Before Easter I promised I’ll show you how to easily make a photo slideshow with music and effects.
Flash Slide Show Maker has very intuitive (and large) buttons; therefore, you can create a slideshow like the one above in very easy and fast way.
Here’s a sample slideshow you should first see. All pictures are done in the same day on rocky cliffs. As you may observe, the names of the pictures are given by the color of the plants, so the slideshow’s name is “Macro Colors”.

On a new project, you first add the photos: these will be shown in the slideshow in the same order you add them. If you want them in a different order, you just drag and drop the pictures. If you decide later that you want one (or more) pictures added, you can do so and then place them at the right place by drag and dropping. There is also a rotate option available, but no brightness, contrast, sharpness or other effects, so the images you use in the slideshow should be finalized in other photo adjustment software.

The next thing the program shows is a window with the slideshow options: here you determine the size and frame rate of the movie, on one side, and on the other side, the picture translation and the time the picture stays on the screen, as well as a background color. The interesting part is choosing a theme (57 choices available, including holidays scenes) and a dynamic “decoration” that will be played over the photos during the show. These are: camera, circle, hearts, line, jumping line, snow dropping, arrow bar, dropping leaves, gifts. Last, but not the last, add a piece of music from your hard drive or cd.

On the bottom, at the left, there is an “Advanced” button that I recommend pressing before going on. I do so because here I can set up that the slideshow will only start at the users click and will stop playing after one loop. I believe it is better so.

The last 3 steps are the simplest ones: just some saving options which for me work well as default. Then, once you press Exit, the program will ask you to save your work as a project file in case you will want to change some options about the slideshow later on.
That’s all folks!

Tags: photo slideshow, Flash Slide Show Maker, flash, slideshow maker, slideshow

Shooting against the light has always been a tricky thing in photography: if you choose to set a longer exposure or just to increase the exposure compensation in order to have plenty of light over the near subject, the background will appear burned (overexposed). The other way around, if you choose the right exposure for the background (the usual auto or program mode will do that), then your subject will appear too dark (underexposed).

The solutions I will present depends on the situation in which you will find yourself. Let’s look at them.

Solution 1 – Use Flash Even in a Sunny Day

If you are close enough to your subject, like for instance in portrait photography, using the flash even if it is a very sunny day will fix the problem in a very simple and effective way.

Solution 2 – D-light Function

But what if your subject is too far away (like far buildings) and you can’t or just don’t want to try a different angle with the sun behind you? Or what if it is night and a lamp illuminates the place? Will you be pleased with the overexposed lamp due to the long exposure needed in night conditions? Some new cameras (HP Photosmart R727, R827, R927, Nikon D80, Nikon Coolpix S50 and S50c, S200, S500, P5000, the Nikon L series, ) come with a function called D-Lighting (or adaptive lighting). This function will solve the problem automatically.

Solution 3 – Photoshop Manipulation

But what if your camera does not have this function? The salvation in this case is a Photoshop manipulation.
When shooting, make several frames with different exposures. In my example (with Canon PowerShot A520), the dark photo was made with: aperture F 3.2, exposure time 0.100 sec; and the light one with: aperture F 3.2, exposure time 0.400 sec. It’s much recommended to have a tripod and take the pictures using it because of 2 reasons: a brighter picture may require a longer exposure time (if you don’t want to deal with a lot of noise you will prefer a longer time instead of higher ISO and aperture) so you need to avoid camera shake (no matter how steady your hands are, night condition will always require a tripod), and the second reason: the frames should be taken from the same angle and viewpoint. Unfortunately, at the time I shot the images in this example, I did not have a tripod so the bright image is blured due to camera shake, but I somehow managed to take quite similar frames.
In a Photoshop document, place the 2 frames as different layers in such way that the darker one will be under the lighter one.
Choose the eraser with a size bigger than the lamp (or whatever your overexposed object is), low hardness and low opacity as shown in the figure. This will softly erase the area around the lamp in the lighter frame revealing the darker frame behind in such way that the 2 images will come together graduated, not suddenly. But the inner portion of the lamp from the darker image is not yet fully revealed. Change the eraser option like this: smaller size to fit only the interior of the lamp, full 100% opacity and 100% hardness.

