By Dave Johnson
December 21, 2009

These days, digital cameras come packed with so many pixels that it’s a challenge e-mailing photos at their full, original size. Instead, it’s important to reduce the size of your pictures so they’re easier to share. I’ve explained how to resize photos for e-mail and the Web in the past–it’s pretty easy to do with any photo editing program or even just with Windows.

But what if a photo is not too big, but too small? Is it possible to make pictures bigger, so you can make a large print, for instance?

Yes, you can. (After all, why would I ask the question if the answer was just going to turn out to be “no”?)

Why Enlarge?
We’ve already established that modern digital cameras tend to have more pixels than you could possibly need. So why would you ever need to enlarge a digital photo?

You might have a photo from an older digital camera that captures only two- or three-megapixel images, for example. Or your photo might be the product of a camera phone that takes much smaller images. Or, no matter how big the original photo started out, it’s possible that after cropping, there just aren’t that many pixels left over for a sharp print.

Remember that you’ll want about 300 pixels per inch when you print, so to make an 8×10-inch print, your photo should be about 2400×3000 pixels. If it’s a lot smaller, the print will look noticeably blocky.

The Wrong Way to Enlarge
You might remember that there’s a resizing tool in your photo editing program. In Photoshop Elements, for example, you can choose Image, Resize, Image Size and specify any size, bigger or smaller than the original photo.

Don’t try that, though. Photo editing programs are fairly “dumb,” and will just tend to duplicate pixels as needed to make the photo as big as you requested. The result is not pretty; your photo will turn into a blocky, pixelated mess.

In general, you should use your photo editor only to resize a photo smaller, never larger.

Try SmillaEnlarger
What you need to enlarge a photo is a program designed just for the task. There are a number of commercial programs (and plug-in filters for Photoshop) that will do this. In the past, I’ve told you about Genuine Fractals, for example, and PCWorld reviewed the most recent version. Genuine Fractals uses fractal interpolation–very advanced math–to infer hidden detail when enlarging an image. The result can be Jack Bauer-style image improvements that can dramatically improve the appearance of a print compared to what you’d get with the low-resolution original. The downside? Genuine Fractals is expensive, clocking in at $160.

Here’s a free alternative: SmillaEnlarger is an open-source photo enlarger for Windows. It’s easy to install, since there’s no setup program–just drag the folder anywhere you like and then run the program. To use it, drag a photo into the program window and specify the new size you want.

You don’t need to tweak any of the program settings to get great results. Just click the Preview button to see what the final image will look like. If you’re happy, specify a name for the final image and then click Enlarge & Save. The results can be stunning.

Here is a zoomed-in detail from “Tomatoes,” by Brian Kolstad. Notice that the text on the shirt is only barely legible.

And here is the same detail, tripled in size with SmillaEnlarger. Notice that the same region of the photo is now dramatically easier to read.

By Dave Johnson
December 19, 2009

Focusing on Holiday Portraits
Since the holidays are about getting together with friends and family, you’ll want to take some portraits along the way. The two biggest problems people tend to have with holiday photos is focus and lighting. Let’s start with focus.

If you’re shooting just one or two people at a time, try to use the narrowest depth of field possible. This brings the subject into sharp focus while causing the background to melt away in a gentle blur. The easiest way to do that is by using your camera’s aperture priority mode and dialing in a small f-stop number.

For group shots, you’ll want to set the aperture in exactly the opposite direction: to ensure that everyone in the photo is in focus, set the biggest f-stop number that your camera allows; this will help you achieve enough depth of field to ensure that everyone from front to back will be in focus. The background won’t blur as it does when you shoot with a small f-number, but you’ll have better luck keeping everyone in focus.


Shedding Light on Your Christmas Morning Photos
If you position your subject in front of a window, you’ll want to overexpose the scene a bit, because your camera’s sensor will be confused by the daylight streaming in the back of the shot. Left to its own devices, your camera will tend to underexpose the faces of your subjects. Use your camera’s exposure compensation control to start with a value of +1, and then experiment to see what works best.

Sharing Your Photos After the Holidays
Now that you’ve assembled a collection of holiday photos, what can you do with them?

If your PC runs Windows 7, you can create your own holiday-photo-themed desktop that randomly displays selections from a set of photos as a desktop background. The results will this look great on your PC, and you can share the theme with friends and family who also have Windows 7–maybe as a personalized holiday gift.

