Fixing the Photos of Summer

Ah, summer photos, at the beach, in the mountains, at the pool, lounging in the backyard. If we take enough photos of summer, maybe it will never go away.

But of course, it will, and you will probably have gigabytes of photos to remember it by. But no matter how good your camera, some of those photos might not quite capture summer the way you remember it.

So you turn to your photo editing software for a fix. Standalone editing programs such as Photoshop CS3, Photoshop Elements or Corel Paint Shop Pro offer sophisticated options for tweaking your photos. But even basic editors such as those found in photo cataloging programs like Picasa, ACDsee or whatever was on the disk that came with your camera can offer some help.

Here’s a few tricks and tools found on many of these editors that you can use to fix your summer photos.

SUMMER READING

Symptom: My photos are inconsistent

Fix: Read your histogram

How: The histogram is basically a report card display for each photo, showing the amount of light ‘information’ gathered in graph form throughout the tonal range from dark to light. Most cameras can display a histogram for each photo automatically as you shoot or during playback so you can judge your photos as you take them. Histograms can also be used in editing software to fix your photos.

A properly exposed photo will look like a mountain range on a histogram, with lots of light information throughout the tonal range. A dark photo will have all the information bunched up in the shadows on the left, and a blown-out or dull photo with little detail will show a flat histogram, indicating that not much data was captured anywhere throughout the tonal range. Of course, naturally bright or dark photos, such as a beach scene or a night photo will have histograms weighted to those extremes, and in these cases, that is fine.

Program modes are pretty good at creating photos with healthy histograms. If you go manual, are working with tricky light or just think the photos look bad in the LCD, check the histogram. If you can see the ‘mountains’ and there is plenty of light information to work with, then you should be OK.

LEVELING OUT

Symptom: Flat, dull photos

Fix: Level, curves controls

How: While it is easy to reach for the brightness and contrast controls in your photo software to fix dull photos, doing so is like using a chain saw to carve a wooden duck. Your results will be rough and unrefined, and can cause a loss of detail as you adjust the lighting with broad strokes. Try these instead:

The levels control can be compared to a graphic equalizer for light. This simple adjustment allows you to adjust shadows, midtones and highlights of a photo individually, and in some software programs you can also adjust these levels for each color (referred to as red, green and blue channels). When you open the levels control, you are presented with a histogram of your photo with three sliding controls below it. These represent shadows (on the left), midtones (center) and highlights. The histogram above them shows how much light is represented in each range.

If the whitest areas of your photo are dull and grey, you can slide the highlights control to the left to add contrast. If the darkest areas are too grey, slide the shadow control to the right. If you have decent highlights and shadows, but the photo is just too dark, try the midtone slider. Most photos will require you to adjust all three to some degree. What you are trying to do is create that even histogram ‘mountain’ I mentioned earlier, showing a full range of data from light to dark, and eliminate the ‘flat’ areas at either end of the histogram.

For even more control, you can try the curves adjustment. When you select this, you are presented with an x-y graph with a 45-degree diagonal line going through it and a histogram in the background.In this case, the x scale (left-right) represents the input tones from dark to light (before adjustments), and the y scale (up and down) represents the output tones (after adjustments). The diagonal line represents your adjustments. When you first open it and the line is straight (x=y), no adjustments have been made.

To tone a photo, you create an ‘anchor point’ on the diagonal line by clicking on it, and can then pull that point around on the graph to adjust the light. For example, if you want to brighten up a highlight, you would create an anchor point near the top of the curve and drag it upward. When you do so, the entire curve moves.

You can create multiple anchor points and move them individually. So, if you ONLY want to adjust the highlights without affecting the midtones or shadows, you create another anchor point below the first one and drag that part of the curve back down. If you have a difficult sunset photo, you can create multiple anchor points in the highlights to bring out the sky and colors, while changing anchor points in the shadows can bring out a dark foreground.

