By Dave Johnson
March 22, 2012

By Dave Johnson
March 14, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO – A few weeks ago, I wrote that photography is often called “painting with light.” In response, a reader asked me what you do when there isn’t any–light, that is. Well, unless you’re shooting inside a closet or at the bottom of a mineshaft, there’s always some light around. Your job as a photographer is often to make the most of whatever light you have access to. I’ve explained how to get the best results with your flash, but there’s a way to maximize the natural light in your scene as well: Using your camera’s ISO control.
ISO in a Nutshell

I get a lot of questions about ISO–many photographers don’t seem to understand exactly what it does. Your camera’s ISO control determines how sensitive the camera’s sensor is to light. On most cameras, ISO starts at 100 and goes up from there; the higher the number, the more sensitive the sensor will be.

Of course, that begs the question: Why wouldn’t you always just leave the ISO as high as it can go all the time?

That’s because ISO is a bit of a mixed bag. Higher ISO values give your camera a better light response, so you can take sharper photos with shorter shutter speeds in low light, but this comes at the expense of more digital noise in your photo. On the same camera, a picture captured at ISO 800 will tend to look noisier–random pixels that resemble grain on an old film camera or static on a television screen–than a photo shot at ISO 100. Here is an enlarged detail of a photo taken at ISO 1000. Notice the rough, sandpaper-like quality of everything in the scene, including the wall and the girl’s complexion.

Use ISO Strategically

It’s a good idea to always shoot with the lowest possible ISO you can get away with. On many cameras, that means dialing in ISO 100 and leaving it there unless you have a good reason to increase it.

What kinds of reasons? Imagine you’re outdoors late in the day trying to take some photos and your flash won’t illuminate the scene because it’s too large or far away. In that case, crank up the ISO until the camera stops giving you a slow shutter warning. I’d suggest going with the lowest ISO that’ll give you a satisfactory photo in order to avoid introducing too much noise in the image. But don’t fret too much about this: It’s a lot better to capture a sharp photo with some noise in it than a shaky photo that was shot too slow for the available light.

You might also be able to rely on your camera’s Auto ISO setting. Check your camera’s user guide for details. On many cameras, you can set the ISO to Auto and it’ll dial the ISO up and down on its own when you shoot in certain modes (like Automatic exposure mode). I’m not a huge fan of Auto ISO because I don’t know exactly what the camera is doing, but it’s a convenient way to ensure you get the sharpest results without sweating over the settings.

ISO Math

It’s also worth pointing out what the ISO numbers mean. What, for example, is the difference between ISO 100 and ISO 200? Thankfully, cameras use a fairly consistent set of conventions, so that doubling the ISO doubles the light sensitivity. So in this sense, ISO is like shutter speed or aperture. If you go from ISO 100 to ISO 400, that’s two stops of exposure change (doubled and then doubled again), so that’s equivalent to changing the shutter speed from 1/60 second to 1/15 second.

Put another way, suppose your camera is currently trying to take a photo at a shutter speed of 1/15 second at an ISO of 100. Change the ISO to 400, and the camera will now be able to take the same photo at 1/60 second, which is probably good enough to take a sharp photo. Change the ISO to 800, and the shutter speed will be 1/125 second.

ISOs Go Really High Now

I’m old enough to remember when an ISO of 800 was very aggressive and 1600 was all but unheard of. These days, the party has barely started at ISO 1600. Camera manufacturers have made dramatic improvements in sensor technology in just the past few years, and these days many cameras come with ISOs as high as 12,800. That’s a range of 7 stops, and it gives you incredible freedom to freeze the action with a fast shutter speed in extremely dim settings. There are cameras that offer even higher ISO–the Nikon D3s, for example, goes as high as 102,400, which is ten stops of exposure control. Of course, you will see a significant amount of noise at those stratospheric ISOs, so if you use them, it pays to use some noise reduction software.

Cutting Down on Noise

Many photo editing programs, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Paint Shop Pro, have a nose reduction filter that cam significantly reduce the stray pixels of noise you get when shooting at a high ISO. Remember the noisy photo we saw earlier? Take a look at the photo here, after it met a noise reduction filter.

You can find a noise reduction tool in Photoshop Elements. Choose Filter, Noise, Reduce Noise.

That said, you’ll get better results with a program that’s designed specifically to eliminate noise. My favorites–and ones I’ve recommended many times before–are Noiseware and Noise Ninja.
There’s a free version of Noiseware called Noiseware Community Edition, which is a great starter tool, but be aware that the program limits your photos to a JPEG quality level of 90 percent. Give it a shot, and if you like it, purchase the commercial version of Noiseware for about $50.

