PCIN.net Update

Several of my blog feeds this week featured a story of how a couple in New York did some very impressive work and was able to track down the owner of a found camera based upon images contained within the camera.

Losing your camera is of course one of every photographer’s nightmares and we cannot all count on the great detective skills of those who find a lost camera. A suggestion was made over at photoborg.org to label your camera with your email address someplace unobtrusive such as the memory card door.

There is another option yet. Many cameras allow you to set owner information within the camera itself. The camera will then add this information on to every photo taken afterward as part of the EXIF information for the photograph. For those of you who have never used the software included in your camera, this might be a great reason to do it now. I typically include my name, email and website address in my camera EXIF information.

Read you manual and find out if you can embed owner information in your camera.

Until next time, happy shooting.

If you have ever deleted an important photo on your digital camera accidentally, you know what a gut wrenching feeling that could be, or even worse, accidentally formatted your memory card. We place a lot of faith in our technology and expect that our cameras will properly store our precious memories and let us retrieve them later on.

But what about the human error.

As a photographer, I have been called upon by friends and family when something has gone wrong with their photos and it has usually been because of their own mistake. Fortunately, I have not been in that situation…yet. When it does happen though, I will be prepared with a bit of knowledge and a few pieces of important software so that I may recover my photos.

The first thing you want to do when you realize that you have deleted photos from your memory card is to stop using that card entirely. Remove it from the camera, mark in a way that you will not reuse it and replace the card with a spare. This is the best thing you can do for yourself at this point.

Most cameras store images using the FAT file system. As an image is written to the card, the location on the card for that photograph is written to an index. When a file is erased, the information in the index is deleted the location is marked as available for more data to be recorded there. The original photo still exists, there is simply no index entry to point to the file. This is where the software comes in.

There are many pieces of software available, both free and commercially, to help recover lost or deleted files. Several brands of flash memory cards sell or include recovery software with their cards including Sandisk and Lexar. Along with the commercial software that I have received with my memory cards, I also keep a copy of Undelete Plus on my thumb drive for quick retrieval of lost photos.

The process is very easy. Using a card reader, insert your memory card into the card reader. Start your choice of file recovery software, choose the drive you card is represented by and start the recovery. Each piece of software will be a little bit different but the general idea is the same. Depending on the software, the erased images may automatically be saved to a location on your hard drive, or you may have to select which images you wish to recover.

Does this process work on every lost file? No. But if you follow my first instruction and stop using the card, you have a much better chance of recovery.

Every camera bag has it’s arsenal of tools and photo recovery software is one that should not be ignored.

Until next time, happy shooting.

One of my co-workers, John, received a Christmas card this week and asked me how he could replicate the image on the card. The image was a black and white photo with a colour Christmas wreath hanging from a bridge and a river running under the bridge in a pastel blue. This is easy to do using a few tools I have talked about it the past, layers, opacity and layer masks.

In both Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Photoshop, the process is almost identical, and very easy in both programs. Below are the instructions:

1. Duplicate the background layer of your image. To do this, right click on the background layer in the layers palette and choose duplicate layer.
2. In Photoshop - Create a channels adjustment layer and convert the image to black and white
   1. In Photoshop Elements - Convert the duplicate layer to black and white (CTRL-ALT-B) Create a layer mask on the black and white layer you created. You can install a utility to enable layer masks for Photoshop Elements here.
3. With the layer mask selected, select a brush and pick the black colour from the colour selector.
4. Next, set the opacity of the brush quite low, 10 or 15%. This will let you paint the colour back in to selected areas in small increments.
5. Painting successively over the same area will paint the colour back into the image more and more with each successive stroke.
6. If you restore colour to a selection of the image you still want to remain in colour, change your brush colour to white and paint back over the area you wish to remain in black and white.

The layer masks blocks the effect of the black and white layer, where you have painted black on the layer mask, the effect is blocked and as I already mentioned, setting the opacity of the brush lets you work in small increments for better control.

If you do not want to add the colour back in from the original image, but wish to paint your own colours in, then follow points 1 and 2 above then create a new layer and on that layer, again using a low opacity brush, paint the colours you want. One final step when painting this way is to change the blending mode of your layer to overlay which will make your colours transparent and let the image below show through your colour.

There are many ways in which you can uses these techniques. A little imagination and creativity can open up a new layer of your own photography.

Until next time, happy shooting.

The application of light in photography can make or break a photo. One of the things photographers do to make an outstanding photo is manipulate light to create depth, dimension and effect in their photos. They use multiple lights and light modifiers to do that.

In this photo, I have used two camera flashes, but any light source would have worked. I used one light to illuminate the rose, and the other to create the pattern on the background. Using a piece of greenery between the flash and the background created the patterns on the wall. This flash was aimed through the greenery, acting as a gobo, toward the wall. The pattern is the shadow this created. The second light was shot across the flower to illuminate it. Neither flash cast light upon the other surface. Had I been using a different type of light, one that spread out more such as a desk lamp, I would have needed to flag, or block, the light to prevent light spill.

You can see the setup I used in the following diagram:

I could have added a little more dimension to the rose by placing a white card to the left of it to reflect some of the light back into the rose on the other side. The full size image may be viewed on my Picture of the Day site.

Until next time, happy shooting.

I have talked in the past about non-destructive editing in Photoshop Elements 5 any of the full Photoshop versions including CS2 and CS3.  This week I will introduce a way to make non-destructive edits to pixel layer detail.

Several of the tools in Photoshop Elements 5 including the magic wand, spot healing, clone stamp, paint bucket and blur tool have an option to sample all layers.  This is a great tool for fixing blemishes or small areas of pixel level detail.  Remember, we use adjustment layers for as many full images modifications as we can and those are not pixel level adjustment.

To use this feature, create a blank layer on top of your other layers and select the tool you would like to use.  Look in the options bar for a check box labeled Use All Layers.  If it is there, make sure it is checked then go ahead and use the tool as normal.  Your previously blank layer will now start to have modified data in it.  One of the nicest features about this is because your edits are on a new layer, you can adjust the opacity of those changes, or turn them off completely.

Taking advantage of all the features of the tools that you use is the best way to achieve your highest quality work. Non-destructive editing provides the most flexibility in post processing your images without risking a permanent modification to your actual photographic detail.

Until next time, happy shooting.