Now, ASF has released two more of its software wunderkind as Photoshop plug-ins: Digital ROC and Digital SHO.

Many photographers find their older transparencies suffering from fading or chemical color shift. Digital ROC is designed to restore that original color and in my testing, it works like a champ. This amazing software doesn't just shift a color cast, it analyzes the three channels of color and calculates what the original should look like.

This 40-year-old Ektachrome of a dock at Lake of the Woods, Minnesota, had lost its vibrancy and reverted to a blue cast, as old Ektachromes are wont to do. Digital ROC was able to restore its original color in less than 15 seconds. A series of slider bars is available to tweak images.

I should have used Digital ICE to scan the Agfachrome of Diamond Head, made in 1961 and since gone totally to hell. Dust and scratches blemish the slide. Mold from organisms in Honolulu's water supply make it look more like a medical specimen than a Hawaiian sunrise.

Still, I was thrilled to see this disaster of a slide transformed into the scene I saw New Year's morning, 1961. Digital ROC proves to be a perfect color correction plug-in, eliminating green casts from fluorescent-lighted shots and the orange of tungsten situations.

Digital SHO has a rougher row to hoe. It's designed to reveal shadow detail and it does a good job on images where detail is present. This side-lighted shot of a young waitress could have been lightened with Photoshop Curves or Levels, but at the sake of the detail on her shoulder.

Digital SHO did an excellent job of bringing up detail in the shadow areas without sacrificing highlights.

A bigger challenge for Digital SHO was this image of a Venetian glassblower. The original on the left was underexposed considerably. Still, the plug-in did a decent job of revealing detail in the man's face and shirt.
Each filter sells for $49.95 and is available for Mac and Windows. You can find out more by visiting Applied Science Fiction on the Web at http://www.asf.com.

After watching Ken's demos for nearly an hour, I returned to Florida feeling confident I could master Stitcher when my review copy arrived. Confidence overestimated.

Stitcher is an $495 stand-alone application that can create panoramic images up to 360x360 degrees in cylindrical, spherical, cubic, planar and VRML formats.

After tangling with the utterly complex Panorama Tools, the application used by Ken Lyons (see column at http://progressive.kelbymediagroup.com/planetphotoshop/uploads/images/tutorials/jim19.html), I expected Stitcher to be a walk in the park. And with the basic tutorial, it sort of was: a nice Romanesque temple with lots of straight lines and hard textures.

Stitcher uses drag & drop to place elements from the Image Strip into the Stitching Window. I mastered the rotate, roll, zoom and stitch commands pretty easily. Then I came to a "cannot stitch image. Adjust manually." I might still be adjusting manually if I had not given up and started over.
Oddly enough, my problem image stitched just fine when I started with it as a base image.

Understanding various formats and the focal length and other menu controls is vital to using Stitcher in a masterful fashion. One two-image pano saved as an extremely wide space of black with the tiny image in its center.

A multi-image construction of my studio shot from a stationary tripod and using precise angles and rotations turned out to be a virtual reality strip that inexplicably cropped tightly when saved.

Stitcher is a fabulous program which takes more than a few days of study and practice to attain proficiency. In the coming weeks, I hope to create something that equals the work of Ken Lyons on his worst day.

With the Macro mode turned on permanently, I find this is a setup that is ready for virtually any subject, except wildlife.

But wide angles do present some problems with image distortion. Point a wide angle up at a tall building and the building will seem to fall away in altered perspective. Here's a simple fix in Photoshop for that problem (it also works for distorted perspective when the lens is pointed down).

Here's a shot of Singapore's skyline from Boat Quay. Even from a distance, the downtown buildings were so tall that I had to tilt the lens up to get them all in the image. Note that they tend to be leaning in as if Singapore isn't built on a firm foundation (which it isn't).

For purposes of the tutorial, I've sent the image to its own new layer (Command/PC: Control-J) and unlocked it. With the Move tool selected, I choose Free Transform (Command/PC: Control-T).

Next, select the upper right corner handle and click and hold down, then hold down Command-Option-Shift (Control-Alt-Shift) and drag the handle to the right. As I do so, the left corner moves out as well, correcting the tilting perspective.