I like Noise Ninja even more, and in fact Noise Ninja is considered the gold standard by many photographers. It is built into the new, excellent Corel AfterShot Pro photo editing program, in fact. A Noise Ninja license costs about $35 and lets you apply a custom noise profile to your photos based on your specific camera, so it can remove noise in an extremely accurate and detailed way. If you shoot a lot of high ISO photos, definitely check out Noise Ninja.

By Dave Johnson
January 25, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO – Most of us use a photo editor for touch-up work–fixing red eye, straightening a crooked photo, perhaps even some color correction. Last week, for example, I explained some simple ways to clean up a portrait by removing red eye, whitening teeth, and erasing skin blemishes. But programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP can do so much more. What if you wanted to add a reflection to a photo, for example, as if your scene were surrounded by water? Today I’ll show you how to do it using Photoshop Elements, and it’ll take about five minutes.
Expand Your Canvas

Suppose you have a photo like this one: A shot of the New York skyline that I recently took from atop Rockefeller Center.

I would like to add a reflection of the skyline to the bottom of the photo, as if all of Manhattan is sitting at the edge of a river. (Manhattan does sit at the edge of a river–two of them, in fact–but not from this particular vantage point.)

Our first step is to expand the canvas in which the photo is sitting, is to give us some more room to work. Choose Image, Resize, Canvas Size, and then set the new height to 150 percent. In the Anchor section, click the Up arrow, which tells Photoshop to put the existing part of the photo at the top of the canvas and add the new part to the bottom (after you do that, the Up arrow will disappear, as you can see here). Click OK.

Copy and Paste

We now have a larger canvas–the bottom of the photo is a blank white background–but you probably can’t see it yet. To get a better view, zoom out by pressing the Alt key and scrolling the mouse wheel until you can see the entire canvas. Alternately, you can zoom using the Magnifying Glass tool, second from the top of the toolbar.

Next, we need to copy the part of the photo that will be reflected in the water at the bottom of the photo. To do that, click the Rectangular Marquee tool (fifth cubby from the top of the toolbar) and use it to select the bottom half of the original photo. Copy this to the clipboard (Edit, Copy).

Before we can put this “reflection” in the bottom of the photo, we need to flip it. Choose File, New, Image from Clipboard and it’ll appear in a new window. Choose Image, Rotate, Flip Vertical, and you’ll have a copy of Manhattan that is properly reflected.

Select the entire image (press Ctrl-A) and then copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C). Switch back to the original photo and press Ctrl-V to paste it into the photo as a new layer. Click the Move tool (in the top cubby in the toolbar), then select the image and drag it to the bottom of the photo, so it snaps in place. It should now look something like this.

Creative Erasing

We’re almost done. All that’s left is to apply some creative erasing so that the bottom of the photo looks like a reflection that naturally fades into the water. Click the Eraser tool (16th from the top of the toolbar) and set the size in the Tool Options palette atop the screen. Set the size to be roughly the same as the reflected section of the photo. Then put the mouse pointer at the bottom of the photo (so the eraser will affect the lower half of the reflection). Click and drag it to erase the bottom of the scene, being careful to draw the eraser in a straight line.

Finally, visit the Layer palette on the right side of the screen and reduce the opacity of the reflection layer until you like the look of the photo. That’s it–save your work. Your final photo should look something like mine.

By Dave Johnson
December 21, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – How do you share your photos? When I was a kid, “photo sharing” often meant sitting in a photo booth and then giving away the picture strip that it produced. (See how to make a modern, digital version by reading “Turn Your Digital Pictures into a Photo Strip.”) Of course, these days, the easiest way to share photos is by posting them online at a photo sharing site.
And there is no shortage of such sites, either; I’ve lost track of how many photo sharing sites let you post your snapshots online. So this week, I’ve rounded up my five favorites. Any one of these sites can host your photo collection and help you share them with friends and family. They’re not all equal, though; some are free, some aren’t, and a couple offer premium features that make it worth paying a little cash.

Flickr

Even if you only know photo sharing sites in passing, you certainly know Flickr. It’s sort of like the YouTube of photos–a massively popular clearinghouse for everyone’s photo collections.

The most common way to use Flickr is with a free account, though the free version of Flickr is almost painfully restrictive, especially if you are an enthusiastic photographer who posts a lot of photos. You can upload 300MB worth of photos each month–depending upon the size of your photos, that’s perhaps 100 photos–though only your most recent 200 photos are visible at any given moment. Moreover, only low-resolution versions of those images can be downloaded from the Web site. Flickr never discards anything, though; if you pay the $25 annual fee for a Pro account, your page instantly “lights up” with all the photos you’ve previously uploaded, and the full sizes are available as well.

