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 has had mixed results using our flash indoors; either everything is washed out in bright, harsh light or our photo clearly shows the 5 meters of nothingness in front of the camera and darkness elsewhere.

Here’s a trick PhotoQuickie uses to get around the problem when taking still photos. We take a test picture with the flash off to get our camera to pick a suitable shutter speed. Then we flip over to shutter priority mode and set the shutter speed to that speed (or a little slower). Finally, we put our camera on a flat surface and use that as a tripod to take our picture without the flash.

That usually gives us the image similar to what we see with our own eyes. On the occasion that our photos still come out blurry (thanks no doubt to PhotoQuickie’s lack of surgeon hands), here’s a meta-trick.

We use our camera’s two second self-timer when taking these shots so the vibrartions of our fingers don’t shake the camera when the shutter is open. The normal ten second self-timer would definitely also work, though we think that standing there and watching our camera for ten seconds would get us some interesting stares.