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.

October 28, 2009

HDR Camera for the iPhone
By Beau Colburn
Macworld

HDR Camera
$1.99
www.macphun.com

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.