Flickr allows you to upload video clips, but the site treats video like that cousin you never really liked. You can upload only two videos per month for free, and each one must be under 90 seconds and 150MB or less. A pro account lets you post HD video, but the 90-second time limit remains.

All that said, Flickr is extremely popular and has an active user community. If you post photos that are even remotely interesting, you’re sure to get unsolicited feedback from an eager community telling you how awesome your photography is. And sharing photos with friends and family is a snap, which is what makes this site everyone’s go-to photo sharing service.

500px

I’ve recently become a big fan of 500px. While it has around for a while, it recently got a major facelift and is getting attention as if it were brand new. The site is simply gorgeous, both in the presentation of your photos and in the quality of work that you’ll find here. This isn’t the sort of place where you’ll want to upload all the photos from your camera in bulk (as many people seem to do on Flickr). Instead, 500px is like that hallway by your front door where you hang your favorite photos.

There are two kinds of accounts at 500px: a free version that allows you to upload up to 20 photos per week, and a subscription version for $50/year that has no photo or bandwidth limits. The subscription version also has a slew of other goodies that are great for photo enthusiasts and pros, like custom domains and customizable page designs.

Effusive feedback from the 500px community is far less common than on Flickr; to be honest, 500px users have somewhat higher aesthetic standards, and the overall quality of photos on 500px is so much higher that there’s more competition for kudos from your peers. But if you’re so inclined, you can build portfolios here of your finest photos and share them with the people who matter to you.

SmugMug

I have a few pro photographer friends who absolutely swear by SmugMug. Let’s face it: Compared to Flickr, almost any website looks attractive. SmugMug has long been a site that knows how important aesthetics are to creative folks like photographers.

Don’t look to SmugMug if you want free photo sharing; none of its tiers of service are gratis. A Basic account costs $35/year and includes unlimited photo uploads. The Power plan adds a personal domain, the ability to protect photos from being downloaded, and unlimited HD videos for $55. There’s also a $145/year Pro plan that includes a store to sell your photos and other goodies.

That said, SmugMug is the place to go if you want fine-tuned control over the photos you share online. You can selectively publish SmugMug photos to Facebook or share via email, for example, as well as embed them in Web sites and blogs. You can protect your photos from downloads and establish portfolios to sell them online. SmugMug backs up your files so you can always recover them in case of catastrophe.

Zenfolio

Looking for a photo sharing site that offers professional-level features like SmugMug, but costs just a little less? Zenfolio might be the right choice for you. Like SmugMug, Zenfolio has no completely free option (aside from the 14-day free trial), but you can get the Basic plan (2GB of storage plus an additional gigabyte each year you’re with the service) for just $25/year. The Unlimited plan is better for enthusiasts: $50/year buys you unlimited storage, HD video support, and a custom domain name. Pros can pay a premium for additional plans with high-end features.

Many of Zenfolio’s key features are built around serious photographers. The site has tools for setting up online stores for your photos, for example. Enthusiasts will love the customizable themes that give your portfolios a distinctive look and the plug-in that makes it easy to upload pictures directly from Adobe Lightroom.

Snapfish

Finally, Snapfish has been around for a long time–I first wrote about this photo sharing site back around 2001. It is completely free, with absolutely unlimited photo storage. That said, the site’s photo sharing service exists mainly just to support an online printing business, so Snapfish maintains your photo collection only on the condition that you occasionally purchase something. Don’t make any prints, photo books, or photo gifts at least once a year, and your photos might be disappeared.

A lot of folks store their photos on Snapfish, but it seems to me that this really only makes sense if you use Snapfish’s printing services frequently. (Like Shutterfly, Zazzle, and similar sites, Snapfish offers a broad collection of services and products, from prints to clothing to photo gifts.) The photo gallery presentation is a bit utilitarian and doesn’t put your photos in the best light. That said, Snapfish has some cool sharing tools you won’t find elsewhere, like private “rooms” where you can chat and share photos with select friends and family.

