Inset a photo in another

Here is an interesting procedure to inset, insert, or superimpose, a photo on another. This is certainly not the best, or easiest way, but it can be quick and handy.

Photo editing programs are the way to do this. There is a better way using Picasa, see my post How do I superimpose a photo on another one?

Windows Live Photo Gallery does not provide for such a task, but when a photo is opened in Paint other images can be easily pasted in.

Take these two photos. The detail image of the water iris is to be added to the scenic pond photo.

We want the inset to be at an angle. So how does one add this twist?

Open the “base” picture in Paint. Open Office Word 2010 and insert the second photo.

The Picture Tools, effective when the inserted photo is clicked, offer a wide range of tools, effects, and options.

To allow moving the inserted photo around on the page, right-click on it, select Wrap Text and in the right menu click Tight.

With the picture selected, there is a “rotate” handle sticking out at the top. You can see it in the illustrations here.

When you move the pointer to the little colored circle a curved arrow will wrap around the tip of the pointer. This tells you that the rotate function is available. Move the pointer left or right to rotate the picture.

When you have the rotation the way you like it, release the mouse button. Press Ctrl+C to copy the rotated image.

Now go to Paint with the base photo. You may need to change the View so you can see all of the photo. Click the Home tab and click Paste – or just press Ctrl+V.

The pasted photo will be in the upper left corner. It likely will not be the size that you like. No problem. Just be careful not to click anywhere in the picture area. Click Resize. In the Resize dialog you can change the size of the inserted photo either by percentage – up or down, or by actual pixel dimensions. The illustration here shows the details.

No need to worry about the white area around the titled image just yet. Just get it to the right size first.

Next click on the down-pointing arrowhead below Select. Click on Transparent selection. the white areas will now be transparent.

Move the pointer over the inserted photo. It will change to the four-pointed drag icon and you can drag the photo around to position it exactly where you want it to be.

All this will take less time than you spent reading about it here.

Naturally, you can add more than one inset image using this procedure. When you have completed the process, be sure to save your new photo with “Save as” so you will not overwrite the original photo.

Here is my finished product.

By the way, the properties, or EXIF data, of the base photo will be retained in the composite. Not, of course, any information from the inserted images.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Technorati Tags: Photo composite,insert photo from computer,inset photo,superimpose photo,Paint,Word,Word 2010,digital photos,photography,photo editing

Using SkyDrive as your Photo Gallery

Windows Live SkyDrive offers a lot of storage for photos and documents. Recent improvements make organizing albums and folders much easier. SkyDrive is not designed to be a photo sharing service, but with some care you can present your gallery in a pleasant manner and make it fun to visit.

Here are some tips for making your gallery a nicer experience for your visitors.

 

Organizing your Gallery

You can have folders with sub-folders in SkyDrive, so one album page can lead to others. Recent changes now allow “root location” folders to be moved to any other folder or sub-folder. This makes organizing and re-organizing your gallery quite easy.

Right-click on a folder tile to get a drop-down menu with various options. One available choice is Move to. This allows you to move the folder to any other folder.

The order of sub-folders in a folder is not under user control, however the photos inside an album can be rearranged.

In the right pane, click Arrange photos to go to the “Arrange photos” page. If you have Silverlight installed, this is just a drag-and-drop procedure.

The alternate procedure is just a little more time-consuming. Each thumbnail is shown with a text box below showing a number that indicates the current order. Just replace that number with the new location order.

When a thumbnail in an album is clicked, it will be shown large. The information pane on the right can be turned off with a click on the “Collapse” chevron.

The right pane also offers a “Play slide show” option. All this can make your album and entire gallery a nice experience for visitors.

 

Uploading photos

There are two easy ways of uploading photos to your SkyDrive albums. You can open the “Add files” dialog from folder view. Again there is a drag-and-drop option. Just drag photos from your computer to the “Add files” panel. They will start uploading as soon as you release the mouse button.

Here too, there is a manual method that opens a standard “Open” dialog where you can navigate through your libraries and folders and select the photos to upload.

The second way of uploading is directly from Live Photo Gallery. There is a serious limitation in this method. You can upload photos only to albums in the root of your SkyDrive. You cannot upload to subfolders.

The procedure is simple. Select the photos and click the SkyDrive icon in the Share group on the Home ribbon. Photo Gallery opens a dialog that connects to your SkyDrive. You have to sign in if you are not signed in to Photo Gallery.

The upload dialog shows your albums so you can select the one to upload to. You may even see other albums that you are permitted to upload to.

You can also create a new album right in this dialog.

Another option is to specify the size of your photos. If they are larger than this specified size, the photos will be scaled down to this size. The default is 1600 pixels on the larger dimension. For most uses this is just fine. You can select “Original” in this dialog to upload photos in their full size. There are uses for that, but that is the scope of this article.

 

Providing a path to your gallery

Now, unfortunately, comes the part that is a “downer”. There is no short, easy to remember, web address for SkyDrive albums. One way to inform your friends of the album and provide them with a link is with an email. This can be done right from the SkyDrive album.  Click “Share folder” under the Share group in the information panel on the right.

