Category Archives: Computing and Software

Exposure Warning: Turn On The Blinkies

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Camera LCD Display With the "Blinkies" Turned On

Camera LCD Display With The Blinkies Turned On. Washed out pixels in the photo are flashing white and black.

Some camera’s come with a highlight overexposure warning, commonly called “the blinkies”. If you have overexposed, blown out pixels, those pixels in your image will flash white and black. A quick look at the LCD image will tell you if part of your image has white, washed out, featureless pixels. If your camera has a highlight overexposure warning, I suggest you turn it on. If you see the blinkies and you don’t want washed out pixels, tone down your exposure until the blinkies go away.

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Exposure Warning: Turn On The Blinkies

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Camera LCD Display With the "Blinkies" Turned On

Camera LCD Display With The Blinkies Turned On. Washed out pixels in the photo are flashing white and black.

Some camera’s come with a highlight overexposure warning, commonly called “the blinkies”. If you have overexposed, blown out pixels, those pixels in your image will flash white and black. A quick look at the LCD image will tell you if part of your image has white, washed out, featureless pixels. If your camera has a highlight overexposure warning, I suggest you turn it on. If you see the blinkies and you don’t want washed out pixels, tone down your exposure until the blinkies go away.

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Buyer’s Guide: Recommendations For The Best Photography Equipment, Software, Books, DVDs, Online Photo Labs, and More

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Welcome to my online buying guide for photographers. With over 80 articles it is one of the most comprehensive photography buyer’s guides on the web.

I get lots of photo questions, especially at this time of year, and many of them begin with “What is the best . . . .” They usually come from photographers or someone who is shopping for a photographer.  If you are shopping for yourself, or for a photographer in your life, this series is for you.

My “best of the best” series recommends the best photo gear, accessories, software, books, DVDs, online photo labs, and a whole lot more. Thanks to the information in these articles I get emails from photographers thanking me for saving them time, frustration, and a lot of money.

This article is reposted annually in November with some updates in between. Reposted: November 30, 2024. Most recent update: December 19, 2024.

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Optimizing Photos, Because Cameras Aren’t Perfect

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Jack Ergo, original file (left) and optimized version (right).

For a variety of reasons, cameras do not capture what your eyes are seeing when you click the shutter. One of the reasons is dynamic range. Your eyes see a remarkable range of tones from black to white in a wide variety of lighting conditions.  Your camera has a much more limited dynamic range. That is one of the issues with this photo.

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Buyer’s Guide: Recommendations For The Best Photography Equipment, Software, Books, DVDs, Online Photo Labs, and More

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Welcome to my online buying guide for photographers. With over 80 articles it is one of the most comprehensive photography buyer’s guides on the web.

I get lots of photo questions, especially at this time of year, and many of them begin with “What is the best . . . .” They usually come from photographers or someone who is shopping for a photographer.  If you are shopping for yourself, or for a photographer in your life, this series is for you.

My “best of the best” series recommends the best photo gear, accessories, software, books, DVDs, online photo labs, and a whole lot more. Thanks to the information in these articles I get emails from photographers thanking me for saving them time, frustration, and a lot of money.

This article is reposted annually in November with some updates in between. Reposted: November 30, 2024. Most recent update: December 19, 2024.

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Tonight: Supermoon, Jupiter and Jupiter’s 4 Moons

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Stellarium:  Jupiter and it’s four moons tonight around 9:15 pm local time.

After you look at the supermoon tonight, the last supermoon until Oct 7, 2025, look at Jupiter, the brightest object below and to the left of the moon. With 10X binoculars and something steady to rest them on, you can see Jupiter’s four Galilean moons.  It is a pretty sight. Galileo spotted these moons in December 1609 or January 1610 and by March 1610 he figured out from their motion they were Jupiter’s moons and not stars. This diagram (above) shows you which moon is which tonight. Ganymede and Callisto are quite close together.

Why (and How) You Should Optimize Your Digital Images!

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Lamoni’s Annual Fall Festival. Before and After.

This article is about why you should optimize your digital images, with a brief example as to how to do it.

