Happy New Year!

Winter is here and 2005 is wrapping up fast. Where did the time go?

We spent 2005 scanning thousands of your treasured photos. And this is great fun. We get glimpse into photos that show how we are similar - and how we are unique. Both shared and exceptional experiences bring us together in ways that we don't normally recognize. Bringing your old photos to life is a great way to recognize these things for yourself.

Do you have the drawer full of old slides or negatives that you have been meaning to scan, organize and share? Winter is a great time to spend some quality time with your images to get them in shape. Then, share the best stuff from past years with your friends and family.

Check out the rest of the newsletter for some great tips on making the most of your digital images along with a discount on scanning orders to warm the coldest months of the year.

Happy Holidays and a fantastic 2006 to everyone!

Steve Bennett
Pixmonix President

Using your digital images:
Online Photo Sharing Services

Your mom, dad and brother live in Dallas, but you and the family are now in Seattle. How are you going to show off all those great photos you shot with your shiny new digital camera (or scanned from your slides and negatives)?

It might feel like sharing your photos will be complicated and painful, but in fact, it is really pretty easy.

There are many websites that give you ways to share your photos with friends and family at little or no cost. We'll try to give you a rundown of some possibilities to explore - and issues to watch out for. We will give you pointers to three services that we have explored. These are many more, as a Google search for "photo sharing" will show. Pixmonix is not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned in this article. You should review their terms of use and privacy policies for yourself before signing up or giving them any personal information.

At first glance, these services all look pretty similar and have similar sales pitches. However, there are some features you definitely want to consider as you look at these services:

• Privacy and Security. You want to make your childhood pictures available to your siblings, but not to everybody on the Internet. You must be able to password protect albums that you make available for viewing. Thankfully, all the services that we have examined allow you to do this.
• Image Size. Being limited to sharing and viewing small images is probably not what you want. You would like your visitors to be able to see images as large as their monitors - or at least close to it.
• Storage and Bandwidth. You may not be a professional photographer, but you still may have quite a lot of images to share. And you might want to make very large or high-resolution images available to your friends and family (see the next item). Hence, you need to make sure that the service you select provides sufficient storage space for your needs. Bandwidth is a measure of how much data your family and friends download in the process of viewing your images. Unless you are a professional, it is unlikely that you will exceed the bandwidth allowances of the companies we cite below.
• Print ordering and image download. Looking at the images on the screen is great. But if your family or friends want to get prints of the images, it sure is nice if the sharing service provides this capability. Most do (because this is another way for them to make money). Additionally, it is very convenient to allow your family and friends to download the full-sized images from the sharing service (if you have allowed this to occur). If this service is available you may be able to avoid shipping CDs or DVDs to all those people. Watch out for bandwidth limitations, however - and note that uploading those large image files can take a long time unless you have a (very) high-speed internet connection - at a business, for example.
• Ads. Having the screen cluttered with ads while you view images is a real drag. You may have to pay for a service that allows ad-free viewing of images. Luckily, this isn't hard to find, nor do you need to pay a great deal for it.
• Cost. Free is good. But by paying a little bit each month for a service like the ones we suggest below has some great benefits - like unlimited storage and ad-free image viewing.

http://www.smugmug.com For $30 per year you get unlimited storage and some really nice options for what you display and how it is displayed. They offer printing in a wide variety of formats for reasonable prices. This service has every desirable feature for very little money. They do not offer a free service beyond a 1 week trial period (making the service cheaper because you aren't subsidizing many other free users). Definitely worth exploring.

http://www.flickr.com Flickr has taken the lead as the "in" place to do photo sharing. Depending on your goals and tolerance for technology, it may be the place for you. The site focuses on collaborative sharing and tagging of images, but you don't need to use these features - and you don't need to make your photos available for the whole world to see. Inviting your friends and family to view your images is a bit convoluted and annoying, and it doesn't let some friends see some albums but not others (meaning that grandma will be able to look at the albums of your college fraternity parties if you want her to see the photos of the grandkids). They offer a free service with limited upload privileges. For $25 per year you can upload 2 GB of photos per month with storage of an unlimited number of photos and sizes. (Yahoo! now owns Flickr.)

http://www.fotki.com For $50 per year you get unlimited ad-free storage and viewing. Interfaces are less slick than smugmug. Free service includes ads and no ability to customize the way that visitors can view your photos.