By Dave Johnson
November 9, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – It’s that time of year again–the local pancake house has put pumpkin pancakes back on the menu, and my family is gearing up for the day when we’ll have a turkey feast, a panoply of pies, and, yes, give thanks for another year. If Thanksgiving is a special day to get together with friends and family and share those things as well, then you probably want to capture moments throughout the day with your digital camera. In the past, I’ve given you some advice on how to get the best Thanksgiving photos–check out my past holiday photo shooting tips, for example. This year, I have a few additional suggestions to help you take some photos you can treasure for years to come.
1. Make a List

First and foremost, it’s a great idea to write down a list of the photos you’d like to capture. In the hustle and bustle of the holiday activities, there’s a good chance you’ll simply forget to take some pictures until it’s too late. Take the food, for example: You probably want to shoot the turkey and the pies before they’re cut into. Make a list of the important scenes. I like to shoot the fully dressed table, laid out with the turkey and fixings, before the guests invade. I also like to get a few different perspectives of the pumpkin pie, such as from directly overhead and from the side. If there are any groups or combinations of guests you want to shoot, make a list of those as well. Tack the list somewhere you’ll see it–like on the fridge–and cross the shots off as you go.

2. Work the Lighting

I know that you’re busy entertaining guests, making the big meal, and keeping the family dog from stealing sweet potatoes off the kitchen counter. But amidst all that, you should also remember to optimize the lighting for your photos. As I’ve said many times before, the camera’s flash is really a last resort–your camera will give much better results with ambient light. Turn on as many lights as possible and pull back curtains to let outdoor light flow into the house.

You can also try increasing your camera’s ISO setting. This control–which affects how sensitive the camera is to light–is usually best left in its lowest position. But rather than use the flash, it’s better to increase the camera’s ISO to 400 or even higher so that you can take better advantage of the naturally available light. If it’s an option, consider taking people outdoors for their portraits.

3. Use HDR Mode Instead of a Flash

You’ve probably seen lots of advice from me in years past about how to take better indoor photos, and most of those tips are, like the previous one, about lighting. This year, I’ve got a new suggestion for you: If your camera has a built-in high dynamic range mode, use it instead of the flash. Some cameras (especially camera phones like some iPhone and Windows Phone models) have an HDR mode that optimizes for light and dark areas to give you a better overall exposure without resorting to the flash. Even better, these built-in HDR modes tweak the exposure of a single photo instead of taking a series of shots and combining them, so the whole process is fairly fast (about the same as taking a normal shot).

4. Get Above the Fray

You might be inclined to take the traditional dinner table family portrait from eye level, but that means you’ve got all sorts of clutter–including candles, glasses, and perhaps even the turkey itself–getting in the way. A better solution is to get above eye level and shoot down towards your subjects. Not only does this get you above the fray, but photos from a higher elevation are often more flattering to the people you’re photographing. You can do that by setting the camera on a tripod, or you can stand on a chair.

5. Combine the Best Parts of a Group Portrait With Photo Fuse

I’ve previously recommended Windows Live Photo Gallery’s Photo Fuse as a way to more easily take great family portraits. Photo Fuse lets you swap elements among similar photos. So even if there’s something wrong in each shot–people blinking, sneezing, whatever–you can just select the photos, choose Photo Fuse from the Create tab, and swap in different versions of each person’s face until everyone looks their best.

What you might not realize, though–and indeed, this is a subtle Photo Fuse trick that slips past almost everyone–is that Photo Fuse doesn’t only let you swap out faces. You can drag a selection box around any part of a photo and instantly choose from different versions of that scene. It’s like being able to construct a photo based on alternate realities, like the recent coin flip episode of the TV show Community. You can swap out clean plates for dirty plates on the dining room table, put the dog in the background even if he got up from his nap by the time you snapped the “best” shot of mom; the choices are endless.

By Dave Johnson
June 1, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can–though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can’t promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus. For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from January, February, March, and April.

Taking Great Night Photos

Recently, with all of the storms that have been going through Arkansas, I wanted to shoot lighting. However, when I set my camera to the bulb setting and the ISO to 200, all of the pictures look as though I have shot them on some cloudy afternoon–they are very bright. I have tried using both my 18-55mm and the 55-200mm lens, but to no avail. I’m a very novice photographer having had my camera only about 6 months.
–Layne Yawn, Jonesboro, Arkansas

By setting your camera to Bulb, you’re on the right track, Layne. But keep in mind that’s not an exposure setting in and of itself; Bulb simply gives you manual control over how long you leave the shutter open. And therein lies your problem: If your pictures are coming out too bright, you’re leaving the shutter open too long.

Another important detail is the aperture, which you don’t mention. Set your aperture to its smallest opening (which is the largest f/number) and your ISO to its smallest value as well (such as ISO 100, if your camera goes that low). Then take some test shots, experimenting with various shutter speeds. Try 5 seconds, 10 seconds, and 20 seconds, and compare them. In this way, you can find an exposure that’ll give you better results for the next storm. For some more help with night photos, check out “Photographing Fireworks: Tips and Tricks.”

