Mike DelGaudio

SF Buckaroo from Flickr describes this great technique in Flickr to give your images a highly stylized effect, and popping out the subject of your image.

You’ll need to have Picasa, the photo editing software from Google.

Here is kind of a mundane image of a woman walking on the beach:

But, with a few changes to the sliders in the Tuning Tab

Essentially, all you need to do is crank up each of the three sliders for Fill Light, Highlight and Shadow, and then back each off a little until the subject is strong and the rest of the image is pretty much white.

You get:

And this works for all sorts of images. The only requirement I have found is that the subject has to be a bit darker than the background. Think overexposed skies and snowy days.

Give it a try!

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, technique. Flickr, SFBuckaroo[/tags]

Picasa has an underused feature in it that allows you to simulate a multiple exposure. We’ve covered how to do it before in this post.
In order to complete this tutorial you’ll need Picasa the photo editing and management software from Google.

The typical multi-exposure effect in Picasa simply overlays two (or more ) selected pictures together. However, I find that the resulting image is often a little too busy, unless you take some additional steps.

Lets use an example. I recently went to New Orleans and took some pictures of St Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. I wanted to illustrate the beauty of the church, both inside and out. I thought a multi-exposure would be perfect here.

Here is the outside shot I wanted to use:

And this is the inside shot I wanted:

If I just mix the two together using Multi-Exposure (for how to do this read my tutorial)

I get a result that is a little busy and not really what I want. Like this:

We can do better.

Here is what I wanted to fix:

- chandelier, lettering and stained glass kind of obscure the façade of the church – one of the things I’m trying to highlight.
- the clouds in the sky in the background on the left cut into the lettering I do want to show.

We can fix this using Soft Focus and Focal Black and White as follows:

On the inside image of the statue, first I applied strong soft focus to the parts of the image I want to de-emphasize:

Then, I added Focal B&W to the same area so the yellow cast on the walls don’t affect the color of the façade.

Next, I went to the outside image and also applied soft focus:

Now I have two images that each have areas de-emphasized where the subject of the other image will appear.
So, NOW we can do the multi-exposure. Which gives us this:

Close, but the combination of the images causes the whole thing to be a bit dim for me. Lets see what Picasa can do. I click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” effect, which corrects the exposure histogram and gives us our final image:

You can also see the high resolution version.

You can see all the images in higher resolution by visiting my Picasa Web Album:

Improving Multi Exposures

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, Photo Editing, Technique, Multi-Exposures[/tags]

Picasa, the photo editing software from Google has a little-known feature that allows your to create a multiple exposure effect using 2 or more photos. If you don’t have Picasa, you should

Multiple exposure has a long creative history in film cameras. On a film camera you expose the same frame more than one time — in other words, take a picture, then take another without advancing the film.

In the digital world, most cameras don’t allow for multiple exposures inside the camera. You need to put them together outside the camera, on your computer.

Luckily, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or other software in order to explore this creative way of mixing photos. Let’s see how to create a Picasa Multi-Exposure

Here is a sample multi-exposure:

Here are the two files that were mixed together into one image:

Lets see how we can get this effect in Picasa photo-editing software.

First, select two or more photos from your Picasa Photo Library. Hold down the CRTL key to select more than one photo.

Then, click the “Create” menu, and select “Picture Collage”

The Make Collage Window will appear. From the “Type” pull down list, select “Multi Exposure”

In the area above the Type list, you’ll see a preview of the image you are creating. If you are satisfied, click “Create” and Picasa will create the image, and add it to your library.

Depending on how many images you have selected to superimpose on each other it may take a few minutes to create.

Once the image has been created you may need to adjust the Brightness and Contrast of the image. See my Tutorial for correcting images using the Histogram for more.

Here is the final image as a result of Picasa’s Multi-Exposure:

See how other people are using this effect in the Picasa Multi-Exposure Group on Flickr.

Pretty cool, huh? If you liked this tutorial or found it helpful, please share it with others by adding it to your favorite social bookmarking software, or digging it.

Picasa is a great tool to make sure your photos are just right for Ebay Auctions.
If you don’t have Picasa,

The easiest way I know how to resize images quickly is to use the
Export feature. Here’s How:

Select each picture you want to include in your auction and click the
“Hold” button at the bottom to keep those pictures in the “tray” area
in the lower right.

Then Click “Export” in the lower left (or File | Export Pictures to
Folder”)

The ‘Export to Folders” window will appear. In this window you can
select where you want the adjusted images to go, and you can slide the
“Image Size options” slider to a resolution that works for Ebay.
Generally images smaller than 640 on the longest side will get you to
image sizes that are “Ebay friendly.”

