You Can Fix Your Own Pix

We all know that taking great pictures involves skill and experience to create a finished product that could hang on a gallery wall.

But professional photographers also have incredibly slick and expensive equipment that solves otherwise impossible problems. Their $2,500 cameras can do things your $250 pocket camera just can't.

The good news is that some affordable desktop software can process and edit your pocket camera pictures and solve some of the problems that normally can only be addressed with expensive retouching. And the best news is that these tools will work on any photos, even ones you took years ago.

Andy Ihnatko, tech columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, visited The Saturday Early Show to show us how to do professional photography on the cheap, and will show us the software that can make the photos that came from your modest digital camera look like they came from a a pro.

PROBLEM 1: Taking sharp pictures at your kid's basketball or hockey game. Dim lighting + fast action = impossible situation. The kids are a blur unless the camera uses a high shutter speed, but a high shutter speed doesn't let in nearly enough light for a proper photo.

PROS:
The pros solve this by using special sport lenses that let in huge amounts of light but cost thousands of dollars. With the pocket camera, your only solution is to crank up the camera's light sensitivity to the max, which will freeze the action nicely, but is like cranking up the volume on a stereo: it gets louder, but adds lots of distortion. The "distortion" shows up as "noise," multicolored speckles of static that are ugly and distracting.

SOLUTION:
Noise Ninja by PictureCode (www.picturecode.com, $34.95, for Windows and Mac). This application analyzes your photo and intelligently "smooths out" any noise-filled areas. It's not magic, but it can take a photo that looks like it was shot through a screen door and turn it into something that'll make a perfectly OK print.

PROBLEM 2: Your camera's lens can't possibly take in the whole scene at once. Whether you want to get the entire panorama of the Grand Canyon in one shot or if you just want to get a picture of what the inside of an awesome old diner looks like, you butt your head against the problem that your pocket camera's built-in lens can only snap one little slice of it.

PROS:
The pros use ultrawide and fisheye lenses with an impressive wide-angle range. With a pocket camera ... well, there's no solution. You can just satisfy yourself by taking separate pictures of everything.

SOLUTION:
Panoramic "stitching" software. Adobe Photoshop Elements (www.adobe.com, $99, Wiundows and Mac) has this feature. You just stay in one place and take a series of photos that "paint" the entire scene, one strip at a time from left to right. When you get home, you hand the photos over to Photoshop Elements. It analyzes the stack and automatically lays them atop each other, lining up and blending all of the overlapping bits together into one seamless panoramic image.

PROBLEM 3: "Gee, the lighting in the photo doesn't look anything like what I saw when I was really there." Complicated scenes are often beyond your camera's ability. The building is properly exposed, but the gorgeous cloud-filled sky is now washed-out into stark white. The altar area of the church is nicely exposed, but you can't see any of the color or detail in those gorgeous stained-class windows behind it, and the rich dark wood of the pews is just a black smear.

PROS:
The true problem is that the human eye can take in a far wider range of light at once than a camera's image sensor. The pros get around this by either bringing in thousands of dollars of lighting or by taking a bunch of photos in which they set the exposure for each separate area of the photo (one shot in which the windows are perfect, another for the altar, a third for the pews). Then they use a $1,000 professional application (Adobe Photoshop, the pro edition) and their extensive (and expensive) training and experience to combine the best elements of each into one image.

SOLUTION:
Photomatix by HDRSoft (www.hdrsoft.com; $99, Mac and Windows). "High Dynamic Range photography" is a digital trick that's actually become its own little field of photography. The camera can't take in all of the light values of the scene at once like the human eye can. Okay, so how about if you take them all in via a series of five or six shots?

There at the Grand Canyon or the inside of the church or whereever, you lock the camera down on a tripod so it won't move, and then you use the camera's built-in exposure compensation feature to take a series of three to seven photos. You start by taking a photo that's too dark and gradually work your way up until you've taken a shot that's too light. The result is a stack of photos that captures all of the light values in the scene.

The camera can't move from shot to shot; you want a series of photos that are absolutely identical except for the lighting.

Photomatix then analyzes this stack of photos and builds a single image with a SUPER wide range of lighting. Everything in the image is exposed perfectly, from the sky to the shadows and everything in between. The difference is dramatic; the photo looks like what you actually saw because, for the first time, your $250 camera captured all the range of light values that could be seen with your eye.

PROBLEM 4: Ever try taking a group photo of squirmy people in which nobody's blinking or looking away? If you've got six grandkids in the photo, that 60 fingers and 12 nostrils. And they've been eating birthday cake for the past hour. (Sugar rush!) What will your chances be of getting a single shot in which they're all looking at the camera and smiling nicely?

PROS:
Pros usually rely on that $1,000 Photoshop professional application. They have them pose for as long as they can tolerate it, and then use the computer to paste together a composite photo in which each kid is looking adorable.

SOLUTION:
Adobe Photoshop Elements again. The latest edition has a unique feature: as before, you take a half-dozen photos of the group. You don't even have to put the camera on a tripod or anything. Just proceed as normal. When you get home, you pick the one photo in which most of the group looks fine, but, say, Ted's eyes are closed. No problem. Open one of the photos in which Ted looks good and draw a simple line around his face.

The Photoshop Elements program will intelligently identify Ted's face in both photos and swap the good one for the bad one, automatically. No steps, no tweaks. just a simple, seamless swap!

Elements can swap faces or even entire bodies, and it's always instantaneous and simple. You can even use it to put in people who weren't actually there.