No camera, no matter how expensive, can capture the full range of light and dark tonalities that your incredible eyes can see. No camera, no matter how expensive, can capture the full range of colors that your eyes can see.  But you can make up for some of the differences by optimizing your images using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

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Saving An Overexposed RAW File

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Anoush, Point Betsie Lighthouse – Overexposed JPEG

On this photo shoot I made a dumb mistake. (It can happen to any of us.) My first few clicks of the shutter were overexposed. When I checked the first few images on the back of the camera I immediately saw the mistake. The overexposed images were shot at f/9, 1/100 second, and ISO 100. They were 1 2/3 stops over Basic Daylight Exposure (BDE). I changed my settings to f/11, 1/200 second, and ISO 100 which is equivalent to BDE. After that my images had good exposures.  The first lesson from this mishap is: Don’t get so wrapped up in the energy of a photo shoot that you forget to stop periodically to check your images.  To learn more about BDE, see the article linked below.

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When Your GPS Leads You Astray!

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Adobe Bridge window and Google Earth Pro window. Click the image for a larger version.

It started today when I was using Adobe Bridge to go through some sunset photos I had taken out my car window on a recent trip to Michigan. I wanted to know where I was at when I created these images. (I knew approximately where I was but not exactly.) Finding a photo location is usually a quick and simple procedure.  My Canon 7D Mark II records the GPS coordinates of the images I take. I clicked on one of the sunset images in Adobe Bridge. Then I opened Google Earth Pro and placed it on top of the Adobe Bridge window.

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Q&A: How To Restore Old, Faded, Original Prints

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Old fading wedding photo and digitally corrected version.

I received this question via email from a person worrying about old, fading prints in her scrapbooks:

“I have noticed some of my older photos look like they may be degrading; if I only have the photo itself, what is the best way to restore the print? Do I just take another photo and send it in to reprint? And one other thing, your opinion of Walgreens photo quality?”

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How To Optimize a Photo with Adobe Camera Raw

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Soleece, before and after Adobe Camera Raw.

Cameras, no matter how expensive, do not capture “visual reality”.  In other words, what you see with your eyes is not what the camera captures when you click the shutter. The photo on the right is what my eyes saw when I clicked the shutter. The photo on the left is what my camera gave me. I used Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to turn the camera image on the left into the image on the right. Plus I cropped the final image. The process of turning the camera image into the image you want only takes a minute or two.

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Using PeakFinder To Find the Names of the Mountains in Your Photos

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Colorado Rockies (Front Range) from Keenesburg Colorado.

I have always loved the view of the Colorado Front Range as I approach the mountains from the eastern plains. I was going to stop in Keenesburg Colorado to get gas, so on that stop I found this county highway northwest of town to take a picture of the mountains.  Back home at my computer I decided to figure out the names of some of these mountains.

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Things That Don’t Work: The Advice on Removing GPS Information from the Photos on Your iPhone

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Big G Lake

As the prior article points out, you should not post photos online that were taken at your home, the homes of your relatives, or your place of work until you remove the GPS location information from those photos. There are some other places where you probably won’t want to share the GPS location of your photos. The prior article also tells you how to remove the GPS locations using your computer.  For this article I was going to show you how to remove GPS data from photos while they are still in your iPhone. I followed the advice online and discovered that advice did not work, at least on my iPhone 11.

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How to Remove GPS Information From Your Photos Using Your Computer

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Greater Prairie Chickens fighting.  The GPS information is still in this digital file.

When you click the shutter to create a photo, almost all smart phones and many other cameras add your GPS location to the photo you just created. The good thing about that is you can go back to your photos later and look up the GPS locations of your photos.

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How to “Rate” Photos in Your Camera

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Camera LCD zoomed in on a Grackle photo. iPhone photo.

It is simple to rate photos in your camera, provided you have a rate button. (Later on I will tell you what to do if you don’t have a rate button.)  If you take a photo you want to find quickly when you download the memory card, just push the rate button.  When you download the photos on your memory card you can use Adobe Bridge (more about Bridge later) to quickly find your rated photos.

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Where was this Photo taken? How to Use an EXIF Viewer to Find the Location of an Online Photo.

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Greater Prairie Chickens fighting. February 25, 8:34 am.

