Troubleshooting Photos
We all produce bad photos and bad prints from time to time.
Sometimes the problem is obvious and easy to solve. Sometimes, though, you feel like you're peeling an onion, and each new layer is a new unknown, a new piece of a puzzle that just won't go together and let you fix your problem.
Do you look in the camera or printer manual? Do you search for a tutorial on the Web?
Some of these problem photos have obvious solutions – or do they? Roll your mouse over the buttons to see another Search.
That might help but the normal manual and the normal tutorial tell you how to get from a to b under ideal circumstances. But if the circumstances were ideal, you wouldn't be here, right?
With the perversity of circumstances in mind, this site turns that standard "ideal-circumstances" approach on its head – it assumes that you've been happily taking photos or printing photos, but suddenly, there a problem. You don't understand the problem and you don't have a name for it, so you can't look it up in an index in a manual or in a photo tutorial.
This site is your alternative – look through our problem photos and find one that looks like your problem. Read on for a fix or at least a recipe for avoiding the problem in the future. And if you're still curious, you can read some background.
But the emphasis is to help you get a hold on your problem and
- fix it, or
- avoid doing the same thing again.
Since putting a name or a face to your problem is often 90 per cent of the battle, this site provides multiple pathways to solutions to the problems that are spoiling your pictures.
In Solutions..., you have quick access to issues you already know about – if you know you've got a focus problem, you can find the word focus quickly and proceed to solutions. You can also search by word or phrase via the Google search tool.
In About..., you have more traditional tutorials on the issues behind color photography and printing – why pictures look different in print than on a monitor, for instance. This is where you go if you want to know why something works the way it does.
But if you've got a problem you really can't get around, that you don't even know how to describe, check out the section that lets you match our failed photos with the problem that's bugging you in
Search By Disaster
One last thing: learning about photography can feel like a never-ending struggle. It isn't, entirely. You'll never stop learning how to make better photos – which is what makes photography endless fun, but the technique stuff will come and will contribute to ever-better photos. Keep at it and have fun.