While this technique brings the perspective to a normal view, it also has the effect of shortening the buildings. To correct this, grab the center bottom handle and drag it down until the buildings look their correct height.

When you click the Return key, the image will be corrected and some portions of the image will be automatically cropped.

Now, on to a second kind of distortion. My Nikon WC-E24 lens (the older, smaller in diameter version) is notorious for Barrel Distortion (perpendicular images bowing out at the edges like the sides of a barrel).

For most images, I live with the effect. Also, I can use Andromeda's Lens Doc plug-in for precise correction. But here's a simple correction technique in Photoshop.

Note that the pillars on each edge of this picture have a graceful bow to the outside. I've sent the image to its own layer (Command/PC: Control-J) and erased the background image to white, and finally increased the canvas size to create a white border for this tutorial.

The image of Man Mo Temple in Hong Kong doesn't have any vertical lines in its center and the distortion of the rafters isn't as noticeable as the vertical pillars. This is an ideal image for the Pinch filter.

Choose Filter>Distort>Pinch. For my 24mm lens, I've found a factor of 9 pixels perfect. You may wish to experiment with a lower number for your particular image but if you go over 10, perhaps it's time to shop for a new lens.

Now you can see the effect of the Pinch filter against the white background. Unless you like wavy edges, use the Crop tool (C) and trim the image down to square edges.

Next week, we'll tackle a slightly more complex variation of wide angle distortion.

Shoot a daylight balanced film under tungsten lights and the results will have a reddish cast. So use a tungsten balanced film... then finish up the rest of the roll outdoors and get slides with an overall blue cast. An old-time trick is to underexpose tungsten (Type B) film outdoors by about three stops to get a moonlight effect.

Daylight film and fluorescent lighting result in a sickly green cast. And so it goes: correction filters, different film types, printing correction. What a hassle!

We digital photographers are more fortunate. Setting white balance has been a routine of videographers for years and today's digital still cameras make it even easier with automatic white balance.

Without getting too technical, light quality is measured as color temperature in Kelvin degrees (K) with clear blue sky checking in at over 10,000K, average sunlight (and electronic flash) at about 5,400K to 6,000K, and tungsten lighting at about 2,500 to 3,000K (according to the wattage).

While our brain interprets colors to our learned experience regardless of the light source (white is white, etc.), the RGB CCD's of digital cameras are more literal.
Auto white balance works marvelously in every digital camera I have tested. But under more difficult lighting situations, white balance adjustment is a camera feature that can pose problems for the forgetful.

Out of habit from their conventional film days, many digital photographers pursue correct white balance with a vengeance. Daylight with sunshine, use the sunshine white balance. Along comes a cloud and switch to overcast.

For instance, using a tungsten lighting set-up for a small product shot gives best results for my camera if the tungsten white balance is set. This adds a blue cast to what would be a reddish-yellow image with daylight white balance.

My only problem is remembering to reset the white balance before I move on to another shooting situation. This is why I rely upon Auto white balance for about 90 percent of my shooting. Below is a comparison of Auto, Incandescent, and Manual White Balance under a two-bulb, incandescent set-up.

Many digital cameras also offer a technique for setting white balance manually for unusual light situations, say for example, a mix of tungsten and fluorescent lights.

This is usually a menu-driven feature that involves aiming the lens (and meter) at a white card (or shirt or tablecloth, whatever) and then hitting the menu select button. As the screen shot above shows, this isn't always the most precise way to determine color balance. While the one below shows some of the garish extremes that can occur with the wrong white balance. In this case, Auto would have been a vast improvement.

So, if a card full of images comes onto your desktop with strange color casts, check your white balance.

Next week, we'll examine Photoshop's Variations feature for correcting color casts.

Currently, the hot technique is Luminosity Masking. My buddy Jim DiVitale calls it "the claw" for its five keys plus elbow keyboard command. My variation has been assigned an F4 action. Now everyone is on the Luminosity Bandwagon. It's been one of my favorite imaging tools since I learned about it at Photoshop World 2000. Here goes:

Most digital cameras have incredible exposure metering capabilities, with many boasting multiple area matrix metering. However, with extreme contrast scenes, the highlights are the first to go. If you adjust in Photoshop to recover highlight detail, shadow areas and midtones are often affected adversely.

