* Juhana Sadeharju [10-02-06 15:58]:

How would one correct the photos 7748 and 7749 to look like 7741 and 7751? And at the same time preserving the sunrays?

First I would not shoot in "auto". A general guide would be to shoot motion sensitive shots in shutter priority mode and scenes in aperture priority mode.

Second I would obtain a basic photography book/manual, particularly one using a canon digital point-and-shoot, and study, comparing the suggestions and examples to your canon ixus 400 manual and camera.

Then try to preform each of the lessons with your camera and see what it takes to achieve the same result.

Then it is time to learn to edit your shots to get them to display more what you intended but were unable to accomplish with your camera.

ps, if I intend to display or provide access to a photo, normailly I use the highest quality mode available on the camera (iso 50, 2272x1704 jpg superfine on your camera) to record the shot. Remember that each time you edit and save a jpg image, you loose a little quality (or much quality depending on the per-centage of compression).

humm, looks like you only have a choice of auto or manual and the iso was 50 (on 7749.jpg) and super-fine @ 2272x1704. Looks like auto white-balance is a good choice for your camera and iso 100 is a problem.

point, learn to use the histogram and use it frequently. Editing a *good* shot is much easier that trying to *make* a good shot after the fact. The second frequently causes noise to become prevalent.

Take multiple shots of the same scene with slightly different settings (aperture and shutter).

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons400 same as IXUS 400 (April 2003).

gud luk,

Juhana Sadeharju wrote:

How would one correct the photos 7748 and 7749 to look like 7741 and 7751? And at the same time preserving the sunrays?

It's not a problem with the camera or the software - it's just a difficult type of image to capture, with too much contrast.

Looks to me like you need to make a composite picture.

If you look at the histogram of the image, you will see it has 2 peaks - one in the darker area, and one in the lighter area. No amount of curves etc is going to fix both, one or the other will be either too light or too dark.

Take the best/enhanced image of the sky, and overlay it with the best/enhanced image of the ground.

There's many websites and magazine articles covering the problem, and one chosen at random from a google search may help: http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/6411/print

Juhana,
These images are much more workable - good job practicing and learning with your camera. The "correct" way to take this image is with a Graduated Neutral Density filter (GND) - however, since you are using a point and shoot this isn't practical.

As for how I would approach fixing this in GIMP is to open both images. * from the layer dialogue, drag 7748 onto the 7749 image (bright image now on top of dark image)
* Create a quick-mask (the box at the lower left corner of your image) - you should get a red-mask overlayed on your image * go to the channel editor (within the layer dialogue) - note that the mask channel is selected
* select the gradient fill tool, with the default gradient (black to white) start just below the tree line and drag to just above the tree line. This will erase part of the mask
* now in channel dialogue, select the "mask to selection" box (second from right on my version of GIMP)
* (while in channel dialogue, click on mask eyeball to hide the red mask) * Go back to the Layer dialogue and do a cut (CTRL-X) - if everything worked right the tree line should have a nice gradient from bright to the darker sky.

Good luck - difficult instructions to follow, but worth playing with layer masks. google for some gimp tutorial on using masks. By the way - nice job of using the road to lead the eye into the photo. A good compositional techinque.