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Photo Viewing | Photo Editing | Photo Tips | Panoramas |

Latest news

26 Aug 2008: Paint.NET v3.36 is released as a maintenance release also with some minor improvements.

18 Apr 2007: New version 2.03.1 of Lightbox JS which fixes a few bugs and some minor improvements.

Links:

• Paint.NET
• Lightbox JS

Photo Editing

Once you have a digital camera, and you have downloaded the images to your PC, you will find it difficult to resist the temptation to edit your photos in some way. Even if you use film and have prints or negatives you may well wish to scan them in to your PC for viewing, cataloguing and editing.

Most editors will also have viewing facilities, but I am a firm believer in specialisation so you should look at the 'Photo Viewing' section for these. I am also a little bit reluctant to edit my photos too far away from the original. I will often crop, and sometimes change lighting and contrast, saturation and gradient fill when merging images. However, I am less keen on adding or subtracting objects from photos - unless of course it is for a non-serious purpose. I don't like trying to enhance images by, for example, changing grey sky to blue sky. Using editors to restore a photo to its original condition is for me a very legitimate use of these tools.

Paint.NET

There is a new web site for Paint.NET and here you can download the latest 3.x version. There are some quite interesting claims for this software with some users even claiming that it can replace Photoshop. Whether or not this is true it is certainly very intuitive and a lot easier to use than some of its grown up rivals. There is an active forum which provides additional plugins and tutorials. The release of the version 3 gave us a load of new features but most importantly a new user interface. Version 3.2 promises HD Photo support, presets for holding adjustments and improvements to support plugin development. It will also make use of NET Framework 3.0 and although I have found the performance of Paint.NET to be very good I suspect best usage will be obtained with a powerful quad processor. This must be one of the best open source developments around and I find that I am using this more and more for everyday tasks.

Creating PNG's

If you are using the images created for publishing on the Net then it is very easy to save in .PNG format and what's more PDN will choose the lowest bit depth to minimise the size of file without loss of quality.

Text Tool

I am not a great fan of the text tool which uses a nub for positioning. The problem I find is when I want to select individual pieces of text, move them around the screen and edit, none of these features seem to be supported. Perhaps I'm missing something but in the meantime I find the text tool within Inkscape is much more intuitive. So if I am playing around with text that I want to publish on the web (for example if a client wishes to use a special font not supported by the browsers) I tend to use Inkscape. It seems to me that the problem is fundamental and highlights the difference between a raster imaging application such as PDN and the vector graphics based approach of Inkscape.

Creating Watermarks

If you are in the habit of publishing photos on the web you may wish to add a watermark to your photo. This is very easily achieved in Paint.NET by creating a new layer adding some text and then adjusting the opacity of the new layer. You can then save the combined image complete with watermark and safeguard your best photos from being pirated.

Plugins

If you go to the Paint.Net website and look in the forums you will find some truly interesting plugins which are actually .dll files that are enabled by just copying them into the "Effects" folder.

Shape3D

This is an awesome plugin for creating 3D, textured, shaded, anti-aliased objects. You will just have to download it and see for yourself. It looks like the future of the desktop is 3D.

Codelab

There is also a plugin called Codelab, which allows you to run C# code in realtime and hence prototype graphics on the fly. There are several sample code files included which can be run and edited in the small editor, or you can even create a new DLL plugin.

Reduce Noise

I find this very useful particularly when bringing older photos back to life. Unlike a lot of the plugins that claim to clean up photos this one really works very well. Of course it can't do magic by making a bad photo into a good photo, but I have found that it does noticeably improve the definition for certain photos. This is considered to be such a useful plugin that it is now included in the release as from version 3.22.

Photoshop

If you are at all interested in serious editing then Photoshop is a must have.

The Gimp

This is open source and free to use, but it does have some drawbacks rooted in its Unix origins. For example you have to install GTK software in order to run it under Windows XP. I tried this very briefly and gave up after a short period because I found the learning curve too high. Maybe if I had been brought up on this software I would probably be singing its praises. However, although it seemed to have an extraordinary number of features, none of these seemed particularly intuitive. Even when cropping an image, there seemed to be several options each of which required looking at the manual.