Attempting to select highlights by selecting with the Magic Wand or using the Similar command do work, to a certain extent. But the results are often artificial looking. Luminosity Masking to the rescue!

I'm using an image I made of Switzerland's Jungfrau a couple of years ago. As is typical, matrix metering resulted in a good overall exposure with a deep blue sky and washed out detail in the highlight area, namely the snowy ledge beneath the mountain.

The secret behind this tip is to select the luminosity of the image, which will vary from picture to picture. This is done by using the keyboard command Command+Option+~ (tilde) [PC: Control+Alt+~). This results in a selection of the highlights based upon that image's luminosity. Since luminosity varies throughout an image, the selection is effectively self-feathered.

The screen shot shows the luminosity selection which is basically composed of the snowy areas on the mountain and the bank beneath the mountain. In addition, highlight luminosity is present in the clouds. In my judgement, I wanted the mountain and clouds to remain unchanged and just increase the detail in the snowy bank.

So I sent switched the luminosity selection to Quick Mask and used the airbrush set to black to paint out the selected mountain snow areas and clouds.

Switching back to the selection mode, I sent the selection to its own layer (Command+J or PC: Control + J) and set the layer's blending mode to Multiply, causing an increase in the highlight detail in the snowy bank.

The final screen shot shows the end result with a stripe cut out of the Multiply layer to illustrate the difference between the raw image and the enhanced Luminosity Masked image. I think you'll agree that it makes a difference.

The beauty of a Luminosity Mask is that it selects highlights as they occur in the image, with feathered or graduated edges.

Next week: the other face of Luminosity Masking.

The actual view encompasses a bend in the river sweeping by the village of le Roc Gageac. Using the widest angle of my zoom lens, I shot three images with about a one-third overlap.

I followed all the steps outlined in the first pano column: resizing the photos; putting each of them on its own layer; and creating a larger canvas size to accommodate the overall panorama.

While my image was resized to 3 inches in height, I set the New Canvas Size to 5 inches high for a little wiggle room. The canvas width, set from the left center, was 10 inches. Note that I made the background layer black in order to see the rather washed out sky as I worked.

All three images are now on the background in separate layers and have been overlapped using the lower opacity layer technique previously described. Note that each layer is slightly higher than the previous one, due to the fact that I attempted to keep the center of the image constant with each shot.
Using Levels (L), I matched the colors of each layer as closely as possible, using adjacent foliage colors. In figure 2, you should be able to see the vertical lines where each image overlaps. The first step is to use the Eraser tool (E) to eliminate these contrasting vertical butt lines and blend the image as realistically as possible.

I'll reiterate that the goal is to create a detailed image of framed peripheral vision but not to attempt to fool the viewer into believing it was made with a single exposure.

I set the Eraser tool's options to Airbrush and selected a 100 pixel soft brush tip and 50% pressure for my Wacom tablet. Selecting the top layer (from the right), I began painting gently over the butt revealing detail from the layer beneath. In the screen shot, the upper arrowhead points to the untouched butt line. The lower arrow shows where the river has been blended in a sharp curve that isn't really there but it's the impression that counts.

Don't attempt to get perfect blends by painting out with the eraser. The blends get refined even more in the next step.

After flattening the image, I use the Crop tool (C) to create a single image. Now it's time to fine-tune the panorama by cloning out duplicate details.

The close-up screen shot above shows that the houses of the village directly below my vantage point have been duplicated due to the extreme angle of view. Eraser painting here would have just revealed more duplicate detail. Instead, I select the Rubber Stamp tool (S) and from its options, use the same airbrush tip and pressure.

I decided to cover up the closer set of houses by cloning foliage. Using a variety of trees of the same shade from different areas as my target point, I carefully brushed in trees to eliminate the roofs. Here, you must be careful not to just sweep the clone tool down from the target, creating a repetitive pattern. Instead, select different areas as a target by Option (PC-Alt)-clicking.

Now the village is a single set of houses. The residents might be a bit miffed that I've messed with their property lines but that's life in the pano world.