Many photo printing services like Ofoto and dotPhoto will let you share your photos with friends and families. They don't charge for this service, but the sharing mechanisms can leave a lot to be desired - generally, the images you can share are small and the screen is cluttered with opportunities to buy prints and other products that the companies sell. This is not meant to demean the products or services they offer -- they do a fantastic job at providing prints and other stuff with your photos on them. But if sharing images is your primary goal, you are better off going with a dedicated sharing service and paying a few dollars a year for the service. (And you don't have to avoid very many printing and shipping charges to those distant friends and family to make up the $30 yearly cost.)

Please let us know what you think.

Photoshop Tip of the Month:
Fixing an under exposed image

Some photos are dark -- and should be. But some of our best shots are sometimes dark unintentionally. Do you have some great shots that could just use a bit of lighting improvement to make them great? Doing basic exposure adjustment in Photoshop Elements or Photoshop (or any other photo editor) is easy and the results can be amazing. It is well worth learning these basic techniques.

Let's look at a set of controls available in the digital world that we simply don't have with film (unless you happen to be experienced in the darkroom). With a full-featured photo editor like Photoshop, there are a million ways to do everything and a million users who will fight to convince you that their technique is the best. We won't do that here. The idea is to give you some basic tools with which you can use more easily later. The two tools that we will look at in this newsletter are the levels dialog and screen adjustment layers.

Let's start with the levels dialog. Don't worry! This sort of adjustment is easy to do with almost every photo editing package. We'll describe the steps to take if you have Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS, but other packages should be very similar.

1. Always work on copies of your images. If you save a file using the same file name after doing a crop or other editing, the original file that you opened is gone forever. Additionally, note that repeatedly opening, editing, and saving digital images in JPEG format results in a degradation in quality.
2. Open the copy of the underexposed image you want to adjust in your photo editor.
3. Examine the image carefully. Is the main subject lit well? Is the background too light or dark?
4. Open the levels dialog by clicking ctrl-l (on Mac, command-l) , or selecting "Levels" in the Image->Adjustments menu.
5. A dialog box opens that might look something like the picture below (this is an example of an extremely underexposed image). This dialog shows a histogram of the pixel values present in the image. Dark pixels are represented at the left side of the histogram, bright pixels at the right. The right side of the histogram in this example is almost totally empty. This means that there are few pixels in the image that are bright, as is expected for an underexposed image. [An overexposed image would have few pixels at the left side of the histogram and a clumping at the right side; a well-exposed image would have pixels spread across the whole width of the histogram.]
   
6. Slide the triangle under the histogram to the left until it starts to make contact with the rightmost part of the curve. As you do this, watch the image in the rest of the window (the "Preview" box must be checked for you to see the result of changes you make). It is OK to push the triangle to the left of the tail of the curve; this will force some pixels to be totally white when they would have been less than white otherwise. In the picture shown below, you can see that we have done this. You should see the image lightening up and the contrast improving. When you have hit the rightmost part of the levels curve, release the mouse button. What you have done is to adjust the white point of the image - changing the way that the bits in the image are interpreted in order to make everything lighter by "spreading out" the dark pixels into the lighter areas of the spectrum. It is OK to experiment here to understand the effect of moving these points around.
   
   The levels dialog looks like this after sliding the white point to the left (compare this to the previous picture):
   
7. If the image still looks dark, you can try sliding the middle triangle to the left a bit. Again, watch the image on screen as you do so. By adjusting this slider, you are changing the gamma of the image - which dictates what values are interpreted as middle tones.
8. If you slide the white point triangle too far, the highlights in the image will become blown out -- losing all detail in the bright parts of the image -- and the shadows will lighten unacceptably and get blotchy. Other effects come into play with drastic changes in the black point and gamma setting. Experiment to see the effects for yourself.
9. When you are happy, click OK. Save off your new masterpiece.