RAW Format

Some cameras allow the user to save the image in what is known as RAW format, as opposed to JPEG format. If you use the manual settings on a Canon camera, then you will produce a RAW file. Canon call this the creative zone as opposed to the basic zone, because it is putting some of the processing decsions back into the hands of the photographer just like the old days of developing in a darkroom. RAW format saves the image as a digital representation of the brightness of each pixel, together with a header recording all the settings of the camera, such as colour temperature, white balance, sharpness, contrast and saturation. Using RAW image mode enables you to maintain a little more control of the process since you can now apply some basic fixes to the image prior to converting to JPEG, which is a lossy format. So you can change the digital exposure compensation for under/over exposure, set the white balance, adjust the colour saturation, contrast and sharpness. Most times the Canon software works well, although on occasions I have found the Picasa editing tools to be more useful with its Fill Light function. The decision to use RAW format generally depends on how much effort you are prepared to put into post processing your images. Note that when you use JPEG mode, you are actually still shooting in RAW mode, except now the camera automatically converts and saves this RAW image in JPEG format. If you shoot in JPEG mode all the decision making is done for you and notwithstanding this generally you will get very acceptable results for normal snapshot photos. However, there are probably occasions where you want the ability to play around with the result, now or in the future, to obtain that little bit of extra quality, and here you would probably opt for RAW format. One point to note is that RAW format takes a lot of space both on your memory card (less images) and is not very useful for sending over the internet.

Scanning in Images

Before the days of digital cameras there were those strange, now obsolete, film cameras which needed processing to provide negatives/slides and prints. Over the years I have accumulated vast quantities of all of these which are hanging around in cupboards, albums and boxes. Some of these have not seen the light of day for many years until I bought a scanner. This allowed me to capture some of my more treasured pictures in digital format, where I could then use all the tools of Photoshop and other editors to bring them back to life. One would suppose, when scanning images, that the negative being the primary source, would provide the best results. However, I have found the results very poor, with far superior results obtained by scanning in a print or slide. I have come to the conclusion that my scanner (Canoscan 800F) is just not capable of producing a sufficiently high quality image, although I understand that some of the more recent scanners (since about 2005) do produce excellent results from negatives. In fact I have come to the conclusion that using any flatbed scanner for negatives is a total waste of time. If you can afford it go for something like a Nikon Coolscan Film Scanner. Using the flatbed scanner I normally scan a 6" x 4" print with an output resolution of 600 dpi. I then do any necessary repairs - see below and then reduce the image size to 2048 pixels for the longest length. On the other hand I have found that slides do scan in quite well in comparison even though they use the same projection lamp and are of the same dimensions - so this seems a bit strange. In fact for slides and normal 6 x 4 inch prints the quality does not seem that far removed from only a few years ago when digital cameras had maximum resultions of about 2 megapixels. So the big differences you will notice is imperfection in the processing such as streaks, blobs and chemical degradation. The older the film the more likely you are to see these effects. I also found that it was difficult to obtain similar colour balance to the printed colour photo when scanning in negatives.

Repairing Scanned Images

By selecting an adjacent area that is the same colour and texture as the bad area you can use the clone stamp in Photoshop to overwrite this. However, be warned that this is a very tedious process and requires a lot of expertise if the bad area is quite large. However, at the end of it you will have a digital photo that you can bring back to life by using some of the editing tools found in Picasa (for example) that you can send to friends and family recording a bygone age. One of the advances of digital photography is the avoidance of scanning and corrections for chemical imperfections.

Cropping

I have tried several tools to crop images and probably the easiest to use is the one bundled with ZoomBrowser. Here you can select a top left hand corner and then specify dimensions for the image. Enter Edit mode and then select edit/trim. Photoshop does a reasonable job as well, except it is a little more difficult to control the dimensions of the resulting image. Picasa does the job and even allows you to select an image size, and if you want to avoid image loss the best way is to use Export Picture to File. Similarly Faststone has a very good crop tool which is claimed to be lossless when you save to file.

Changing the Pixel Dimensions

Often you find that you have an image that you want to reduce the size without suffering any loss of quality. In Photoshop you just need to go to Image/Image Size and select either the desired width or height pixels. This is often required where you want to display images on the web where there is often a limit of 1mb on upload size. In FuturixImager you can select Edit/ Filters /Resize and you can choose a number of methods (including Bell) to re-size. With Picasa you use the File / Export picture to folder which allows you to resize the image.

Dealing with Camera Shake

There is software around which claim to reduce the impact of camera shake. One such product I tried is Focus Magic, which had reasonably good reviews. It has two modes; one to correct movement shake and another to correct out of focus. I tried it on a couple of photos without much success, although there are some reviews that I have read, rating this quite highly. I will try to check some other products and compare results again, although I have to say it would be better to avoid camera shake / out of focus in the first place.