Add Some Shadows
You’re almost ready to add drop shadows, but first you need to expand the canvas around the edges of the photo. Select Image, Resize, Canvas Size. Switch the unit of measure from inches to percent, and then enter 110 for both height and width. Click OK. You should see that the canvas has expanded, and a transparent border should surround the edges of your photo.

Now it’s time to experiment with drop shadows. In the Effects palette on the right side of the screen, click the Layer Styles button (second from the left) and then choose Drop Shadows from the menu. Now you can drag any of the drop shadow presets from the palette to your photo. If you don’t like the one you dragged, replace it with another. When you find one that suits your image, save your finished product.

Drop Shadows: Prep Your Photo
To get started, open a photo in Photoshop Elements. Make any changes you want–tweak the colors and exposure, for example–and then crop the image to your satisfaction.

Because the drop shadow effect is designed to work on a layer, you need to promote your photo to layer status. To do that, find the Layers palette on the right side of the screen and double-click the image, which should be identified currently as ‘Background’. The New Layer dialog box will appear. Click OK. Your image is now a layer, indicated by the name ‘Layer 0′ in the Layers palette.

Give Your Photos a Lift With Drop Shadows
Adding a drop shadow effect to the edge of a digital photo seems to elevate the image off the page (or off the screen) and give it a little extra life. This subtle effect adds some interest without distracting from the image itself. In Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, drop shadows are only a few clicks away.

Add Special Effects to Your Frame
A solid-color matte is fine for some photos, but what if you want to get a little fancier? Most photo editing programs have custom frames that add visual flair to the image. In Photoshop Elements 6, for example, start by turning on the Content palette (click Window and then Content).You’ll see two drop-down menus at the top of the pane; click the one on the right and choose Frames.

Next, find a frame that you like–the program has almost 200 of them in a variety of colors, styles, and shapes–and drag it from the Content palette into your photo. The frame will automatically wrap around the image, and, depending on the specific frame, it might also change the size and formatting of the photo at the same time. Use the frame’s sizing handles to fine-tune your arrangement and click the frame’s check mark to keep your changes.

If you don’t like the frame, you can always choose Undo, or drag a new frame into your photo to replace the current one.

Make A Simple Matte
The easiest way to create a frame is to surround your photo with a solid background. In Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, choose Image, Resize, Canvas Size from the menu and then add some extra “padding” to the picture. A simple way to do so is to click in the menu and choose Percent, and then set the width and height to 110. Click in the color box and select a shade that suits the photo–I tried a rosy hue. Click OK to exit. If you don’t like the size of your frame, you can always click Undo and try again with a different value.

As you can see, you can use this technique to create a built-in matte, and then print and frame the result. Or you can use the border as a completely digital frame for your photo, even if you never plan to print it.

Use Adobe Photoshop Elements or another image editor to add picture frames, drop shadows, and other border effects to digital photos.

Virtual Frames Add Real Aesthetics
It’s no secret that the right frame, finished in the perfect color and style, can improve almost any photo. Artists knew about the power of frames all the way back in the Renaissance, and–based on the amount of time I spend at the local frame shop–my wife is aware of this as well.

Of course, if you print out a digital photo, you can insert the paper into a traditional frame. (Or, you can display your snapshots on the screen of a digital photo frame.) But did you know that it’s easy to create a virtual frame in a photo editing program? You can leverage the aesthetic power of frames, mattes, and borders to enhance your digital photos, even if they never leave your computer.

Cool fx is a image-editing app by photo industry veterans The Tiffen Company. In its App Store description, Cool fx promises to simulate different colour and black-and-white photographic looks, diffusion, motion picture and film stocks, and optical lab processes. It certainly delivers on that promise –perhaps too much so for some users.

Cool fx functions very simply while giving you a large range of options. As soon as the app launches, you are prompted to pick a photo from your camera’s photo roll. Once you’ve picked your photo, you have five effect areas from which you can alter the photo: Black & White, Color, Diffusion, Grain, and Temperature. Each of these effects categories contain anything from 18 to 50 individual options for specific adjustments to be made.

For example, when choosing to adjust a image in the Black & White setting, you have more than 40 options from which to select (8mm, Old Newspaper, Sepia, and so on). From there, you can dig further in and make individual adjustments to each specific setting. With more than 170 presets — and the ability to adjust each individually — the possibilities are limitless.

For consumer-level users, the options are so broad that it could be a problem. For Digital Arts readers looking to mess about with their iPhone photos, it offers all the control you could wish for. There is, of course, the question of why you wouldn’t just use a computer if you needed that much adjustment control.