Once you erase the red marked area, you will notice that even if the pictures come together softly, the colors are not the same. You can adjust the gradient by moving onto the dark image layer, in the menu “Image” -> “Adjustments” select Selective Color. Play around with the “neutrals” until you are satisfied with the color gradient around the lamp. When all this is done, go to the menu “Layer” and select “Merge Visible” (or press Shift + Ctrl+E). This step will merge the 2 images and now, if you are still not satisfied with this result, you can play around with blur tool and healing brush before saving the final image.

If you are interested in digital cameras with D-light function check them on Amazon. They are quite amazing and useful.

- HP PhotoSmart R727
– HP Photosmart R827
– HP Photosmart R927
– Nikon D80 Kit
– Nikon Coolpix with Vibration Reduction Zoom
– Nikon Coolpix S50c 7 is Wifi Capable
– Nikon Coolpix S200
– Nikon Coolpix S500, Vibration Reduction Zoom
– Nikon Coolpix P5000, Vibration Reduction Zoom
– Nikon Coolpix from 74$

When you go out shooting, be sure to take one of your Izod shirts, my favorite brand.

Tags: D-Lighting, Adaptative Lighting, Photoshop, Exposure Correction, Shooting Against the Light

Neat Image is a noise reduction plug-in (plugin for Photoshop) and standalone application designed to reduce visible noise and grain in photographic images. Neat Image is indispensable in low-light (indoors, night, astro) and high-speed (sport, action) photography.
Neat Image has 4 tabs right under the menu: Image Imput, Device Noise Profile, Noise Filter Settings, Output.

First thing you should do is to open an input image (button is in the first tab). Here we see Neat Image supports TIFF, JPEG and BMP.

On the second tab you choose an area of the picture (make sure it’s an uniform area) and create a noise profile: Auto Profiler will automacally find, select and analyze a featureless image area that contains only noise and no important details. After that, a new noise profile is ready and the input image can be processed.

Third tab, the noise settings, is the most important part:
Noise Filter Settings:
Adjusts estimations of noise levels in luminance and chrominance channels (relative to noise profile)
- positive values -> more image elements are considered noise
- negative values -> fewer image elements are considered noise
Noise Reduction Amount:
The bigger the precent, the more amount of noise is reduced.
Sharpening Amount:
Adjusts amount of sharpening applied to luminance channel
- high values -> more sharpening
- low values -> less sharpening

Neat Image will automatically select an area in the image and prepare a preview in the selection, but, you can manually select what you want also.

Finally, the last tab has two buttons: Apply and Save.
First apply the changes made before if you are pleased with the preview results, then save the output image and you’re done!

Note: for this experiment, i used an ISO 400 image taken with Canon Powershot A520 in low-light.

Some images contain both noisy and clean areas and it may be preferable to filter only noisy areas. This can be manually done by combining two images – original and filtered one – in an image editor. For example, the following steps can be followed:

1. Filter an input image in Neat Image (so that noisy areas are well cleaned) and save the output image to a new file;
2. Open this new file in an image editor;
3. Place the filtered image in a new layer on top of the original image;
4. Adjust the transparency of the new layer so that noisy areas would look fine;
5. Select and delete the areas of the new layer where filtration is not necessary or excessive (you may want to use the eraser tool with adjustable transparency and shape).

To read more about Neat Image (considered to be the best noise reduction software) and download it, click here.

Tags: noise reduction, neat image, noise, noise profile

Now that you know what RAW is, let’s see some adjustments over a .nef file.
Picasa is a free software from Google which I found useful and helpful in many photographic situations, but when it comes to RAW editing, it’s very basic. If you take a look at the first image down here, you’ll see that raw editing is split into 3 categories: Basic Fixes, Tuning and Effects. Basic Fixes solves most of the editing necessities but is not flexible as Adobe Photoshop contrast, brightness, and curves: practically you only got Auto Contrast and Auto Color. Croping is useful and nicely done and Straighten is a function I really admire Google for the idea: it saves a lot of time compared to manually straighten that usually requires a lot of steps.

Basic:


Tuning goes deeper into the lighting adjustments, conferring the possibility to darken the shadows, lighten the highlights and adding overall atmospheric light to the RAW picture. While I consider this still pretty basic fixing, choosing the neutral color and color temperature is a little bit more than that. Picasa did a fine job with the colors, and, if you still think about improvements, in the Effects menu you got Saturation, Warmify, and Glow for further color adjustments. Sharpen, Film Grain and Blur are also present but, again, in a much more inflexible and basic form than Adobe Photoshop.