A Homemade Flash Reflector

Do you have any directions for making a homemade flash reflector? I saw some directions once, but can’t remember where I had found them.
–Barry Bowman, Staten Island, New York

Sure thing. A flash reflector–commonly called a bounce card–lets you diffuse the light from your camera’s flash to avoid harsh and cold illumination. As I’ve mentioned before, you can bounce the light off the ceiling or use a bounce card, which diffuses and redirects the light from your flash. You can buy a flash card, but there’s no need to. The Web is filled with instructions for free ones you can make yourself. Try, for example, a DIY bounce card at Make. Print the PDF, cut it out, and attach it to your flash with a rubber band. It works great.

Understanding Equivalent Focal Lengths

I am new to digital cameras and I have question that I can’t wrap my head around. I have read that the 35mm equivalent focal length of a digital camera is determined by the size of the sensor. For example, in How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera you state, “if this digital camera were a 35mm camera, its 9.3mm lens would give you the same picture as a 50mm camera.” Would you please explain? –Calvin S. Hall, Springvale, Maine
I’ll give you a really simple explanation, Calvin. A lens’s focal length is not an absolute measure of the “magnification” it delivers. Instead, the size of the image depends upon both the focal length of the lens and the size of the film or image sensor. For any given focal length, the smaller the image sensor, the higher the relative magnification of the image will be. Most digital camera sensors are smaller than a frame in a roll of 35mm film. So when you use any lens on a digital SLR, it will have a longer effective focal length than how it’s marked, as compared to using the lens on a 35mm film camera.

This is why some digital SLRs are advertised as “full frame” models–their sensor is the same size as a frame of 35mm film, and so the lens behaves exactly the same. Of course, this magnification effect can be both good and bad. If you love telephoto photography, you’ll like using a digital SLR, because all of your old 35mm lenses automatically have more “reach.” But by the same token, it’s harder to get the most from a really wide angle lens on a digital camera, because all lenses are somewhat magnified, reducing the wide angle effect. As a result, folks who love fisheye and wide-angle photography tend to gravitate towards the relatively small number of full-frame cameras on the market.

The Water Is Bent!

My wife used a cheap digital camera to take this photo of our daughter-in-law washing her dog. This is how it came out.

So how did water get bent? I’m a professional photographer and I can’t figure it out!
–John Brown, Salem, Massachusetts

You’ve stumbled onto a fascinating glitch that has caused endless confusion for camera phone owners. Inexpensive cameras, particularly camera phones like the iPhone, use something called a rolling shutter. Due to the way the rolling shutter works–capturing the image one row of pixels at a time, sort of like the way an old-fashioned TV would display video–you can get some really funky photos. This photo, which captures spinning airplane blades with an iPhone, is one of the more famous illustrations of this problem.

Generally, you’ll see this kind of effect when you take a photo of something that’s rotating during the exposure, so its position changes over the course of the short exposure. I can’t quite figure out what caused the effect in your photo of the kitchen sink, but it has all the hallmarks of a rolling shutter problem, and so that’s how I would diagnose this photo.

When to Crop?

When in your digital workflow should you crop a photo? First? Last? Somewhere in between?
–Alex Rigly, San Diego, California

Typically, I suggest cropping the photo very early in your editing process, Alex. You should definitely crop before you do any color or exposure adjustments. That way, your photo editing software can base any automatic adjustments only on the colors and brightness found in the part of the photo you want to keep, and it can disregard the bits you’ve cropped away.

By Dave Johnson
December 29, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Enlarge a detail in your photo by peering through a fake magnifying glass Once you take a photo with a digital camera, you can do pretty much anything you want with it. You can tweak the exposure, colors, and cropping. If you’re feeling more creative, you can insert a UFO or shake hands with Elvis. A few readers have asked me how to add a magnification effect, as if there’s a magnifying glass lying on top of the photo. It’s pretty easy to do.

The Photoshop Caveat

I’ll show you how to add a basic magnifying glass effect to a photo. We’ll lay an image of a magnifying glass on a photo, and then enlarge the image in the lens. Unfortunately, to do some of the fancier stuff, like adding lens distortion and reflections to truly make it look real, require tools that you won’t typically find in a photo editor like Adobe Photoshop Elements–for that, you need to step up to the Photoshop CS series. But that’s okay; we can get a good result with Photoshop Elements–here’s how.