Picasa offers a variety of ways to create good black and white images from a color image. Some digital cameras only take color images (my Nikon D70 comes to mind), others take black and whites, but you can’t get filters onto most point and shoots.

So, if you want to create nice back and white photos your answer is to make a color image black and white in “post processing” – Picasa to the rescue.

For this tutorial you will need Picasa from Google.. Good news: it’s free!

Lets use this image as our original to see how it looks in different back and white renderings.

Choose a picture from your Picasa library, and go to the photo detail view by double clicking the image. Then click the “Effects” Tab.

1. Plain old B&W
Picasa offers an out-of the box Black and white mode. From the full color iamge Click the “B&W” effect.

2. Filtered B&W
Picasa can simulate the effect of adding a colored lens filter to the camera as the picture was taken. Filters allow you to allow/prevent certain colors from reaching the film. Picasa shows a number of standard filters, and allows you to custom select a filter from a wide range of tones. From the full color image select “Filtered B&W” then click “Pick a color” And select one of the swatches from the top, or from the color chart that appears.

For example, you can simulate the effect of adding a Green Filter to the Camera lens

Generally speaking, a Green filter is good to enhance detail in landscape / nature pictures. When used in portraits, you’ll find that a green filter accentuates freckles and skin blemishes, making them stand out. Blue irises look very bright and detailed.

You can simulate adding a Red filter to the lens:

Red filters do a great job of hiding skin blemishes and give skin a very even tone. Maybe too even, as red filters can give almost a ghostly appearance. Red filters also make the irises on blue eyed people nearly black.

Here is an example of a blue filter. It is similar to a green filter, but even less flattering to skin tones.

Here is an example of a blue filter applied. Notice that the eyes are bright, but can be very unforgiving to skin, and can be used if you really want to accentuate weathering or skin texture.

On the other hand, a Yellow filter is very flattering to skin and not as ghostly as a red filter. If you want to get good, smooth skin tones that the subject will be happy with, choose a filter in the yellow to orange range.

There are a whole range of tones you can use as filters, even more than are found in ACTUAL lens filters. Try exploring around with the eye dropper over the “pick a color” color chart.

3. Focal black and white, or a “Cutout”

Picasa allows you to select just a portion of your image to remain in full color. Sometimes this is referred to a “Cutout” in photoshop terms. In this case, we can choose a circular cutout, with a hard-or soft (called a feathered” edge.)

From your full color image, select “Focal B&W” then click on the image to move the crosshairs to the location you want to remain in color. Then adjust the size and sharpness slider to obtain the desired effect.

The Focal B&W filter will help turn your attention to a specific portion of your image – the part that is in color.

4. Using White tint.

You can also get a black and white image using the “Tint” effect. Click “Tint” then “Pick a Color” then select the white swatch (top row, fifth from the left.)

Personally I think this is the best effect and offers higher contrast from the other black and white images. Notice that tinting with white makes skin tones brighter – closer to white without overbrightening. Some people prefer a more contrasty image, especially in black and white images. Since your typical photo taken in auto mode won’t create a high contrast image, here is how you can boost the effect in Picasa.

With the Full color image selected, click the “Tuning“ tab. And bring up the Histogram by clicking the little “propellerhead” button

Then drag the Highlights and Shadows button to the right until the brights are bright and the darks are dark without letting detail fall of either end of the histogram.
(See my “Correcting Exposure by using a Histogram” tutorial for more detail on this)

Notice how this image is adjusted and has high tonal separation The darks are dark, but there are bright highlights in the cheeks and forehead.

Now, return to the “Effects” tab and Choose “Tint” with the white swatch selected.

Notice how this really separates the faces from the background. A lot more so than the straight back and white filter. This is really good for landscapes and bringing out architectural details on intricate buildings.

Since most buildings are just flat gray cement, the default B&W filter will give uninteresting images, but by increasing the difference between highlight and shadow you can really bring out the detail and make an image pop.

5. Desaturation

From the full color image, click the “Saturation” effect and slide the slider all the way to the left.

Desaturation is another way to get the same effect as the plan b&w filter. Often you’ll see Photoshop tutorials that tell you to desaturate a picture rather than to convert to gray scale so that you can retain the color information, just not show it.

Bonus

While that on it’s own is useful it brings us to the “bonus”. And that’s to create an “Almost Back and White” image.

You can stop just short of full back and white and get a nice effect with partial desaturation. Often this effect will make a photo seem old, and are sometimes described as “sentimental”.

I hope you have found this tutorial helpful. If you did, please let others know by digging it, or bookmarking in del.icio.us, won’t you? I would also love to hear your feedback in the comments.

For basic, quick photo editing you can’t beat Picasa, Google’s Photo software.