This levels dialog-based technique can work wonders. However, a very badly exposed image can't be saved this way. With a bit of experimentation you will have a good feel for what is possible using this technique.

A key point to recognize is that changes using the levels dialog as we have described it here will change the entire image. A better technique (though more involved) uses a screen adjustment layer to lighten the whole image and then selectively remove the lightening from parts of the image that don't need it. [Note that this technique is not available in every photo editor; again, we discuss Photoshop or Photoshop Elements techniques here.]

1. Open a copy of the underexposed image you want to adjust in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
2. Display the layers pallet by selecting it in the "Window" menu (or by hitting F7).
3. Create a copy of the underexposed image in a new layer by pressing ctrl-j (command-j on the Mac, or using the appropriate commands in the layers pallet or "Layer" menu). The image you see on the screen should not change yet.
4. Change the mode of the new layer to "screen" mode after selecting the new layer in the layers pallet (click on it if it isn't already highlighted). You change the mode of the layer using the pull down menu at the top (it should say "Normal" prior to this step). You should see the whole image lighten after the layer is changed to "Screen" mode.
5. Select a reasonably large soft-edged paintbrush in the tool box, make the foreground color black (press "x"), and paint onto the new layer in the areas that you do not want lightened. You should see them darken as you paint (but you won't see the black paint come through because of the "screen" mode of the layer on which you are painting).
   
   [Advanced tip: use a brush with less than 100% opacity to allow some of the lightening to come through on areas that you paint in this step.]
6. Is your image not lightened enough? Duplicate the new layer by dragging it onto the "new layer" icon in the layers pallet (or by pressing ctrl-j/command-j).
7. Is your image lightened too much? You can lower the opacity of the newest screen layer in the layers pallet.
8. Flatten the image by choosing "flatten image" in the layer pallet's fly out menu (click the little triangle in the circle at the top right of the pallet).
9. Save off your newest masterpiece.

Does this all sound rather complicated? Believe it or not, this is harder to explain than it is to do - and it won't seem hard to you after you have done it a few times. You will even learn to love layers if you aren't careful! This is a very powerful tool to have in hand - and there are dozens of fantastic techniques that use a similar basic procedure.

Questions on these procedures? Please let us know at https://www.pixmonix.com/contact.php.

Scanning Technologies:
Scan Resolutions

We are approaching New Year's Eve. Time for resolutions. At Pixmonix, we can scan your slides and negatives at one of two resolutions - namely 2000PPI and 4000PPI. What does this mean?

Some background...

Digital images are composed of pixels. A pixel is one small point of color. When thousands of these very small points of color are put close together, an image results. The image on the screen you are looking at is composed of pixels. If your monitor is about average in size, there are about 800,000 pixels on the screen in front of you. Each pixel is able to show one of more than 16 million colors. When many pixels are placed close enough together and they can convey a wide enough range of colors our eye can no longer perceive the individual dots. Rather, we see a continuous picture.

Resolution

The resolution of a scanned image refers to the number of pixels in the resulting digital image for each square inch of the original material. The scanning resolution and the size of the original being scanned determine the dimensions of the resulting digital image, measured in pixels. Scanning resolution is commonly measured in pixels-per-inch, or PPI.

For example, if you have a 1 inch square original image (slightly smaller than a 35mm slide or negative) scanned at 4000 PPI, the result is a 4000 pixel by 4000 pixel image (or 16 megapixels). This is similar to the number of pixels in images shot with high-end digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras available today.

Not all scanners are created equal. Some scan at higher resolutions than others. However, this is not the only factor to consider when deciding which scanning service or which scanner to use. Scan quality is not the same across different scanners even if resolutions match. Steps taken during and after scanning can have a significant effect on the quality of the final digital images.

