For all of their amazing abilities, digital cameras still can't seem to take perfectly exposed a photo every time you press the shutter release. That's not too surprising: There are a lot of variables in every scene, and getting the exposure just right, all the time, is beyond the ability of even professional photographers. Isn't it amazing that our poor little $300 digital cameras perform as well as they actually do?
But that's okay, because this week I'm going to show you how to take a picture that's clearly under- or overexposed and make it look great in less than 5 minutes. Of course, nothing beats nailing the exposure when you take the picture, but I think you'll be surprised by how easy it is to punch up photos you might otherwise throw away.
Let's start with a photo that's clearly underexposed. In this picture, my camera underexposed the important parts of the scene because the bright, sunny sky tricked the camera into thinking there was too much light in the scene. It reduced the exposure time, and that underexposed the landscape.
Save the file to your computer, then open it--or another underexposed photo--in your favorite image editing program. I'll use Corel's Paint Shop Pro for this example.
Start by creating a duplicate version of the picture in a second layer. To do that, choose
Why did we create a layer? This lets us adjust the brightness of the picture in the top layer, and then carefully change the opacity to let some of the underlying original show through. By combining the two layers, we can get exactly the exposure we want.
So let's tackle the picture's brightness. Choose
A gamma level of 1.00 represents no change, so drag the slider to a position of about 3.0 for this particular image, then click OK. The goal is not to get the exposure to look perfect--indeed, 3.0 is actually overexposed. We'll fix that with the opacity later. Your results should look like this.
Finally, it's time to finish the photo by adjusting the opacity. To do that, double click the top layer--it should be called Copy of Background--in the Layers palette. You'll see the Layer Properties dialog box. Reduce the Opacity slider from 100 to a number that makes the photo look properly exposed. To my eye, pulling the opacity back to about 60 percent is ideal for this photo; the details in the street are clearly visible, but the sky is not too overexposed. When you're happy with the exposure level, click OK and save your new image.
It should come as no surprise that the technique for fixing an overexposed photo is pretty much just the opposite of what we just did for an underexposed photo. Follow the same steps as above, but when you open the Gamma Adjustment dialog box, reduce the gamma below 1.00 rather than cranking it up higher.
ACDSee is something of an underground favorite among digital photographers. It's a solid choice for organizing and editing your photos, but it never seems to wriggle its way into the mainstream the way Adobe, Picasa, Corel, and Microsoft have managed to do.
That's too bad, because, ACDSee has a lot to offer. The program is a photo organizer first and foremost, displaying thumbnails of all your photos in its main window. You can scope your view based on a traditional Windows Explorer-style folder tree or using keywords, ratings, or a calendar control. If that's not enough sorting power, ACDSee also packs in a set of filters for creating pretty advanced photo searches.
If you have a lot of images to work on, you'll like the program's Image Basket. The basket is a temporary holding area where you can collect a bunch of photos that need some kind of editing--perhaps you want to batch resize, convert to a different file format, edit, or watch them in a slide show. Just mark them for the basket and then work on them at your leisure.
The ACDSee editor does basic touchup work, such as exposure and color correction, noise reduction, cropping, red eye removal, and rotate. It's not a full-strength photo editor, though; you'll still need a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro for layers and advanced effects.
ACDSee has a free trial version, and the entire program is a very affordable $50. You can download it from us.
Q&A: What Kind of Disc Should I Use to Back Up Photos?Someone told me that if I save photos on a rewritable CD, I can't then view the pictures on other computers. Since I have backed up my photos on these CDs, do I need to save them again on write-once CDs?
You should be able to read your CD-RW media on MultiRead optical drives in computers other than the one you used to write them--and most drives today conform to the MultiRead spec.
However, I've learned not to depend on best-case scenarios. For maximum flexibility, copy your pictures to CD-Rs. Once you've finalized them, CD-Rs can be read without a hitch with just about any optical drive in pretty much any computer you're likely to use.
More important, CD-Rs are more reliable than CD-RWs. CD-RWs are rated for 1000 rewrites, but if you keep rewriting a disc, sooner or later it will fail. At that point, you'll likely lose everything you have on the disc. Smart backup mavens tell me always to use CD-Rs (instead of CD-RWs) for archiving and long-term backup. CD-Rs are inexpensive, and I see no reason to question their wisdom.
Hot PicsGet 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.
Thornton says: "This is a picture of gulls circling on a beach on the Outerbanks of North Carolina. To get this photo, I spend 15 minutes throwing bread up into the air and letting them perform for us."
Thornton used a Nikon D70 Digital SLR with a 28-55mm zoom lens.
Congratulations to Allen and to everyone else who won a Hot Pic of the Week last month. Keep those entries coming!
Dave Johnson