Many times, you may find your images underexposed, often as the result of weak batteries in your flash, or the flash simply not firing. Don’t fret. Picasa can usually salvage an underexposed image, if you pay attention the the histogram.

If you don’t have Picasa you should . It’s free and really worth it.

To see the histogram of your image, go to the photo detail view of a picture (by double clicking an image in the Library.) Then click the little propeller in the lower right

A histogram is a simple chart that shows you the quantity of each color in your photograph, with darks on the left and lights on the right. An underexposed image will have a histogram that us predominantly loaded up on the left:

whereas an over exposed image will be loaded up on the right.

And a picture that has good exposure generally has it’s histogram in the center:

Now, this is not a hard and fast rule, but for general purposes it holds true.

So, how do we correct exposure? First, you need to know that if a picture is really over exposed, there will be little that you can do. Once an area has gone all the way overexposed to white, you can’t get the details that were there back. But, underexposed? That we can work with.

Once you are in the photo detail view, click the Tuning tab on the left. There you will see four sliders: Fill light, highlights, shadows, and color temperature. For this tutorial we won’t need the Color Temperature slider.

Start by sliding the fill light slider to the right until the histogram stretches about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way across the available are in the graph. Then switch down to the Highlights slider and slide that to the right until the histogram goes from 3/4 of the way across to all the way across. Look at the image as you go, if it gets to bright or grainy, back off a bit until it looks better. Now, I like to slide the shadows slider just a bit to the right to deepend some of the shadow areas lightened by the fill light. Make sure the histogram does not bleed too far off either end of the histogram, it should be a nice distribution across the whole chart.

Here is a video to demonstrate on an underexposed picture.

I learned all about Histograms from Luminous landscape. It’s techie, but a worthwhile read. If you want the real in-depth goods on histograms, read it.

I hope you find this tutorial helpful, and if you have any tips or tricks regarding correcting exposure, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

As I mentioned in Part 1, I am currently digitizing all my family’s photo albums. This is to try and stop the deterioration process, and so that each of my siblings can have ca copy of the albums. In Part 1 we covered how to get the full page scans into Google’s Photo Software Picasa, and eased our repetition a bit using a macro recorded with AutoHotKey. Now that we have full pages of albums scanned, we need to separate each of the photos into individual shots.

To complete this you should

In Picasa, that would involve the following steps in the individual photo screen

1. Click Crop
2. Click and Drag the outline of the individual crop
3. Apply the crop
4. File, Save A Copy
5. Undo the Crop.
6. Repeat.

Many of those steps can be easily automated. Pretty much everything but the click and drag portion. Let’s see how. Step 1: Create the Macro. To make this easier, we are going to record our macro beginning at step 3, then record all the way back around to step 1, make sense?

Here is a little video to show what I mean :

1. Open AutoScriptWriter
2. Set up Picasa by getting to the individual photo screen, clicking crop, then clicking and dragging around one of the photos.
3. Click Record on Auto Script Writer.
4. Click “Apply” on the Picasa crop function.
5. When the cropped photo appears in the photo screen, click File then Save A copy. This automatically makes a copy of the cropped area and saves it to a new file in the same directory.
6. Click “Undo Crop” to get the full album page back.
7. Click the “Recrop” button to get you back the crop screen ready to click and drag the next photo.
8. Click “Stop” on AutoScriptWriter.

Step 2: Associate with a Key Combination. Once you have recorded the macro, associate your macro to a particular key stroke. I use Ctrl+Alt+\ for mine (so that I can keep pne hand on the mouse, and one hand ready to crop.)

1. In the Auto Script Writer window, where you see the steps the script recorded, place your cursor on the the First line, and hist enter to create a new blank line.
2. On this new line, type “^!\::” (without the quotes). This is the syntax to associate with a keystroke. Here the ^ is for Ctrl, and ! is for Alt, \ is for the \ key, and :: indicates the end of the sequence.
3. Save the Script in a memorable place (I have created a folder in my Documents called “My Hot Keys”) and save it with a memorable name like “Picasa Crop”

Now whenever you are cropping photo albums, go to this folder, and double click the script to load in the the system tray. Step 3: Start Cropping The first photo you want to crop, you will need to start by clicking “crop” then clicking and dragging. (Remember our macro starts with clicking “Apply”, right?) Then press Ctrl+Alt+\ To kick off the macro. Watch in stunned satisfaction as AutoHotKey performs it’s miracle, and sets you up to click and drag the next photo.

technorati tags:picasa, photo, autohotkey, automation, archive, macro, squelly

I’m in the process of digitizing my family’s photo albums, and since I really hate repetitive processes, I was looking for a way that I could make the process go a little faster.