To get started, right-click the desktop and choose Personalize; then click Desktop Background, browse to your photos, and select your best shots of friends, family, and holiday lights. (To make this step easier, you could collect all of the holiday photos into a single folder.) Click Save Changes. Now, in the My Themes section, right-click your new Unsaved Theme and choose Save theme for sharing. You can give the resulting file to friends and family, and they in turn can install it as a theme on their own Windows 7 PCs, with a simple double-click.

Another option: Turn your favorite photos into calendars, coffee mugs, mouse pads, jigsaw puzzles, or other gifts. If you already share your photos online or occasionally make prints from an online printing site, you’ll find that most of those sites offer all sorts of gift options as well. The most popular sites include Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, and SmugMug. Also, check out “Parlay Your Photos Into Holiday Cards and Calendars” for more photo gift ideas.

By Dave Johnson
December 19, 2009

The holidays are a time for colorful gifts, candy canes, and holiday pictures. And with a little attention to exposure settings and shooting techniques, you can capture great holiday photos you’ll want to share.


Choose the Right Camera Settings
When the house is filling with guests and the kids want to open their gifts, you don’t want to worry about your camera settings. Here’s how to optimize your camera in advance for the kinds of shots you plan to take.

For all-around indoor holiday photography, prepare your camera to shoot fast action in low light. Kids are like cats: They might appear calm and quiet, but you can’t predict what they’ll do next, especially under the influence of presents and candy. If you’ll be shooting during daylight hours, turn off the camera’s flash and increase the ISO to ensure that the camera can take good natural-light photos. Then either set the camera to its action scene mode or switch to aperture priority and use a small f-number, which will give you the fastest possible shutter speed.

In the evening, you’ll probably need to turn the flash back on, but you might want to leave the ISO setting high–especially if you’ll be shooting in a large room–so you can fully illuminate the scene.


Capture the Magic With a Series of Photos
Often, a single photo can’t adequately capture the moment. If your camera has an interval timer mode (check the camera’s menu or user guide), you can use it to create your own time-lapse photos. Set up the camera in a corner of the room with a good view of the action, and configure it to snap one picture every minute or so as you decorate the tree or open presents. You can turn the resulting photos into a time-lapse movie, or you can publish the most interesting shots as a series of images on your Web site or photo-sharing site.

Another alternative is to use the burst mode or continuous-shooting setting on your camera to take a series of rapid-fire shots while the assembled multitude is opening gifts. You’re much likelier to get a memorable photo this way, and you can discard the images that you don’t like.

Whether you choose to shoot photos at intervals or in burst mode, you’ll want to avoid using the flash, in order to save battery life and to let the camera recharge faster, with less lag between shots.

By Dave Johnson
November 10, 2009

Recently, a friend of mine congratulated me for selling one of my wildlife photos. When I asked him what he meant, he sent me a link to a site that was prominently using a shot I had taken of some wolves. The problem? I had never given the site owners permission to use my photo, which they had “borrowed” from my Flickr page. I asked them to remove the photo, and they did–but not everyone out there is so reasonable. You can watermark your photos to prevent this sort of thing from happening. But is there any way to find your photos online to see they’re being used inappropriately?

It turns out that there are a couple of ways to keep an eye on your photos.

Your Photos Are Vulnerable
Before we go any further, though, allow me to emphasize that whenever you post a photo on the Internet, there’s a potential for theft. There is no way to completely protect a photo from being used without your permission. Even if your Web page uses a special script to disable the right-click “Save picture as” command, a determined photo borrower can simply take a screen shot of the Web browser. The only way to absolutely secure your photos? Never share them online.

Reverse Image Search
Suppose you have posted some photos on a photo sharing site, and you’re curious to see if someone has absconded with them. What you need is a way to perform a reverse image search–where a smart search engine looks for a photo by detecting identical content within the image itself, rather than keying on file names or metadata, which are easily changed.

That might sound like science fiction, and in fact it’s pretty close. But I’ve found a Web site out there, TinEye, that can actually perform reverse images searches today.

To use TinEye, you can upload a photo from your computer or point the site to a Web page that already hosts the photo. TinEye then returns a list of sites using the same image.

TinEye is far from perfect. It often identifies photos that are similar to–but not exactly the same as–the source image. Worse, TinEye’s database of photos represents only a fraction of what’s available on the entire Internet–so if you get zero results, that doesn’t mean your photo isn’t being repurposed out there somewhere.

Look for Similar Photos
I haven’t been able to find any competing reverse image search sites that are similar to TinEye, but I do have a slightly different strategy you can try.

The new-ish Bing search engine lets you zero in on “similar” photos when conducting an image search. This can lead you to photos that are being re-used on multiple sites.