Find a Magnifying Glass

For starters, you’ll want to have a graphic of a magnifying glass that we can add to your main photo. You can search online for this–I just typed “magnifying glass photo” into Bing, for example, and found many dozens of usable examples.

You can also look on a site like Flickr. If this is a photo you intend to publish somewhere, then be sure to use a royalty-free photo or something with a Creative Commons license. It’s easy to search for photos like these on Flickr if you check the box at the bottom of the page for Creative Commons-licensed content.

Clone Your Photo

Now that you have a magnifying glass image saved and ready to go, let’s take a look at the photo you want to magnify. We’ll want two copies of the photo; a low resolution version and a high resolution one. The low res photo is the one that will form the basis of our picture, and we’ll put a detail from the high resolution photo inside the magnifying glass lens.

Open your photo in Photoshop Elements (or your favorite photo editor). I’ll assume this photo is a high resolution original, and therefore has a lot of pixels in it. Choose Image, Resize, Image Size and enter a smaller value in the Width. In this example, I’m resizing it down to 1000 pixels across. Click OK. Then save this smaller photo, so you have both handy.

Stack the Elements

Launch Photoshop Elements and open the smaller version of the photo. Next, open the magnifying glass image in Photoshop Elements as well. You should see them both in the Project Bin at the bottom of the screen. If it’s not currently the selected photo, double-click the magnifying glass. Select it by pressing Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-C. Now double-click the other photo in the Project Bin and choose Edit, Paste. You should see the magnifying glass appear as a new layer in your photo.

Next, position the magnifying glass to suit your needs. Click the Move tool (the very first one in the toolbar at the top of the toolbar on the left side of the screen) and use it to position the magnifying glass over the part of the photo you plan to enlarge. You can also resize the magnifying glass so it’s about the right scale for your photo.

It’s time for the magnified photo. Open the original, full-size image and add it as a layer just like you did with the magnifying glass (press Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-C, then switch to the other photo and paste it into a new layer).

At this point, you’ll want to finesse the enlarged photo so that the magnifying glass shows the desired part of the photo. Click the Move tool and use it to position and size the photo.

Select the Lens

We’re in the home stretch now. For our next trick, we’ll select the lens of the magnifying glass. Or, more specifically, the enlarged photo that’s in the lens circle. Choose the Elliptical Marquee tool in the fifth cubby from the top of the toolbar, and then–making sure that the enlarged photo layer is selected in the Layer Palette on the right side of the screen–click and drag to create a round selection over the magnifying glass lens. You won’t get it right the first time, so feel free to click and drag again until you get a selection that closely matches the lens.

Now choose Select, Inverse to select everything in the layer except the lignifying glass area, and press Delete. Check out the photo–you should now see a magnified image in the lens.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique.

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: “Alicia at Fantasmic” by Dwayne A. Taylor, Salem, Massachusetts

Dwayne writes: “I took this at Disney’s Fantasmic. The little girl is my stepdaughter, holding a spinning light toy. I captured the scene with an Olympus C2100UZ ”

This week’s runner-up: “Geschnitztal Valley” by Alessandro Sacilotto, Oakton, Virginia

Alessandro says: “I took this photo in the Geschnitztal Valley, south of Innsbruck in Austria’s Tyrol Province. I was struck by the fields of rapeseed and maneuvered myself so that I could use them as a strong foreground for the mountains and village in the background. I used an Olympus E-510.”

To see the February winners, visit our Hot Pics slide show. Visit the Hot Pics Flickr gallery to browse past winners.

By Dave Johnson
December 29, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – We all take more photos than usual at this time of year. You might be taking pictures in the snow, photos of Christmas decorations, or just capturing holiday get-togethers. No matter what the subject, I’m reminded about just how important your photo collection actually is. These are treasured memories, and you don’t want to trust decades of images to a finicky magnetized platter that spins at 7,000 rpm and, as it ages, could fail catastrophically. I don’t mean to scare you, but it’s a fact of life: All computer gear breaks eventually, and it’s important to have a backup of your photos when that inevitable day comes. So with that in mind, I’ve rounded up some easy ways to back up your photos to guard against calamity.
Floppies–Thousands of Floppies

Actually, I’m kidding. Back in the day, floppy disks were the most common way to back up your files, but they’ve been mercifully obsolete for many years now. I hope that bringing these relics up doesn’t date me too badly–but in my defense, last year my dad asked me if using floppies was a practical backup strategy for his photos. That’s when I pointed out to him that my last few computers didn’t even come with floppy drive bays (which makes it all the stranger that I have a stack of floppies still stacked neatly on a shelf, “just in case”).