OFF COLOR

Symptom: The color is wrong

Fix: Color temperature, hues, saturation

How: Digital cameras are notoriously finicky with color. This is especially true for mixed light, like a carnival lit by fluorescents at dusk. The color temperature slider found on most editing software is a good start, but changes all your colors. For a finer control, you can also change each individual color with levels or curves.

Remember to think opposite when making color adjustments. Photo too green (fluorescent light)? Add red. Too much yellow (incandescent light)? Add some blue. Did your sunset come out dull and cold-looking? Add some yellow and red.

A great way to control individual colors is to use the hue / saturation control. On basic editing software, this may be a single slider that controls all colors at once. In programs like Photoshop, you can separate each color out, however, that can be useful for fixing magenta castes on faces (adjust the hue just for the reds to add some yellow), or fix yellowish castes when shooting indoors without a flash (desaturate the yellow, adjust the hue slightly to bring in more red).

AUTO TROUBLE

Symptom: Auto color and/or auto levels doesn’t work right

Fix: Choose your own highlight and shadow

How: ‘Auto levels’ and ‘auto color’ can be great time-savers when you are editing your photos, but these tools can be fooled by a light source in your photos (such as a flash reflection or stage lights) or a predominance of one particular color. To help these tools get it right, you can select the black and white points of a photo using an ‘eyedropper’ selector. Set the white point on something that is lit by the dominant light source in the photo (your flash, sunlight, or room light) and the black point on the deepest shadow you can find.

SPECIAL CASES

Symptom: Fireworks photos are dark and/or grainy

Fix: Noise reduction software, levels/curves

How: A good fireworks photo requires a camera capable of long exposures (5-15 seconds is usually good), a tripod or other stable surface, and a good sense of timing. My favorite fireworks photos also generally include some foreground element such as buildings or the crowd. If your fireworks pictures come out underexposed, you can adjust the highlights using levels or curves; just be sure to keep the shadows down or the photos will turn grey. If they are very dark, the photos may get very grainy once you adjust them. This can be corrected with noise reduction software on your camera, in your editing software, or with standalone programs such as Noise Ninja or Neat Image. If your lens was open too wide, the colors of the bursts may appear faded. Bumping up the color saturation may help, but this also increases noise.

Symptom: Blue caste on swimming pool / underwater photos

Fix: Levels, saturation

How: The blue caste created by swimming pool reflections and underwater photos not only changes the color, but robs your subjects of color saturation, as well. You can change the color using levels or curves (decrease the blue AND increase the red), then add some saturation. Using the auto exposure / color functions may work if there are both white and dark areas in the photo.

Symptom: Severe highlights and shadows under trees

Fix: Fill light, levels

How: Not many photographers think about using a flash in the middle of the day outside, but light filtering through trees and strong shadows on backlit subjects on beaches can challenge the best of digicams. The best solution is to use a flash whenever possible, or pose your subjects in areas where the light is even. A flash has to be pretty bright to compete with direct sunlight, so the photographer must stand close to the subject or have a pretty powerful flash for this to work at a distance. If this is not possible, you can adjust the midtones of the levels or curves to bring more detail to areas in shadow without sacrificing your highlights. A ‘fill light’ adjustment on some software achieves the same effect. The downside is a loss of contrast on the subjects.

Symptom: Overexposed beach photos

Fix: Levels, burn

How: Overexposure on digital cameras is one of the toughest fixes. If the photo is blown out and the detail just isn’t there, it is almost impossible to ‘re-create’ it with any program. You can bring whatever detail is available by bringing up the midtones toward the highlight range in levels. Some programs also have a ‘recovery’ adjustment that can be of limited help to emphasize details that are almost not there. If your program has dodging and burning tools, you can burn the midtones of overexposed areas. Why not burn the highlights? Because these have a tendency to come out looking like grey stains on your photo. In Photoshop, the ‘color burn’ and ‘darken’ brushes can also be used to fix the highlights.o be used to fix the highlights.