If you have the need to add a huge range of effects to an image while on the iPhone, Cool fx provides tons of options. (And it’s currently on sale for $1, as of this writing.) However, if you just want to tweak a few pictures every now and then, there are other apps out there that may feel less overwhelming.

By Dave Johnson

Image stabilization technology in cameras and in lenses has revolutionized digital photography, enabling photographers to get dramatically sharper photos without hauling around a tripod. But it’s not obvious how to use a digital SLR’s image-stabilized lens–after all, the very fact that it has an on/off switch implies you shouldn’t leave the feature on all the time. For a refresher on lens basics, check out “Demystifying Lenses,” and then join me as I explain how to get the most out of your image stabilization technology.

What Is Image Stabilization?
When shopping for lenses for your digital SLR, you might have noticed that image stabilization goes by a few different names, most commonly either IS (among Canon lenses) or VR (for Nikon). But the lenses all tend to work the same way: Motion sensors in the lens generate feedback that directs optical elements to compensate for small movements, like the sort that occur when you hold a camera.

Of course, some cameras have image stabilization built into the body instead of the lens. If you have such a camera, the basic idea is the same. The key difference is that the motion sensors direct the camera’s sensor rather than optics in the lens. The advantage is that you need to buy the expensive stabilization hardware only once, instead of in each and every lens.

When to Use Image Stabilization
Sounds great, right? You might be tempted to leave something like that on all the time. In reality, these motion sensors are a little too sensitive for 24/7 operation. If you mount a camera with image stabilization on a tripod or secure it to some other form of stable support, then you should generally flick the switch to off. (There should be a switch for image stabilization somewhere on the IS or VR lens, or, if it’s built into the camera, somewhere on the body.)

What happens of you don’t? The sensors tend to interpret artifacts in the sensor’s data (like digital noise) as motion, and send instructions to the sensor to compensate. This produces an effect sometimes called ghost motion. The result is that the image stabilization system introduces motion blur into a photo that would otherwise have been as sharp as a tack.

So the bottom line is that you should turn image stabilization off when shooting with a tripod, but leave it on the rest of the time. You can tell when image stabilization is doing its job when you depress the shutter release halfway; the viewfinder image should tend to “freeze” as the system dampens the normal jitters of your body.

Disable One Axis
You might be able to exert even more control over your image-stabilized lens besides just turning it on or off. Some lenses have Active and Normal modes, like on my Nikon 18-200mm zoom.

Active is a good all-around setting for counteracting ordinary jiggles both vertically and horizontally. If you’re trying to pan a moving subject, though, you’d want to switch to Normal mode, which compensates for vertical vibration while allowing for the kind of side-to-side motion you are trying to capture. Various lenses are marked differently, so check your user guide for details about the lingo on your particular lens.

Dave Johnson
PC World (US)

Photographers love to talk about the “magic hour” in the morning and late afternoon when the sun is perfectly positioned for awe-inspiring photos (“Use the Best Light for Awesome Photos“). Listen to enough of that sort of talk, and you’ll start to believe that early morning and dusk are the only times of day you could possibly get any good photos at all.

Unfortunately, most of us take pictures pretty much every time of day except the aforementioned magic hour. Whether on vacation, at or kid’s soccer game, or just on a lazy Saturday afternoon, we need to contend with harsh midday sunlight and grey, washed out skies. This week, let’s talk about five strategies for taking great photos when the sun just won’t cooperate.

Avoid the Middle of the Day
Even though I promised you I’d tell you how to make the most of bad lighting, it’s still important to say that if you can avoid shooting at high noon, your photos will thank you. For better results, try taking pictures a few hours on either side of lunch, if your schedule will allow. When the sun is directly overhead, you’ll have to contend with a dynamic range that far exceeds what your camera is capable of capturing, so you’ll have regions of totally black shadow, pure white highlights, or both.

Put the Sun to Your Back
Assuming that you’re shooting any time except noon, keep an eye on where the sun is in the sky, and try to put yourself between it and your subject. Sometimes that will mean walking around your subject and shooting it from a different angle. You’d be surprised how often you’ll forget this bit of common sense when you’re on vacation and approach some historic attraction–your first instinct will be to shoot it as you approach, no matter where the sun happens to be positioned. Move around, though, and take a few minutes to look for different vantage points with a better sun position.

