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Computer and Technology |
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"Common Editing Techniques to Enhance and Restore Photos" Presented by Phil Goff
Two things to remember are to save your original and that Ctrl-Z will undo any changes that you have made. This session covers: Phil believes in cropping. Removing unneeded background gives the picture more life. He says that he crops every photo normally to 4”x 6”. This is where high-resolution photos are important if you are going to do heavy cropping. Also if you saved your original you can go back and do it again differently if you wish. Adjusting Shadows and highlights improves the picture. Default is 25%, even more is better. Play with the sliders to suite your preference. This adjustment does wonders with old prints. Phil demonstrated red eye removal. Blow up the photo first. Left click the” eye” to activate the tool. Left click on the eye in the photo. If results aren’t good draw a box around the eye and try again. Spot Healing works wonders on blemishes on a plain background. Set the tool a bit larger than the spot. Just click and the spot is gone. With the clone tool you select an area next to a bad spot and the tool copies it over the bad area. Large areas can be treated. Phil showed a before and after example where he had removed an unwanted lamp from the picture. You use the Dodge tool to lighten portions of a picture that are too dark. If portions of the picture are too light the Burn tool is used to darken them. Noise reduction is accomplished by the use of filters. At the same time the filter softens the picture. If too soft another filter, called Sharpen-Unsharp mask (that name is strange but correct) sharpens it again. The presentation shows an old photo that is almost gone and how it was largely restored by the use of these tools. Phil also demonstrated how to convert a picture to sepia tone. In conclusion Phil requested help planning future programs; both topics and presenters. One suggestion: How to color calibrate a monitor to the printer. Q and A Session with Dick Curry He first commented on three new software items from Microsoft. He said that Internet Explorer 7.0 is now out in final form. It can be downloaded to XP. He likes it. It should be available next month as an automatic download. Vista the new operating system is now scheduled for consumer release in January. He recommends waiting rather than buying a computer early with some kind of upgrade deal. Office 2007 is now available (with a small fee) in beta form. Dick will review it next month. TUT The Ultimate Troubleshooter is now available as an annual renewal fee of $17.50 A Crash Question led to a backup discussion. Dick uses Acronis to make a full system image backup quarterly with normal and incremental backup every 15 days using Microsoft’s Backup Utility (click on Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Backup). Floyd uses a different approach. He makes a disk image (Norton Ghost) full backup weekly to an external hard drive. This only takes him about 1-1/2 hours. A program feature allows a search for a particular file and to restore it only. Phil also backs up fully on a weekly basis. The important thing is to establish and follow a regular regime. Also make a test restore of your backup at least once to ensure that what you are doing works. Another crash problem had to do with “Dynamic Drives” which link a portion of one partition to another partition. The answer is don’t use dynamic drives instead create the additional space by using Partition Magic. There was a problem with Google web accelerator being corrupted. It had to be removed. Dick’s advice was to be careful with all utilities, especially free ones. They may cause conflicts. For Internet loading problems try power cycling which is 1) power down the modem, then 2) the router, if any, then the computer. Waite a few minutes and then power up again in the same order. |