The most common floppy disks have a capacity of 1.44MB, which means that you’d need a stack of about 700 floppies to store all the photos on just a single 8GB Secure Digital card.

So if a mountain of floppy disks won’t do the trick, what other options do you have?

CD or DVD

Instead of floppies, my dad opted for the modern equivalent of floppy disks: CDs and DVDs. You’ll certainly get a lot more stuff on each disc; CDs hold about 700MB of data and DVDs can be filled with 4.7GB of files. Since most PCs come with DVD writers these days, archiving your photos on shiny silver discs is easy to do.

If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, you don’t need any additional software to archive your photos. Just insert a blank disc in your PC’s CD or DVD burner, choose Burn files to disc using Windows Explorer, and then follow the wizard to copy the photos. Windows does give you two options, which can be a little confusing.

The first option–called a Live File System disc–makes the disc work like a USB flash drive or ordinary hard drive, in that when you drag a file to the CD or DVD, the file is copied immediately. This is generally the best choice. The other option (a Mastered disc) feels a little archaic because you have to select the files to copy and then burn them all at once. The resulting disc is more compatible with other devices, though, like the DVD or Blu-ray player in your living room.

If you’re still using Windows XP, you will need another program to make DVDs. I recommend Roxio Creator 2011, which I mentioned in my holiday gift guide.
An External Hard Drive

While CD and DVD burning doesn’t require any additional investments (aside from blank discs), it’s not especially convenient to have a stockpile of shiny silver platters in a box somewhere. And it’s a very manual process: Whenever you accumulate a bunch of new photos, those DVDs aren’t going to copy themselves. Just ask my dad. After a year of archiving photos on DVD, he recently enlisted my help to switch over to an automatic external hard drive backup solution.

For my money, an external USB hard drive is the sweet spot in the photo backup continuum. External drives are inexpensive, can be configured to back up your files automatically, are easy to recover data from, and generally last for years without failure. CDs and DVDs last longer (at least in theory), but backing up and later restoring files from them is a real hassle.

Drives like the Toshiba Canvio are small and unobtrusive on your desktop. The Canvio is even designed to be portable, so you can take it on a trip for instant backup of your photos the day you take them. The Canvio comes in sizes ranging from 500GB for $120 to a full terabyte for $180.
Windows Home Server

Finally, let’s bring out the big gun. Suppose you have several PCs in your home and want an automated backup of each one. You could deploy a separate external drive to each computer, certainly–but at that point you might want to consider a Windows Home Server.

I might have recommended a Home Server before; I am a big fan, and I wish more people knew about them. A Home Server is amazingly easy to set up: Just plug it in, connect it to your network, and install a small program on each computer in your house. The Home Server will automatically back up each computer every night, giving you a central place from which to restore your photos (and other files) if you ever have trouble. The Home Server has a slew of other benefits as well, though, like the ability to share files and folders with everyone on your home network. There are a half-dozen Windows Home Server models available from companies like Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Asus, and prices range from $500 to 800. You can read more at Microsoft’s Home Server site.

By Dave Johnson
September 15, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – If you have ever played a game like The Sims or Farmville, you know the simple joys of creating your own little world. In fact, there’s a game on my Apple iPad called GodFinger, which takes this to the logical extreme, giving me dominion over all the beings on a small world that fits entirely on the screen.

The cartoonish planet on GodFinger reminds me of a simple photo editing technique that has been making the rounds on the Internet lately. Imagine taking a panoramic photo you’ve created with Windows Live Photo Gallery, Autostitch, or some other program and wrapping it into a circle. You’ll end up with your own little planet, made entirely of whatever was in your panorama. It’s easy to do and the results can be a lot of fun.

This kind of photo is called a stereograph–and if you took a lot of math in college, you might know it as a stereographic projection. You can see many examples of sterographs on the Web, such as in the Stereographic Projections or the Miniplanetas Flickr groups.

These photos can look kind of trippy, but in essence, they’re all just panoramic photos that have been mapped to a circle using the Polar Coordinates filter in a photo editing program. Let’s see how it’s done.

Step 1: Pick Your Panorama

You can use most any photo editing program, like Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro, or GIMP. Begin by opening a suitable photo. What’s suitable? As I’ve suggested, a panoramic photo works best. I’ve also found that photos with a lot of artificial structures, like a city skyline, work especially well. Panoramas of mountains and other more organic landscapes often don’t create eye-popping scenes, but by all means, experiment.

