find in very old, scanned photos.
Other programs have similar controls. Photoshop Elements, for instance, has a series of automatic adjustments. In the Enhance menu, for example, you'll find Auto Levels and Auto Contrast. Like all automatic adjustments, however, these two might make your pictures worse--so keep the Undo control close at hand when you use them. There's also the superb Variations control, which is available by selecting Enhance, Variations. This control places your photo at the center of a series of images with slightly different color characteristics. Like the process an eye doctor uses to help you pick the right lens for your glasses, you just select images that look slightly better than the one before. When you're done, you should be left with a color-corrected image.
Zero in on White
Most digital cameras are wrong more than half the time when setting the automatic white balance. That's why so many pictures have a bit of a color cast. Luckily, you can use your image editor's white point setting to color correct your pictures on the PC. In Paint Shop Pro, for instance, choose Adjust, Color Balance, Black and White Points. Click on the White box on the right side of the dialog box (the one labeled "Original color") and then click on something that's supposed to be white in the actual image. Then click OK to close the dialog box. The image should change immediately, eliminating whatever color cast was there. If you prefer, you can base the image's color cast on a black or gray object instead.
Brighten the Gloom
Maybe the flash didn't reach the subject, or perhaps the camera underexposed the scene because of a bright background. Many digital cameras seem a bit predisposed to underexposing pictures a bit. In any event, adding a little brightness can salvage images that look 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 the name is cool, gamma adjustments affect the mid-tone of an image more than the extreme light and dark ends of the spectrum. That means you can brighten skin tones without washing out deep shadows or overexposing the sky. In other words, if you use the gamma control, you're less likely to ruin your photo through overcorrection. In Paint Shop Pro, you can find the gamma control by choosing Adjust, Brightness and Contrast, Gamma Correction. Try small adjustments like 1.1 or 1.2; rarely will you need to push the gamma beyond 1.3 or 1.4. Any more than that, and the picture begins to look washed out.
Straighten the Horizon
There's nothing quite as distracting as a photo that's slightly crooked--whether it's the frame on the wall that's lopsided, or the horizon in the scene.
Luckily, you can straighten out a crooked picture in a heartbeat. Use your image editor's rotate tool (in Paint Shop Pro, it's Image, Rotate, Free Rotate) and specify how much to spin the picture. But be conservative: Most images are rarely off by more than a degree or two. And be aware that rotations introduce a bit of distortion, so you should avoid adding rotation to rotation. Undo and start again with a larger number if you didn't get it right the first time. I like the rotation tool in Photoshop Elements because you can grab a corner of the image and spin it with the mouse, stopping when it looks perfect. When you're done, crop the image to trim away the crooked sides.
Dave's Favorites: Add Flashy Effects With Xenofex 2
One of the best reasons to use an image editor like Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro is for compatibility with plug-ins. Little programs that add extra editing features and special effects to your digital darkroom's tool box, like Xenofex 2 from Alien Skin Software, will surely motivate you to get creative.
The $129 Xenofex 2 gives you some amazing special effects: You can lighten your images; add a gorgeous blue sky; transform an image into a TV-style graphic, complete with old-fashioned, picture tube-like curved edges and video scan lines; add burnt edges; shatter an image like broken glass; or create a virtual jigsaw puzzle. And that's just for starters.
Xenofex 2 has a great interface. When you launch one of the program's filters from within Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or another compatible program, you get a large dialog box with a real-time preview of the effect, lots of controls for fine-tuning the image, and a heap of presets that can help you find just the right look.
The Alien Skin folks have created a real winner with Xenofex 2. Old hands at digital editing will recognize some of these effects--they're classics--but Alien Skin's presentation and ease of use is simply outstanding.
Q&A: What's the Difference Between Dots and Pixels?
How do I preserve the size that I select for my photos when I e-mail them to others? For example, suppose I take a picture and re-size it in Photoshop to a 4-by-6-inch photo at 72 dots per inch, then e-mail it to a few people. When one person opens it, their application displays it as a poster-size image. But another person opens it and sees the correct size. I've always been puzzled by this. Can I lock in my selected photo size so it opens the same everywhere in all applications?
--John Olszewski, Trenton, New Jersey
Good question, John. A lot of people are confused about resolution, dots per inch, print size, and pixels. It all stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what an image size--like 4 by 6 inches, 72 dpi--is actually telling you.
The important thing to understand is that measurements like "4 by 6 inches" are meaningless while the image is still on screen. A computer deals only in pixels. An image can be 640 by 480, 1280 by 1024, or 2240 by 1680 pixels, for instance. And the "size" of the image on a computer screen depends upon two things: the display resolution and the zoom factor of the application displaying the image.
If you show a 640-by-480-pixel image at a screen resolution of 640 by 480, the image fills the screen. If you show it on a display with 1280 by 1024 resolution, the image takes up about one-quarter of the screen.
Some image editors automatically fit images to the screen, shrinking or expanding them as necessary. Other programs try to display images at full size--which can result in pictures that you have to pan around because they're larger, pixel-for-pixel, than the computer screen itself. That's one reason you should reduce the size of images that you plan to e-mail. I rarely e-mail photos to friends and family unless I first resize them in Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop Elements to a reasonable 800 by 600 pixels.
Only when you're getting ready to print a picture does a size like "4 by 6 inches" have any meaning. A 2240-by-1680-pixel image can make a 7.5-by-5.5-inch print at 300 dpi (ideal for a color laser printer) or a 15-by-11-inch print at 150 dpi (fine for many ink jet printers). At 72 dpi, which is the resolution of many computer monitors, that same image would measure a massive 31 by 23 inches if printed.
To sum up, dots per inch and print size are just ways to measure the size you can print a digital image--the real numbers you should care about are the number of pixels.
Hot Pics
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: "Willow Tree," by Jeanie Bright, Hilliard, Ohio
Jeanie says: "I used a Sony CyberShot S70 to take this picture of my daughter, Kristin, climbing a tree. I decided to convert it to black and white. I thought that the leaves and branches took on a very unique backdrop, and it really made my daughter stand out in the frame."
Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For August, we chose Michael Kaplan's sultry portrait of a cabaret dancer. Congratulations to Michael and to everyone who won the Hot Pic of the Week this month. Keep those entries coming!
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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