Most smart phones and some digital cameras record the GPS coordinates of a photo every time the shutter button is pressed, provided you have that feature turned on. If you find a photo on the internet, you can use an EXIF Viewer to see if the GPS coordinates are embedded in the online photo. Not all cameras have this capability, and some photographers strip that information out of their photos before they post them online. I really appreciate landscape photographers that leave the GPS data in their online photos.

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Buyer’s Guide: Recommendations For The Best Photography Equipment, Software, Books, Magazines, DVDs, Online Photo Labs, and More

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Welcome to my online buying guide for photographers. With over 75 articles it is one of the most comprehensive photography buyer’s guides on the web.

I get lots of photo questions, especially at this time of year, and many of them begin with “What is the best . . . .” They usually come from photographers or someone who is shopping for a photographer.  If you are shopping for yourself, or for a photographer in your life, this series is for you.

My “best of the best” series recommends the best photo gear, accessories, software, books, DVDs, online photo labs, and a whole lot more. Thanks to the information in these articles I get emails from photographers thanking me for saving them time, frustration, and a lot of money.

This article is updated annually in November with some updates in between. Most recent update: March 23, 2025.

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Adobe Bridge: Finding an Original Photo

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Sunset, Lake Michigan

It started with a text message from my brother John that included this sunset photo. He found it somewhere on one of my websites. He was asking technical questions about the original photo that I could not answer without finding the original photo and checking the size in MB and dimensions in pixels. I knew at first glance that this is a sunset photo of Lake Michigan that was taken at Thorne Swift Nature Preserve which is not far from Harbor Springs Michigan. I was leading a photo workshop field trip when I created this image. It was taken several years ago but I had no idea what year or the specific date. But that was simple to figure out. Using Adobe Bridge it would take only a few seconds.

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Adobe Bridge Basics: How to Do a Keyword Search

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Adobe Bridge. Keyword search for “portraits”. Click the image to see a larger version.

Single Keyword searches with Adobe Bridge are fast and simple. Open your master folder of photos (see Adventures with Adobe Bridge for suggestions on how to create this folder). All of the keywords for all of the photos in your folder will show up on a list at the left. Scroll down the list until you come to the keyword you want to use in your search. For this example I chose the keyword “portrait”. Click the box in front of the word portrait and in less than a second all of your portraits will show up. You can see some of them in the above screen capture. The process is the same for any other keyword you want to look for, be it elk, moose, sunsets, or Elvis sightings.

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Adobe Bridge Basics: How to Batch Keyword Photos

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Adobe Bridge workspace with a folder of renamed photos.Click this image to see a larger version.

This is the third article in a “how to” series. In the prior article in this series we ended up with a folder of renamed photos that need to be keyworded. They are still all selected as you can see by the blue borders. This article will show you how to batch keyword these photos.

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Adobe Bridge Basics: How To Download Photos into Folders By Date

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Adobe Bridge Workspace. Click the image to see a much larger version.

I was downloading, renaming, and keywording photos today so I did some screen captures to create this series of three tutorials on how to use Adobe Bridge. If you find Bridge intimidating, this series is for you. When you click on Bridge to open it, this is what the workspace looks like. There is more about why you should use Adobe Bridge in Adventures with Adobe Bridge. FYI, Adobe Bridge is a free download.

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Fixing a Photo for Publication with Topaz Sharpen AI

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“After the parade.” The final version of this image.

I was going through parade images yesterday to send to the local newspaper. The parade was over when I spotted this person on a skateboard with an American flag. I took 8 images of him with varying backgrounds, him with different body postures, and the flag at different angles. My least favorite had his head looking straight down as he checked his phone. This is my most favorite. I processed this image with Adobe Camera Raw and Topaz software before sending it off to the newspaper.

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Testing Topaz Gigapixel AI on a 1960s Family Photo

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Family photo from the late 1960s.

At a family reunion several years ago I decided to make digital copies of some old family photo albums. I did one digital picture of each page (there were several photos on each page). When I got back home I digitally separated the individual photos that were on each page. This particular image is a family favorite. I decided this image would be a good test of Topaz Gigapixel AI which enlarges, and hopefully improves small photos. The original photographic print also has a lot of damage which created some additional problems.

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