Save That Photograph! We’ve all taken photos that could use some help. Well, there’s no need to toss those shots or keep reminding ourselves of what they should have been. Get on your computer and save those photographs! The first step is to get your photograph into a digital format. Today, there are many options to accomplish this. Scanners are readily available in a variety of sizes and price ranges. Most photo processors offer an option to put files on diskettes or CDs. This can be done at the time of processing or at a later date. We shoot slide film, so we use a Nikon slide scanner. We also have a Hewlett Packard ScanJet flatbed scanner which is used for any non slide media. We always save scanned images in a bitmap format. If the desired final format is JPG, we make any adjustments and enhancements to the bitmap file and convert it to JPG as the very last step. There are many computer software packages that can be used to manipulate photographs. Some take you by the hand and lead you through a project. Others let you take the lead right from the beginning. We find that no one package does everything we want, so we use a combination of packages. For simple touch-ups, we use the Paint program that is included with Windows. Depending on what the final objective is, we may use Ulead Photo Express, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw or a combination of them to accomplish our task. For this project, I used a software package that I am currently evaluating called Paint Shop Pro by Jasc Software. You can download the package from their web site and try it for free. If you like it, register it and pay for it. If it doesn’t provide what you need, simply delete it from your computer. It’s shareware at it’s best. My project is to fix up a photograph of Kori and her brother Jayson. I was so busy trying to pose them and get nice expressions, that I didn’t pay enough attention to setting up the shot properly. (Sound familiar?) The background is too distracting and their faces are a bit dark.
I began the project by scanning the slide. I generally use the default settings on my Nikon Coolscan. It uses a scanning resolution of 450DPI which produces an 820KB bitmap file. From this file, I can produce up to a 6"x 9" print. If I want a larger print, I must adjust the scanner settings to achieve the desired image size. This will also result in a much larger bitmap file. Since I knew that I would be cropping the image, I increased the image size to 8" x 12". The scanner automatically increased the DPI and produced a 1,459KB (1.5MB) file. Next, I used Paint to clean up the scanned image. I used Zoom from the View Menu and selected Large Size. At this magnification, you can see the individual pixels that make up the bitmap image. I used the eyedropper to select colors and the pencil to apply the selected color – pixel by pixel. For larger problem areas, I might use one of the selection tools to copy and paste from one area to another. Paint Shop Pro would also have allowed me to perform these cleanup functions. |