Just go to Bing and click Images, then search for a photo. When you see the results, hover over a photo that interests you. Click “Show similar images,” and Bing will refresh the page with results that might contain the same photo from a different site.

Of course, this approach has its flaws as well. You can’t start with a specific photo like you can with TinEye; you have to nudge Bing to a photo you’re interested in using the right search terms. And once you find that photo in question, looking for “similar” photos is still far from a sure thing.

The moral of the story? There are a few tricks you can use to see if your photos are being used out there in cyberspace, but it’s still really hard and the results are inconclusive. Don’t post anything you aren’t willing to give away.

By Dave Johnson
November 3, 2009

Halloween is behind us, and you know what that means: The holiday season has descended. This time of year is a photographer’s dream come true: between now and January, it seems that every few weeks we have a new reason to put lighted decorations outside the house. In the past I’ve given you some general advice for taking holiday photos, but this year I thought it would be fun to take an in-depth look at the best ways to take photos of those holiday lights. You can use these tips over and over again this fall, whether you’re shooting Halloween, Chanukah, Christmas, or New Year’s events.

Preparing Your Camera
When you head out to shoot some holiday lights, be sure to make sure your camera is ready. You can get good results with almost any sort of camera–you don’t need a digital SLR–but I do recommend using a tripod. Nighttime exposures are always somewhat slow, and it’s just not possible to freeze the action when the shutter is open for a whole second.

If you don’t have a tripod, you can consider propping the camera on top of a bean bag (or a bean bag-like gadget, such as The Pod. Bean bags are handy because they conform to the shape of the camera as well as to the shape of whatever you’re placing the camera on.

When to Shoot
This is the most important part of the stew–and the ingredient that most people omit when they try taking holiday lighting photos.

The typical shots of holiday lights–the ones you see all the time–are taken at night, long after the sun is gone and the background is in total darkness. In these photos, the lights are bursting at the seams, and the background is abject darkness. There’s little context, and no drama. These photos aren’t bad, but they lack a certain vitality.

The remedy? Shoot shortly after sunset, when there’s still some light in the sky.

Set up in front of the lighting display when there’s still plenty of light in the sky, at least half an hour before the sky goes totally dark. You should be able to see the display lights, but they should still be fighting the natural light in the sky.

Setting Your Exposure
One last thing to consider before you start shooting: the exposure settings. If your camera lets you adjust the white balance, you should set it to “tungsten” or “incandescent.” These settings will give you a richer, bluer sky as well as better lights.

You can leave the camera on its automatic setting, but if you can dial in manual and adjust aperture and shutter separately, you can try starting with f/8 and a half second. To change the overall exposure, open the shutter longer (for a brighter scene) or shorter (for less exposure). To make the strings of holiday lights brighter and more dramatic, open the aperture (a smaller number–like f/4).

If the lights are already too bright and overexposed, you can throttle the aperture down to f/11.

The bottom line? Experiment.

Frame the Scene
Getting to the scene early enough is more than half the battle. Start taking some photos and check the results you’re getting. As the sky gets darker, you’ll start to hit a sweet spot in which the background sets a dramatic tone for your photos, but the lighting takes over the foreground and becomes the “protagonist” in your scene.

Be sure to take a lot of photos and try a number of different angles, but you’re guaranteed to get some great photos if you “go wide” and include a lot of sky.

This approach means you won’t be able to shoot a lot of different locations in a single night, but the holidays last for months–you’ve got plenty of time.

By Dave Johnson
October 19, 2009

Everyone loves photos with a sharply defined subject and a blurry, indistinct background. This powerful photographic effect has been used for ages–and it’s shallow depth of field at work. Not sure what depth of field is all about? Check out “Master Your Camera’s Depth of Field.” This week, I’ve rounded up four ways for you to take control of the depth of field in your photos.

1. The Natural Way: Aperture Control
You probably already know that your camera controls exposure by balancing aperture size and shutter speed. You can combine a faster shutter speed with a bigger aperture, or a slower shutter with a smaller aperture. There’s no single correct exposure setting for any photo; there are many, as long as you keep those two values in balance.

That knowledge is handy because it lets you control the depth of field by choosing the right aperture for a scene. The bigger the aperture (which corresponds to a smaller f/stop number), the more shallow your depth of field. The easiest way to do this is to set your camera to Aperture Priority, and then dial in the aperture value you want–the camera will automatically respond with the right shutter speed.

You can see the effect of varying the aperture in the side-by-side examples shown here. On the left, I used an aperture of f/16 to make the background relatively sharp. On the right, the larger opening afforded by an f/8 setting muted the background instead.