I also prefer using Google’s Photo Software known as “Picasa” as my photo management software. It has just the right combination of power and ease of use that allow me to fix up most pictures quickly. Reserving the more time consuming photoshop for the tougher retouching / color correcting jobs.

Since scanning photo albums is such a time-consuming and repetitive task, I used AutoHotKey to record many of the mouse clicks and keystrokes needed to perform the scan. In this post we’ll concentrate on getting the full-page scans into the computer, in part 2 we’ll look at how to get the full pages into individual pictures.

Best of all both Picasa and Autohotkey are free (as in beer)!

You’ll also need a flatbed scanner. You could probably use a camera an tripod to photograph that pages, but then you’ll just need to go to Part 2.

I’ll assume you have downloaded and installed Picasa, Autohot key, attached your scanner, installed it’s drivers and have confirmed you can actually scan with it.

Step 1: Record your Autohotkey Macro.

1. Open Picasa, select File > Import From.
2. Open AutoScriptWriter from your Start menu
3. Click the “Record” button in Auto Script writer.
4. Return to picasa and scan the picture.

Here is a little video of the process:

In my script, I prefer to click the close button on my scanner software
window, which returns to Picasa. You may prefer to include that step in
your recorded macro. Up to you. YMMV.

Step 2: Associate with a Key Combination.
Once you have recorded the macro, associate your macro to a particular key stroke. I use Ctrl+Alt+S for mine.

1. In the Auto Script Writer window, where you see the steps the script recorded, place your cursor on the the First line, and hist enter to create a new blank line.
2. On this new line, type “^!s::” (without the quotes). This is the syntax to associate with a keystroke. Here the ^ is for Ctrl, and ! is for Alt, S is for the S key, and :: indicates the end of the sequence.
3. Save the Script in a memorable place (I have created a folder in my Documents called “My Hot Keys”) and save it with a memorable name like “Scan”

Now whenever you are scanning photo albums, go to this folder, and double click the script to load in the the system tray.

Step 3: Start Scanning.

1. Place your photo album on the scanner bed, and press “Ctrl+Alt+S” and watch in amazement as AutoHotKey clicks all the right buttons.
2. Once the scan is complete click “Import All” in Picasa (again, you could have this as part of your recorded script if you want. )
3. In the “Finish importing” window that appears, select a photo to drop the scan.

Repeat Step three until the photo album has been completely scanned. You can right click the Autohotkey icon in your tray and close down the macro if you are finished your scanning duties for the day.

In the next part, we’ll look at how to separate all the photos on the scanned album page into individual photos.

I always back up the scanned photos right away, too. I have no interest in rescanning the albums. See my post on how to do this with Picasa.

In older photo albums you may find that the images are fading. Sometimes this is due to exposure to direct sunlight over time, or perhaps acid found in the pages, plastics or glues that hold the photo in place.As a result you may end up with a yellow or red cast over the image.

If you have the expertise and the expensive software you can correct this degradation with photoshop, but before you go dropping several hundred dollars, you may be able to fix it for free.

You can use Picasa to correct for some of this color loss.

For this tutorial I will assume you have the free Picasa software.
Let’s take for example, this photo which as a decidedly red cast as a result of aging. This photo was taken in the early sixties and this kind of color loss is common.

Once you have scanned the picture into the Picasa library, open it in the photo detail view by double clicking it.

First, lets see if we can tone down the red cast by using the natural color picker. Click the Tuning tab, then the eyedropper.

With the eyedropper selected, click a point in the picture that should be white. In the example picture I selected a point on the
handrail. If there are no white areas, try picking a bright spot on a face in the picture, like a cheek or forehead.

In this case, Picasa offsets the red cast with a decidedly greenish cast. It’s a start, at least.

Next, you will want to Saturate the picture, just a touch, since in the next step we will be de-saturating the image. Click “Effects” then “Saturate”, and slide the slider just a bit to the left of center. If the color start to “tip over” and become over saturated, then back the slider off until they look rich, but not overdone.

Above is a little saturation, below is too much saturation, see how the colors have “tipped over” and look funny?

Next, we can use the Tint feature to offset the green cast. Click the “Effects” tab, the click Tint. Then, click the “Pick a color” box, then click the white swatch (this is on the top row, fifth from the left).You now have a black and white photo. Slide the “color Preservation” tab to the right until you have restored most of the color. I usually slide 90 percent or more to the right, since the tint desaturates the image a fair amount anyway.

You may be done at this point, or you can apply a whit tint AGAIN if you like. If there is still a slight cast to the image, repeat the white tint until you have the image where you want it.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the original and the corrected version. Much better, wouldn’t you
say?

In future posts we’ll explore correcting for other color casts. I hope you found this tutorial helpful. Please consider digging this article if you liked it. Your comments are appreciated.