As you can see in the illustration, there are a number of options. Besides sharing with an email you can post to Facebook and other social networks and to get links that you can distribute separately.

For the email option just enter the recipients’ email addresses. You can include a message in the email. Note that the “Recipient can edit” check box is already checked. Normally you want to uncheck that. You can also require that the recipients sign in to their Windows Live account to view your album. Not something you want to require when just casually sharing photos.

The recipients get a pretty email that looks like the illustration here (the recipients address has been removed). The email contains a “View photos” link that takes the visitor right to the album in folder view with the pretty tiles of the photos. In fact, clicking on any thumbnail in the email opens the browser right to that photo in large view.

You can copy the URL of the photos or the folder. These are very long and ugly, as you can see in the illustration. You definitely would not want to type out such a link. Better to stick to the pretty email. If the album is public, that is shared with Everyone, the email can even be forwarded to others.

My suggestion is this: Set up one folder as your “gallery”, organize you photos in subfolders. Share your gallery with “Everyone” if you want public access. Private albums should go into a separate folder or folders with more restrictive sharing. Note: You can share individual photos. However the visitor will have access to other publicly shared photos and albums.

If you want a public gateway to your gallery consider setting up a blog. Here in this blog post you can see how links to your gallery could be set up:

A Photo Album VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Using Live Writer as your blogging tool offers a number of ways to show album links. Above is just one example.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Technorati Tags: Photography,SkyDrive,Windows Live SkyDrive,folders in SkyDrive,albums,gallery,Live Photo Gallery,photo email,organizing photos,links,web address,URL

Aperture is not what it used to be

In the olden days, as they say – that’s way back last century, photographers were taught to stop down the lens for best sharpness and depth of field. With 35mm cameras that was modified a little – apertures no longer went all the way to f/64. Smallest apertures were only f/16 on some lenses as seen in my photo here of a fifty year old lens.

Still, stopping down remained a good rule. Lenses sported aperture scales with the f-numbers, distance scales that were pretty accurate, and depth-of-field marks, as seen here, that made the relationship between aperture and depth of field pretty clear. In the photo here, the lens is set to the hyper-focal distance for f/16, about 8 feet. You can tell that the scale shows that objects from 4 feet to infinity would be sharp.

That brings us to “sharp”. The “sharpness” of objects in a photograph are always dependent on a number of different things. The resolution capability of the recording medium being just one factor. How a photo is reproduced and viewed is another. What looks tack sharp in a small print might be unacceptably fuzzy in a wall-sized enlargement.

Film for a long time was a limiting item, especially as cameras moved to smaller formats. One big problem lurking in the background always was “diffraction”. Yes, camera lenses are diffraction limited optics at the smaller aperture sizes. The aperture is that “hole” through which the light reaches the recording medium, nowadays, the sensor.

The distance from that aperture to where the light bundle converges to a point for an infinitely far object on the other side, is called the “focal length”. The focal length divided by the diameter of the aperture is called the “f-number”. The light actually never “converges to a point”. This is where the laws of physics wag a big finger. Diffraction happens, it is the cantankerous, ornery, way of light bending slightly around corners instead of proceeding in a straight line. The smaller the light bundle, the more light won’t converge to a point. We will let the physicists worry about “Airy disks”, the point here is that light is smeared out and small detail becomes fuzzy, the larger the f-number, the worse it gets.

As digital cameras get ever smaller, this problem becomes more bothersome. The individual sensor elements, “pixels” to all of us, are already smaller that what the optics can resolve. As the aperture is set to a smaller hole, the “spread” of the light increases. So the minimum aperture for some camera lenses is limited. I have seen f/11 as the smallest aperture on some cameras. Smartphones, which have absolutely tiny sensors, go to the extreme: No stopping down of the lens. They work at full aperture all the time.

I ran an interesting experiment. I mounted my camera firmly on a tripod a good distance from my subject. This subject was a barren tree some two hundred feet from the camera. I was careful to exclude any foreground. I turned off auto-focus and vibration reduction. Then I took a series of photos at apertures from the widest, f/5.6, to the smallest, my camera goes to f/36. The first indication of how image quality is affected can be seen from the file sizes of the images. The seven images were taken at f/5.6, f/8, f11, f/16, f/22, f/32, and f/36. I let the camera choose the shutter speed.

Notice that file size gets larger, reaches a maximum for f/11, then declines. When the raw images were translated to JPG format (at 100% quality), the differences became even more noticeable. Photo file formats reduce the file size by eliminating repeating values. The simplest way to explain this is to say that when a pixel has the same value as the previous one, instead of recording that value, a “ditto” is recorded. So if three pixels have the same value, the file says effectively “three times xxx”. As a consequence photos with less detail produce smaller file sizes since there are fewer different values. This is a gross oversimplification, of course.

Can you tell the difference in the pictures? You sure can!

Here are small cutouts from the images. These cutouts are from the JPG images since this is how most photos get distributed and viewed.

Here, in a larger view the extremes, the f/5.6 image, the f/11, and the f/36:

I was far enough from the tree so that the small twigs were narrower in the image than the pixels of the camera sensor. The first couple of photos show improvement in the image as the lens aberrations decrease as the lens is stopped down. Then, after f/11 (third image in the top row, center image of the larger views) diffraction and some other effects take over.