2. Fake It With Layers

Of course, this is the digital age: You can always fix a photo, as they say in the movie business, “in post.”

Let’s say that you want to blur the background of a photo. You can use layers to do that easily in Adobe Photoshop Elements or almost any other image editor. For a refresher, you might want to check out my recent tutorial on using layers in Photoshop Elements.

Here’s the skinny on this technique: Open the photo in Photoshop Elements and choose Layer, Duplicate Layer. Then, with the top layer selected, choose Filter, Blue, Gaussian Blur, and apply some blur to the image. You can apply more if you want to; you can do it more than once, like putting layers of wax on your car.

When the background looks sufficiently blurry, choose the Eraser tool from the toolbar on the left side of the screen, and erase the now-blurry subject, revealing the sharp original from the layer underneath. For the best results, select a brush shape with a soft edge from the drop-down menu in the options palette at the top of the screen.

3. Fake It With Selections
There are many ways to blur your background in Photoshop Elements. Another approach is to select the subject using a selection tool like the Magnetic Lasso, and then choose Select, Inverse from the menu to select the background instead. Then apply blur to the selected region, leaving the subject sharp and clear.

4. Get Infinite Depth of Field

Sometimes you want a deep depth of field, not the shallow depth that blurring the background gives you. A while back, I found a clever way to get that effect: a program called Helicon Focus.

Helicon works sort of like a panoramic stitching program in that it combines multiple photos into a single, finished image. But instead of a series of overlapping shots, Helicon requires a series of shots of the exact same scene, just varying where the focus is from front to back. The program combines these images into a final photo that is in sharp focus all the way from the foreground to the background. Intrigued? Check out my tutorial on how to use Helicon Focus.

By Dave Johnson
October 6, 2009

In a lot of ways, megapixels aren’t that important. You’ll never be able to detect the difference between an eight-megapixel and a 12-megapixel photo when looking at the picture on a computer screen, for example, because your monitor only shows about one or two megapixels of information anyway. So unless you’re making poster-sized prints or doing a lot of deep zooming and cropping, who cares how many pixels there are?

The Value of Pixels
If you take a high-resolution photo, there’s a lot of detail locked away in your image. You can zoom in and get a good look at minutiae in the background, for example. It’s fun to see how much you can enlarge the image and still see somewhat sharp, meaningful visuals that you never noticed when you took the photo to begin with.

Unfortunately, few people ever get to see those subtle details. When you share a photo in e-mail or online, you generally need to shrink the image down to a manageable size, throwing away most of those pixels in the process. What might have been a few thousand pixels of unexamined action way in the background gets reduced to a dozen indistinct pixels. Even if you print the photo, it’s still too small to really appreciate all the detail that’s locked into the original photo.

Closr Unlocks Your Details
Recently, though, I stumbled across a free Web site that helps to address this problem. Closr lets you upload your photos in all their original, full-resolution glory. Eight megapixels? 10? 20? No problem–the only limit is that the file must be under 100MB, which isn’t a problem since even a 12-megapixel photo is typically only about 3MB or 4MB.

Because you can upload such large photos, Closr is also a great way to show off enormous panoramic photos made by stitching together several high-megapixel images. I have panoramas that are 20 and 30 megabytes in size, and Closr accepted them without a hiccup.

To use Closr, you’ll need to register with a screen name, e-mail, and password. Then upload a photo, and you’ll see something like the screen shown on the left.

Once uploaded, your photo appears in a “widget” on the Web site, which you can use to pan around and zoom in to see some of the details that your many-megapixel camera captured. The real magic happens when you go full screen. Click the icon in the very upper right corner of the widget (with the plus sign) and the photo will go full screen, where you can zoom in and pan around without the somewhat claustrophobic frame of the small gadget. This is an especially great mode for viewing panoramas, in fact.

Sharing Closr Photos
You can share your uploaded photos by sending the URL in e-mail. If you have a Web site or blog, you can embed the widget. Copy the script at the bottom of the page and you’ll get something like what you see on the right.

That’s not a static image; the widget is interactive, so you can click in the picture and drag it around or use the zoom buttons for a better view. You can see it in action by visiting my blog and playing with it yourself.

I could complain that Closr doesn’t really take full advantage of the resolution in your photos. You can only zoom in a bit, which is disappointing when I know there’s a lot more detail locked away in the photo. But it’s free, and it’s a good start.