For this example, I’ll use a photo of a lighthouse I captured on a Caribbean diving trip.

Step 2: Resize and Reorient

Next, resize the photo in a way you’ve probably never done before: by turning off the lock that keeps the aspect ratio correct. In Photoshop Elements, for example, choose Image, Resize, Image Size and then clear the check box that says Constrain Proportions. Set the height to whatever the width is, and click OK. The image should now be completely square, and, frankly, look terrible. That’s okay.

Now flip the photo so it is upside down. Why? Because when we map it into a circle, the orientation of the photo determines which side of the photo is the center of the planet. In Photoshop Elements, choose Image, Rotate, 180 degrees. In other photo editors, you might need to rotate the photo 90 degrees to the right twice to get it in the correct orientation.

Step 3: Create Your Planet

Finally, choose Filter, Distort, Polar Coordinates. Make sure the filter is set to Rectangular to Polar (rather than Polar to Rectangular) and click OK. And that’s it. You should now be staring at your own tiny planet, populated with whatever was in your panoramic photo.

You might see a problem with this photo, though–there’s an obvious and somewhat ugly seam where the two halves of the photo come together. Fear not–we can fix that. Come back next week, when I’ll pick up where we left off and explain how to make truly seamless stereographs.

By Dave Johnson
July 14, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – I routinely use high-powered photo editing programs like Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, and Corel Paint Shop Pro. But you can get away with spending a lot less on photo editing software. You can spend nothing at all, in fact. In the past I’ve mentioned GIMP–a popular free, open source program. This week, I’ll show you how to get started with Paint.NET as well.

Paint.NET got its start as a senior design project at Washington State University, where it was envisioned as a replacement for the Paint program in Windows. It has evolved significantly since then, though. It remains free, and today has all the basic rudiments of photo editing programs, like layers, effects, and even support for Photoshop-like plug-ins. You can download the latest version of Paint.NET from PCWorld, but you’ll want to bookmark the official Paint.NET Web site as well, since there are forums, tutorials, and plug-ins available there. (You can also get to the Web site from Paint.NET’s help menu.)

A Quick Tour

The interface should look pretty familiar to anyone who has used a program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Nothing, though, is locked in place. The standard toolbar, for example–usually located on the left side of the screen–can be moved around anywhere in the program window. In fact, if you don’t maximize the Paint.NET window, you can drag toolbars and tool palettes out of the program window completely.

The toolbar has all the basics. You’ll find selection tools, a magic wand, and a clone tool, for example. When you choose a tool, look at the toolbar at the top of the screen for options to customize it, such as controlling the size of the brush. But making a complex selection with Paint.NET can be tricky, since there’s no “magnetic” selections–just a freehand lasso.

As you make changes to your photo, you might notice the Undo window at the top right. It tracks everything you do, so you can undo edits one at a time, or undo a slew of actions all at once–all the way back to the first thing you did to the photo, if you want to.

Working With Layers

Like any full-featured photo editor, Paint.NET gives you the ability to combine photos using layers. There isn’t an “adjustment layer” tool for making edits to a photo, but you can simulate Photoshop-like adjustment layers pretty effectively. Just duplicate your photo in a new layer (choose Layers, Duplicate Layer) and then choose one of the options from the Adjustments or Effects menus. You can choose Adjustments, Curves, for example, and tweak the photo. Then, in the Layers palette at the bottom right of the screen, click Properties and use the slider to adjust the opacity of the top layer. (Note that Paint.NET uses the geeky range of 0-255 instead of 0-100, but the effect is the same.)

Play With Plug-Ins

You can use plug-ins to add a wealth of new capabilities to Paint.NET. To get to plug-ins, choose Help, Plug-ins from the menu in Paint.NET, which opens your browser to the Paint.NET Web site’s plug-in page.

For example, if you shoot using your camera’s RAW mode, the first plug-in you’ll want to install is a RAW plug-in so you can open those images in Paint.NET. To get to that quickly, choose Plugins Index, show the Alphabetical List of Plugins Q-Z, and scroll down to the entries for RAW tools. There are a few to choose from, but I’ve had the best luck with RawReader. To install it, download the RawReader zip file, which contains three DLL files. Then open the program location for Paint.NET (probably c:\program files\Paint.NET) and drag those DLLs to the folder called FileTypes. Restart Paint.NET and you should be able to open most RAW files. Installing any plug-in is basically that easy–just drag the DLL to the Paint.NET folder or one of its subfolders like Effects or FileTypes.

Is there something in particular you’d like to do with Paint.NET? Send me your questions and I will answer them in a future Digital Focus.