In general, you want to scan your slides or negatives at the highest resolution possible, as long as you understand a number of important issues up-front.

• Not all original images need the highest resolution. If your slide or negative film is fast (e.g., 400 ISO), of questionable quality (e.g., dirty or scratched), shot on less than top-notch equipment or with less than top-notch technique, you are unlikely to see significant improvement in scan quality by going to very high resolutions. What you can get from the higher resolution scan is all the detail in your film, down to the film grain. This resolution may allow you to create slightly larger prints, but it is no panacea.
• Digital image file sizes grow geometrically with resolution. Are you prepared to deal with 50MB TIFF image files? These beasts can take a good deal of time to load and process on average PCs. If you have a lot of images, you need lots of storage space and you have to be concerned with backing up and maintaining a large database of images; this can be a challenge. These issues clearly diminish in importance as computers get faster and faster, memories get larger and larger and disk drive capacities seem to grow without bound. Large file sizes should not automatically turn you toward lower resolution images, but you have to be prepared for what you are getting.
• Scan resolution is not the only quality factor. We use scanners that we provide consistent, excellent quality at their highest resolutions of 4000 PPI. However, scan resolution alone is not sufficient to assure a high quality digital image. We employ a variety of technologies in our scanners and processing that aid in producing high quality scans. We have rigorous procedures that assure that your scans are as good as they can be. We discuss these features of our services in detail on our website. We believe that the scanning methodology we employ ensures you the highest quality at a reasonable price.

The table below details the print sizes and storage requirements for various scanning resolutions.

For many of our customers, the important figure in this table is the print size possibilities. At 2000 PPI, a scan from a slide can be printed reasonably large (up to approximately 6" x 9"). Going to 4000 PPI allows for larger print sizes (assuming that the source slide or negative is of high enough quality to realize a benefit from scanning at the higher resolution).

At what resolution should I scan my slides/negatives?

We are asked this question quite regularly. The answer is "it depends". For many people who don't plan on making large prints of their images or doing heaving editing or cropping of the digital images, scanning at 2000 PPI is sufficient. Additionally, much of the film that we see at Pixmonix was not shot on the best equipment or stored in ideal conditions. However, we do have many customers who have excellent photos shot on good film with good equipment and technique who benefit from higher resolution scans. On the other hand, scanning at the higher resolution doesn't cost much more and most computers can manage the larger files. The choice is yours. We are always happy to help you determine the right scanning resolution for your project. We are waiting to hear from you!

New at Pixmonix:
Noise Reduction

We now apply noise reduction techniques to scanned images to reduce the effect of particular grain structures in some films. This benefits many films when the "traditional" use of GEM does not. However, applying these techniques blindly or too aggressively can do more damage than good. Like ICE, ROC and GEM, we apply these techniques only when they will benefit your particular images, based on our experienced eyes and careful analysis.

Let's look at two example images showing the benefit of these techniques:

Before and after versions of two photos showing the benefit of noise reduction techniques. Noise reduction techniques can have drastic effects (and these examples are not unusual).

We do not charge extra for this service. Our goal is to give you images that you can use without doing a bunch of work.

[We described ICE, ROC and GEM in our Fall 2005 newsletter, available at http://www.pixmonix.com/Newsletters/2005_Fall/newsletter_fall_2005.htm.]

Bravo!
(notes from our customers)

Just wanted you to know our scanned negatives turned out great! Thank you! I'll be sure and share your services with others.
Sincerely,
Jeff
(Fort Collins, CO)

I just recently received an order of scans from your company and I wanted to thank you for the great work and quick service. There will also be an additional order of scans coming your way in the near future.
Thank you again for the good work,
Brian
(Knoxville, TN)

Winter Newsletter Special

From December 21, 2005 thru the end of February, 2006 you are invited to enter the promo code "SNOW" on your Pixmonix order form to save $5 on your order of $50 or more.**