Troubleshooting Photos –
How The Site Works
This page contains ideas and information to help you use this site to troubleshoot your problem photos and prints quickly and easily:
- Why Troubleshooting is easiest when you start with what you know – what your problem looks like.
- Setting up your monitor for photo work.
- Resolving issues you may have with the site.
Why the site works like this
There lots of sites on the Web that promise to fill you in on the marvels of digital photography. Unfortunately – and this is not to disparage the good ones, such as those provided on the Links page – most of them assume that you already know a fair bit about photography. And color. And computers. And, and, and.
What if you don't? What if you just have a digital camera and a computer, and you'd like to start taking better pictures? Do you have to wade through a postgrad degree in technology before someone tells you why some of your pictures are fuzzy?
This site assumes that if you can see a problem, you can fix it. It gets you learning by showing you pages of common photo bloopers. People with red eyes, prints that have mysteriously turned blue or some other unexpected color. Pictures with jagged edges – or fuzzy edges. You find the mess that looks like the problem you want to fix and you're on your way to a solution. Eventually you'll have to learn some technical stuff, but you'll learn it after you know it's the answer you need, instead of having to wade through piles of it in the hope that you'll find a clue to your problem.
We call this Search By Disaster, by the way. Match your disaster to ours and you've got an answer.
Good luck and happy troubleshooting. (Of course, if you know certain words or phrases that are key to your issue, you can use the Google search function).
Solving starts with seeing
[Note: this section deals with your monitor's ability to display your color photos accurately. For issues regarding viewing this site, please read Optimized for anything.]
WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) is a well known acronym for a revolution in computing. The flip side of this coin, though, is not as well known: You can't get what you can't see. If your monitor or your viewing conditions aren't up to the mark, you won't see problems in your photos until they're printed, and you won't see the problems in the example pictures on this site that will lead you to solutions.
If you have a good and properly adjusted monitor, you should be able to see all 21 squares in this grey ramp. It's acceptable for the two darkest squares to blend into one another, but not the two lightest. If your monitor doesn't meet this standard, follow the instructions on set-up below and/or consider a new monitor.
First, your viewing environment... Imaging pros sit in half-dark, mid-grey rooms that have been swept of brightly colored objects (including clothing). That's because the presence of color can affect your color judgement – and this is not superstition, it's well proven (and it's the reason this page is light grey, not hot pink, and why both Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro Photo, to name just two, have dark grey interfaces). You probably won't want a computer room that's lit like a tomb in your home, but there are things you can do that do make a difference:
- Put your monitor where sunlight or a bright light can't shine on it. Ideally, you want about the same low level of illumination all day long. The wall behind it should be a muted color.
- Lose the bright red mouse pad, the sunset-in-paradise screensaver and your lime-green trousers. Consider wearing a neutral or at least muted shirt and pants. For photo work, you want to be sure your eyes don't get biased by a strong adjacent color.
- Finally, don't wear tinted glasses or sunglasses. This may sound obvious, but color pros will tell you that people often turn up for critical color-judging sessions wearing dark shades, colored contacts and other impediments to making an even reasonably accurate color assessment. Your palette may look fine to you, but the colors can look awfully strange to others.
Now, your monitor – regrettably, monitors deteriorate gracelessly with age. If your monitor is a CRT (has a picture tube) more than three years old, or is a flat-panel more than four years old, it is past its prime for photo work and should be replaced. Fortunately, new monitors are reasonably priced and the new flat-panel monitors will save you a noticeable amount on your electricity bill if you're a frequent user.
Adobe Gamma provides more control over the way your monitor displays tone and color than is available from Windows itself, giving you the opportunity to get the most accurate image your monitor can render. Colors should be adjusted individually, as shown above, by unchecking the View Single Gamma Only box. Mac OS X's Display Calibrator Assistant in expert mode provides similar capabilities.If you're satisfied with your present monitor, do one of the following:
- in Windows, open your monitor Control Panel and set it to the highest setting ("millions of colors" or "32-bit"), so you can see the differences in the photos for yourself;
- in Mac OS X, use the Display Calibrator Assistant that forms part of the Display >> Color control pane in System Preferences to fine-tune your system's display values;
- use Adobe Gamma (included with Adobe Photoshop Elements Win or Mac, including the trial version); and
- for even better results, consider a complete color management package, such as those discussed in About Color Management.
Problems
If you think there is:
- a photo problem that you'd like to see covered;
- misinformation on the site;
- a functional problem (like a rollover or link that doesn't work);
- even a misspelling,
drop us .