The moral of this story is this: For best image quality, do not go to small apertures, large f-numbers.

For my camera the deterioration in this test starts at about f/11. This is a DX format Nikon D-60. For full-size sensor cameras, the sensors, and the pixel elements are larger thus the diffraction effects will be less. For smaller cameras, especially the point-and-shoot pocket cameras, image quality will decline starting at even larger apertures.

To give you an idea of the size of the areas shown above, here is the full image with the section indicated.

Camera manufacturers either help out, or cover up, depending on your point of view. You don’t see aperture scales on lenses any more. Distance scales are only on professional lenses. Cameras are programmed to do the best they can, and this means working at the largest aperture possible, not the smallest one.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Technorati Tags: Photography,digital photography,digital imaging,aperture,diffration,f-number

Slide Shows compared

Showing your album as a slide show can come in handy in many situations. Most online photo sharing services offer a slide show feature with automatic advance. Since Windows Live SkyDrive recently disabled this feature I have received many inquiries about how to present photos automatically.

Here is a comparison of a photo album as presented by Flickr, Picasaweb, myPicturetown and Shutterfly. The album, consisting of 16 reduced-resolution images (1024 pixel horizontal dimension), was uploaded to each photo sharing service.

Here is the set of photos and below are links to view the album – and run the slide show – in the three services:

 

My impressions:

Flickr

There is a short download delay, but the images download rapidly. The slide show runs right from the link, no need to click a play button. The slide show does not automatically cycle after it has played through. The default setting is to scale images to the browser window or to the full screen(F11). The option menu calls this quaintly “Embiggen small things to fill screen”.

It is possible to get to the author’s “Photostream” with a keyboard shortcut (“m”).

 

Picasaweb

The slide show has to be manually started with the “play” button in the control strip at the bottom. Tools for managing the slide show timing are right there. The images are not enlarged beyond the actual size. For this album the photos do not fill a large screen but are surrounded by black.

Not scaling has the advantage that the photos do not become unsharp as is the case when they are enlarged beyond their actual pixel size.

 

 

myPicturetown

With this service there is a significant download delay before the album appears. The slide show does not start by itself but is started with the “play” button (lower left). The slide show goes immediately to full screen and the images are scaled up to fill the screen.

Accompanying the slide show is a music track. The viewer can turn the music off or make another selection (from 5). By default the show recycles and starts over again and again.

 

Shutterfly

The Shutterfly slide show starts right away. Images are not enlarged beyond their actual size. The show plays just once and must be manually repeated.

The controls at the top of the photo remain even when full screen mode (F11) is selected.

 

 

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The viewer of these slide shows cannot get to other parts of the author’s shared photos, except for the Flickr show, as noted.

Obtaining the web address, URL, of a slide show is just a matter of starting a slide show when you are signed in to your account and copying the address from the browser address bar. This is not available for a show in myPicturetown. For that service, the address is obtained by a “share album” feature (it sends an email with the URL).

 

Which photo sharing service provides the best slide show?

That depends, of course, on your preferences. All of these photo sharing services, and there are many others, do things a little bit differently. We all have our on individual likes and dislikes. If you would like to share your opinion, please comment on this post.

.:.

Technorati Tags: Photography,digital images,photo sharing,Flickr,Picasaweb,myPicturetown,Nikon myPicturetown,Shutterfly,slide show,online slide show,albums,photo album

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Sharing Photos with myPicturetown

Nikon has offered a photo sharing service for quite some time and recently made improvements. With a claimed user base of over a million and a half it is not among the largest sharing services but offers some nice features. You do not have to be a Nikon photographer to set up an account at myPicturetown. Two levels are offered: a free account with 2 GB of storage and  a fee-based “Gold” account with more storage and additional features.

The site requires Adobe Flash Player and the user interface has some unexpected quirks, it is also unexpectedly slow in operation. In addition there is an up-loader app you install on your computer that used Adobe AIR.

Sharing photos is by email – somewhat like sharing a SkyDrive album. I prefer a clean web address like you get at Flickr or Picasaweb, but that is not available. The generated email message is quite pleasant and looks like the one shown here.

The “View photos” link is extra-ordinarily long, not something to be typed by hand. If you wish to share in a way other than the email link, an URL shortening service is advised.

One nice feature is that you share just one album. The recipient can view the photos an a pleasant slide show, but cannot view the rest of your site. In my opinion that is a definite plus.

You can define the background of the album with several color and design options. The layout and appearance are attractive and functional. When the visitor gets to the album it looks about like this:

Clicking a thumbnail on the right displays it in the space on the left. The little play button, ,

in the lower left starts a slide show, with music! The viewer has a set of tools to set the transition speed and effect and to pick the type of music track. Not much choice there, I don’t like any, but this is a nice touch.

The viewer can also download the set of photos in the album as a ZIP file.

Take a look at my album, either image above links to it, and see if this is something that would appal to you and your friends.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Technorati Tags: Photography,photo sharing,sharing service,myPicturetown,Nikon