We don’t usually often think of it this way, but photography is really about drawing pictures with light–which means that you can literally draw your own pictures by adding light to a photo in a controlled way. Many years ago, before digital photography, I used to experiment with this sort of photo using long exposures and a flashlight. In the past, I’ve shown you how to mimic that effect digitally (“Add Sci-Fi Special Effects“). This week, I thought it would be fun to do it the old-fashioned way and actually “paint” with a flashlight.

Get Set Up

Painting with light is more art than science: You can get great results with almost any kind of camera, and experimentation is key. Unlike the kind of experimentation I remember from my college physics class, though, this is actually fun.

To get started, you’ll want a digital camera that has some sort of long exposure mode. Ideally, you’ll be able to set the shutter speed to 8 or 16 seconds. I’ve found that 8 seconds is barely time to do anything, so honestly, you’ll get more satisfying results if your camera has a 16- or even 30-second exposure setting.

You’ll also need to set the camera on a stable surface. Since you can’t really hold it still for 16 seconds, a tripod is ideal. You could also just set it on a desk, table, chair, or any other surface that isn’t going to move around during the exposure.

And finally, you’ll need some light sources. You should gather one or more flashlights, and, if possible, an external flash unit. Don’t mount the flash on the camera–you’ll want to hold it and trigger it manually.

Taking the Shot

Now that you have your supplies ready, wait for nightfall and position your camera for a photo. Your surroundings should be as dark as possible, such as in a room with the lights turned off. or outdoors, away from street lights. Press the shutter release to start your long exposure, and then use a flashlight to “inject” light directly into the scene.

One way to use your flashlight is to mimic a sci-fi “phaser” effect, like this old photo from my film days. I achieved this shot of my buddy Paul “phasering” Bob by positioning them in total darkness, starting the camera exposure, and illuminating them with my handheld flash. Then I carefully moved a flashlight in a straight line from Paul to Bob. For a finishing touch, I removed Bob from the scene and fired the flash again to achieve the impression that he was disintegrating.

For a modern update with a digital camera, here are some shots I took just this week with my daughter, who hasn’t been this excited to be photographed since the time we tried our hands at popping water balloons at high shutter speed. Here she is shooting beams of light from her hands.

And this one shows the kind of cool, unpredictable light trails you get as a result of random variations in the way you hold the flashlight.

Controlling the Light

Since this technique relies on you moving a flashlight around in the dark, clearly it’s not possible to get perfect results every time–that’s why I say you need to experiment. You can stack the deck in your favor if you remember to choose your camera settings wisely.

The shutter needs to be open for a long time, so that means the only aspect of your camera you really have control over is the aperture. If you use a small aperture (which equates to a large number, like f/18), the effect of the light will be diminished. A large aperture (small number, like f/4) will admit a lot more light, and that means any ambient light will illuminate the entire scene. But it also means the flashlight will appear brighter, and you might pick up ghost images of the person moving around with the flashlight. Start with an intermediate aperture, like f/8, and vary it to see how different values affect your photos.

Pointing the Flashlight

Finally, how you point your flashlight can give you dramatically different effects. I recommended that you point the flashlight directly into the camera lens, because that will give you the most immediate and dramatic result. But as an alternative, try shining the flashlight at objects in the scene instead. In a perfectly dark room, for example, you can experiment with selectively illuminating subjects. Good luck, and send me some of your best results.

Get Your Vignette Set
Begin by creating a duplicate layer: Choose Layer, Duplicate Layer, and then click OK. You should be working in the top layer automatically, but you can verify where you are by checking the Layers palette on the right side of the screen; make sure the top layer is selected.

Next, select the region that you want to preserve. Choose the Rectangular Marquee Tool (fifth from the top on the left side of the screen). In the Options toolbar, set the feathering to a fairly large value; the more pixels in your image, the bigger your feather value should be. For my sample photo, which is 800 pixels wide, I chose a feather of 50 pixels. Now draw a rectangle that contains the part of the photo you want to keep.

Burn Your Photo’s Edges
Back in the days of film and darkrooms, you could control the look of your prints with techniques called “dodging” and “burning.” As you exposed a print, for example, you could cover part of the photographic paper on which you were exposing the image. The resulting effect (dodging) would make the obscured section lighter than the rest of the image. Alternately, you could expose another section of the photo longer (burning), and that would make it darker. Burn part of the photo long enough, and it would turn black.

Digitally, you can apply the burn effect to add some subtle vignetting to a photo. You can work with any image, but it helps to start with one that is already predominantly dark overall, like this shot of my son’s marching band taken at a nighttime football game. You want to focus on the middle of the image by gradually darkening both sides, until the left and right edges are pure black. I’ll show you an easy method that relies on the Photoshop Elements Levels tool.