Photo Quickies

Recently, PhotoQuickie was taking photos indoors at an event, and being the observant photographer, we changed our white balance to the little light bulb icon (which stands for tungsten, the material of the wire in a light bulb that generates the light). Unfortunately, our beautiful photograph had a strongly blue tint.

We opened up our photo editing program, today’s choice being Photoshop to try and fix it. To our surprise, fixing white balance is actually very simple. We opened the image, the went to the “Image” menu, went to the “Adjustments” option and selected “Auto Color”. That’s it! and it worked like a charm.

Seeing how it was not complicated, we tried to do the same thing in Picasa, the photo organizational tool from Google. Again, it was done with a click of the button; double click the image and select “Auto Color”. Although PhotoQuickie has a warning about a feature of Picasa, which is alternatively a pro and a con; the editing changes that we made in Picasa are not saved onto the original file, and so to send off our fixed picture to friends and family, we would need to select the picture and use the export function on the main screen.

Read more about: White Balance, Fixing WB in Photoshop

PhotoQuickie received an email from Winston with an idea that we had not thought of, he suggested using a memory card reader and a battery operated hard drive:

You can either connect your camera directly to the hard drive or use the card reader to off-load your images to the hard drive. Much smaller and lighter than taking your laptop with you. Also remember to bring your AC power adapter to charge up the battery if necessary.

Thanks for the tip Winston! We think that it is a great idea, as it would give us ample room to store other data files if necessary.

Booyaa also suggested several ideas of his in the comment including using a phone to transfer photos to flickr. It is a rather neat idea, and may be doable soon as companies such as Nikon and Kodak are releasing cameras with wireless built in.

We took a short trip ourselves across the ocean recently on which we worried about storing photos (which was also the seed that spawned this topic in our mind), luckily for us we did not run into any problems as it was quite rainy and we over-estimated the number of photos we thought we would take.

By the way, you will hopefully be glad to know that PhotoQuickie hasn’t died scaling mountains to get that perfect shot or anything; we’ve been quite busy in the new year and haven’t had a lot of time to spend on our photographing hobby, which is a convenient excuse for the lack of updates. If you’re tired of checking the site every day waiting for updates, try using our RSS feed instead (now available through FeedBurner).