Advanced:


Between B&W and Filtered B&W I prefer filtered. Sepia and Duotone (here called Tint) are also present in the menu. By the way, I like very much the preview thumbs of the menu that helps deciding what effect to chose. Graduated Tint was a pleasure surprise from Google. For this kind of picture, like the one in my example: where a good part of it is the sky, this effect really works amazing – it gives a darker tint to the sky but no dark tint over the buildings.

Results:

Tags: raw, picasa, raw adjustments, picasa raw editing, raw editing

If understanding RAW is still difficult after what I said before, take a look at the following images from photo.net.




The 3 most known RAW formats are CRW, CR2, NEF, and DNG. A few words on them:

The Canon RAW (CRW, CR2) File Format
Canon uses two different RAW formats, and some camera models produce CR2 instead of CRW files and other models can use bouth. The Canon CRW file format is type of RAW file format and It has a structure that is fundamentally similar to TIFF. CRW files are written in Camera Image File Format (CIFF).
For extremely detailed informations about the structure of a CRW see this article.

The Nikon RAW (NEF) File Format
Nikon RAW Format is known as Nikon Electronic Format (.NEF). Nikon offer their pro SLRs with PictureProject software that includes limited control over the RAW file conversion process, and then offer the more feature-rich Nikon Capture conversion software for an added cost. Nikon’s policy was to encrypt the white balance data in order to sell their software, so with other available programs the management of .nef files is limited. While Nikon Capture does indeed offer excellent capabilities for people to manipulate images saved in NEF formats, many photographers prefer Adobe Photoshop and from now on Adobe Lightroom.

The Adobe RAW (DNG) File Format
Adobe’s Digital NeGative format, indicated as .dng, is an open standard file format available to all, without secrecy, seeking to become the next overall universal format. A quote from OpenRaw: DNG is not an open standard in that it does not document all the essential information contained in current RAW format files like NEF and CR2. In many ways, DNG can be viewed as simply yet another RAW format with undocumented information – except that DNG has the added risk that information can be lost during conversion to/from DNG and other RAW formats.

Tags: raw, raw format, raw files, raw image, raw conversion, digital raw, raw formats, raw file, iphoto, picasa, microsoft digital image, openraw, dng, nef, cr2, crw

RAW images contain unprocessed image data straight from the camera’s image sensor. Since the data isn’t processed on the camera you must do it yourself on your computer in order to get it into more usable formats like TIFF or JPEG.
.raf (Fuji)
.crw .cr2 (Canon)
.kdc .dcr (Kodak)
.mrw (Minolta)
.nef (Nikon)
.orf (Olympus)
.dng (Adobe)
.ptx .pef (Pentax)
.arw (Sony)
.x3f (Sigma)

Cameras that support raw files typically come with proprietary software for conversion of their raw format to TIFF or JPEG.

However, Canon decided not to add support for their D30 DSLR in their latest release of their Digital Photo Professional software, and Nikon removed features of their own RAW converter Nikon Capture and added the encryption of features in Nikon’s D2x digital camera RAW format (NEF). As a response to this, on March 10th, 2005, OpenRAW (a Working Group of photographers and other people interested in advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files), coordinated by Juergen Specht, has been created.

Also, Microsoft’s Digital Image 2006 is able to recognize and organize RAW image formats such as .crw, .cr2, .tif, and .nef, which are file formats produced by Canon and Nikon. Picasa, a free image editing and cataloguing program from Google, can read and display many RAW formats, but like iPhoto (the Apple release), Picasa provides only limited tools for processing the data in a RAW file.

There is no single RAW format: different manufacturers use their own proprietary formats, which are collectively known as RAW format. Raw files contain pixel data from the image sensor usually at 12 or 14 bits per individual sensor bucket. These pixels are a mosaic of either red, blue or green values. o retrieve an image from a RAW file this mosaic must be converted into an RGB image (Demosaicing). RAW Data is preserving the maximum amount of original image data and offers greater creative control with digital images.

The contents of RAW files are often considered to be of ‘higher quality‘ than the RGB converted results, because you have finer control over the white balance, brightness, contrast, colours and saturation.

Note: RAW files are sometimes referred to as CCD-RAW

Tags: raw, raw format, raw files, raw image, raw conversion, digital raw, raw formats, raw file, iphoto, picasa, microsoft digital image, openraw