Shoot a Silhouette
What if the shot you really want to get is between you and the sun, and there’s just no getting around that unfortunate geometry? All isn’t lost. Go ahead and take the shot. But also consider an artistic variation designed to make the most of this kind of situation: the silhouette

To put your subject in silhouette, you’ll want to lock your camera’s exposure not on the subject–which is probably in shadow–but on the bright sky behind the subject. You can do this using your camera’s exposure lock feature (usually by pressing the shutter down halfway) to set the exposure on the bright sky, then recomposing and taking the photo.

Replace the Sky
Silhouettes are nice, but you probably don’t want a steady diet of them. To take a more traditional photo in harsh lighting or with overcast skies, you have some other options. One is a favorite trick of mine: Replacing the sky with a better, bluer one in your photo editing program afterwards.

It’s actually pretty easy to do. You can open a better sky in your photo editor and then add the photo with the poor sky as a layer on top. Select the blown out sky using your selection tool of choice, and delete it. The blue sky will show through from behind.

Take a High Dynamic Range Photo
Finally, I’ve got a high-tech solution to consider. The problem with bright, mid-day sunlight is that it sends way more brightness information to the camera than the sensor is capable of handling. As a result, the camera has to optimize for one part of the brightness range–the brighter bits or the darker bits–and the rest gets discarded, rendering as pure white or pure black.

If you take a series of photos of the same scene, though, each with a different exposure, you can combine the images on your PC into a single photo that includes the full dynamic range (or at least a lot more of the dynamic range than you’d otherwise get). This technique is called High Dynamic Range photography, or HDR for short.

To take an HDR photo, you’ll want to use a tripod and to take a series of photos using your camera’s exposure bracketing mode or exposure compensation dial. And you’ll need software on your PC that can stitch together an HDR image, such as Photomatix Pro.

Looking for a photo editor? The usual choices include Adobe Photoshop Elements (starting at about $85 online), which I use to demonstrate techniques here in Digital Focus, and Corel Paint Shop Pro (available for around $70 and up). There are free options as well, like Paint.Net and GIMP. For serious RAW shooters, I recommend Adobe Lightroom (available for about $220 and up).

But these days there’s a whole new way to edit your digital photos: using online photo editors that run from within a Web browser, like a photo equivalent to Google Docs or Zoho. On the upside, you don’t have to install anything, and you can edit your photos anywhere you have an Internet connection. The downside? Just what you’d expect: these programs generally offer only a fraction of the features found in stand-alone image editors like Photoshop, and you can’t work without an Internet connection. This week, let’s look at a few of these online photo editors.

FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer shows that you don’t need to sacrifice all of the photo editing features you know from programs like Photoshop Elements to use an online photo editor.

Once you upload a photo to the site, you’ll see an interface that looks like a simplified photo editing program, complete with automatic exposure correction, red eye removal, and cropping control. But there’s a ton of extra stuff here as well, including support for layers–you can load multiple images and control the opacity of each layer, just like in a commercial photo editor. The program also includes effects like blurred edges, grayscale and sepia conversion, and the ability to “cartoonify” your photos. There’s even a Photoshop-like Curves tool for adjusting exposure, and a full-screen mode so you don’t need to feel like you’re working in a Web browser.

Picnik

Though it’s not the most powerful option out there, I also like Picnik. You can use the simple, tabbed interface to grab photos from your hard drive or photo sharing sites like Flickr, Facebook, and Myspace. All the basics are here. You can rotate, crop, resize, and tweak the colors and exposure. Like Corel Paint Shop Pro, the red eye removal tool can handle both humans and pets. The Create tab is home to special effects filters, like black and white, sepia, color boost, and soft focus.

Splashup

Of all the Web tools I mention here, my favorite is Splashup. It has the most traditional interface I’ve seen in an online photo editor, complete with a menu bar across the top of the page and a toolbar on the left side packed with all the usual tools. Like FotoFlexer, it includes support for layers, so you can combine photos or perform fine adjustments to your photos. Splashup even has its own file format, which preserves layer information, so you can open a project and continue editing later–just like Photoshop. You can load photos for editing from your computer or popular photo sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and SmugMug.

Photoshop Express

As nice as Splashup is, it isn’t as refined as Adobe Photoshop Express, which is an online version of the familiar Photoshop Elements. You get the same basics as in FotoFlexer–crop, rotate, red-eye removal, exposure correction, for example–but there’s no layer support or any of the more powerful editing and correction tools in Photoshop Elements. You will find some cool stuff like a fill light (which lets you adjust the foreground separately from the background), filters, and image distortion. And like the desktop version of Photoshop, you can choose from among several thumbnail variations of the same effect.

Like the other Web tools, you can upload photos from your own PC or from sites like Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa. Adobe offers a generous 2GB of online storage, and there are subscribe options for additional photo storage as well.