Reveal Hidden Details in your Photos

by Dave Johnson

What's hiding in your shadows? That's kind of a creepy question, but one you might occasionally ask yourself--especially when you look at your digital photos. Often, in order to properly expose one part of your picture, your camera throws another part of the scene into deep shadow. There might be a lot of detail hiding in those shadows, if only you knew how to unlock it.

Taking an external shot of a window in daylight is always a problem, especially if you're trying to show what your eye can naturally see through the window. In our photo example, we see a small detail from a picture of the back of my house. Since the inside of the house is a lot darker than the outside (in the middle of the day, at least), I ended up with dark, shadowy window panes that reveal almost nothing about what's inside.

Using the Histogram Adjustment tool in Jasc Paint Shop Pro, though, I was able to unmask the details and see a lot more. You can too, and find out what's hiding my picture.

Select the Window Panes

If you want to play along with our sample picture, save it to your PC and load it into an image editor. I'll use Paint Shop Pro.

Our first order of business is to select the window panes, because we want to brighten just the windows, not the rest of the door frame. For this task, choose the Magic Wand tool, which resides in the fifth cubby from the top in the toolbar on the left side of the screen.

The Magic Wand lets us select part of the picture not by searching for edges, but instead by grabbing pixels of similar color. The wand uses a setting called Tolerance to know how similar the colors need to be to get selected: a low tolerance requires colors to be very similar, while a high tolerance selects a lot of dissimilar colors at once. For this picture, I found a tolerance level of 55 to be almost perfect. You can adjust the Tolerance setting in the Tool Options palette which is usually docked to the top of the screen. (If you don't see it, choose View, Palettes, Tool Options to toggle it on.)

Next, while holding down Shift, click in each window pane. The Shift key lets you make multiple selections; after 20 clicks, you should have all the panes in the door selected. (Note that our approach leaves the lamp shades unselected--a handy turn of events, as we don't need to lighten them.)

Bring Out the Details

Finally, we're ready to see what's hiding indoors. Choose Adjust, Brightness and Contrast, Histogram Adjustment. This tool displays a histogram, which represents the brightness of the pixels in the selected part of the image. (You may need to zoom in or out a little using the zoom controls on the left to get a similar view in the dialog box.)

The graph is pressed against the left side of the screen, which means most pixels are dark, or underexposed. To fix that, we'll drag the white point arrow (the white triangle labeled "High") to the left. This redistributes the brightness in the picture, brightening it. As you do so, Paint Shop Pro displays a new graph that represents the adjusted pixel brightness. When that graph just starts to meet the right side, that's about right.

When you click OK to accept these changes, you should see all sorts of things that were previously invisible: reflections from the backyard, someone at a table, and even a cat looking out. You can apply this technique to all sorts of situations. Now you'll always be able to see what lurks in the shadows--of your photos, that is.

Unfortunately, there are all sorts of annoying rules in place about who can appear on a U.S. postage stamp and when they're eligible for stamphood. Even then, there are all sorts of committees, selection teams, and official brouhaha associated with designing stamps. If only there was an easier way!

Okay, I know that few of you sit up late at night dreaming of getting on a stamp. But now that I mention it, you've got to admit that it sounds pretty neat, right? A new service called PhotoStamps can make it all happen.

To get started, visit the PhotoStamps site and upload your favorite digital image. After a few moments, you see your picture embedded in a stamp on screen, where you can reposition the image in the stamp, rotate it, flip it, and change the border color. When you're happy with the results, select the kind of stamp you want (first-class letter or postcard, for instance) and finish your order. A sheet of 20 stamps costs $17.

So, the big questions: Are they really stamps? Can you use them to mail packages? Yes and yes. They're perfectly legal postage stamps. They make great gifts--I'm thinking baby birthdays and high-school graduations, for instance. Or put your pet on a stamp to make it famous. PhotoStamps are some of the most unusual photo gifts you'll ever find.

What's the difference between JPEG and JPEG 2000? Can JPEG 2000 files be opened by anyone as easily as JPEGs, or do they require special software?

--Tom Rathburn, Las Vegas

Although JPEG 2000 has been around for a number of years, it's still considered the new kid on the block, Tom. It's an alternative file format that claims to generate more-accurate, less-lossy images than the traditional JPEG file format. And in reality, JPEG 2000 is somewhat better than JPEG.

However, use of the JPEG 2000 format is not without issues. Despite its similar name, JPEG 2000 is a completely different file format. That means your software needs to be JPEG 2000 "aware" to display such files. Although many common image editing programs do have JPEG 2000 support, you won't find support for JPEG 2000 in Windows. You can't make a JPEG 2000 image your desktop wallpaper, for instance. And most slide show apps, image viewers, and business programs (such as Word and PowerPoint) don't recognize JPEG 2000, either.

Worst of all, no digital camera that I know of uses the JPEG 2000 file format, so your pictures must start out as JPEGs or TIFFs and get converted to JPEG 2000 somewhere along the way. Bottom line? It's one file format that's far too much trouble for me to mess with.

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Early Fourth," by Ross Heeren, Juniata, Nebraska

It's not early anymore, but this picture was snapped on a spring evening before the Fourth of July, according to Ross. He says that he captured this image with a Canon A40 set to a long exposure and with a few sparklers "we keep for special occasions."

Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For our August winner, we chose "Weathered Outhouse Door," by Sandy Kronberger, from Carlton, Minnesota.

Congratulations to Sandy and to everyone else who won a Hot Pic of the Week last month. Keep those entries coming!

I want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about Digital Focus to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com. And be sure to sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.

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