The horizon and skyline present a different challenge. I used the clone tool to clone sky into the areas where the hills did not meet, then targeted the hilltops to create a new horizon. Due to the soft pressure used with my Wacom brush, the overall effect is of a cloud or fog bank coming through the gaps of the hills.

Once you get used to shooting panoramas, you'll see scenes where the subject matter screams for pano treatment but the terrain is definitely working against you. This was the case in Le Baux, an Iron Age fortress and medieval village in Provence.

Here, I chose to make a continuous set of images matching one to the next but not trying to maintain an impossibly level horizon. If I had cropped the entire image to a rectangular frame, the effect of the steep hillside and surrounding cliffs would have been lost.

Instead, I matched the images in stair step fashion and then outlined them with the Pen tool (P) to create the irregular frame. Making my paths into a selection (Command [PC-Control]-Enter in 6.0, just Enter in 5.5 or earlier), I then sent the image to its own layer (Command/Ctrl-J) and then gave it a drop shadow.

I really like the effect and so do others. It's sold several times.

We see panoramas constantly through peripheral vision. Our fascination with panoramic photos lies in the ability to examine details in an ultrawide, framed view, something peripheral vision can't provide.

Indeed, before the first panoramic camera appeared in 1843, cycloramic paintings were one of the big tourist attractions of the 19th century. Two of the most famous surviving cycloramas are at Gettysburg battlefield and in Atlanta, Georgia.

Panoramic photography is enjoying a new tide of popularity through digital cameras with several applications available to "stitch" consecutive views together into a single, nearly seamless image. Additional, virtual reality software has made possible panoramas that can be scrolled on-screen.

I made my first panorama in 1960 by pasting together 18 consecutive b&w prints together to create a 260 degree (don't ask why, I don't know) view of Honolulu harbor. This yellowing monster is nearly 4 feet long and impossible to display.

When Layers appeared in Photoshop, I resumed my love affair with panoramas and although I've tried several stitching applications, Photoshop remains my favorite tool for creating these unusual images.

Shooting For Panoramic Images
Purists claim a "perfect" panorama must be made with a tripod equipped with a rotating, leveling head to ensure the film plane is perpendicular to the subject. While this technique does produce images with less distortion, the equipment can be expensive and cumbersome to set up.

My approach to shooting panoramas is a bit more relaxed, using a hand-held camera and matching each adjacent view using the LCD monitor of my camera. Nor do I hold with the concept that panorama shots must be level. Many of my best have been shot from high places looking down. Extreme distortion may result but that's why Photoshop has Image Transform.

I'm not trying to fool anyone into thinking what he's looking at is a single image from the camera. I am trying to create an impression of a peripheral vision view with interesting detail. The three-image panorama of Niagara Falls at the beginning of this column is a good example.

The one important rule to follow is to overlap each adjacent image. I try for about one-third overlap from frame to frame.

Do a dry run through your views to determine where the center of your viewfinder should be for each image. Look for natural places for overlap: vertical buildings, poles and other structures are good.

It's natural but not necessary to shoot from one end to another. In the example I'm using in this "how to," the boat came through the bridge just as I finished my dry run so that was the first shot. I built the rest of the panorama from that.

Many digital cameras have a special exposure mode for panoramas, shooting each frame with the same exposure of the first picture. I've used this feature on my Nikon 990 and don't find it too useful.

After you've made your exposures, review them in the LCD in Play mode. Don't be afraid to try to reshoot a single image if, for some reason, it's not a good shot.

Creating A Panorama In Photoshop
Once you've downloaded your images from camera/card to your computer, segregate the panorama images into a folder of their own. As a Mac user, I review mine in Cameraid and rename them (Pano 1, Pano 2, etc.).

Step 1: In Photoshop, open all the files (or one of the end images if you're not using version 6.0). Estimate how long you want your finished panorama to be and then perform an Image>Image Size to create an image with the right vertical measurement. I used 3 inches in this example.

Use Command (PC-Control)-J to send the image to a layer of its own, then select the background layer and delete it (Command (PC-Control)-Delete).

Step 2: Then go to Image>Canvas Size and set the base point to one end or the other (I used the right) and set a new width for the canvas. Be generous although the file size may grow huge: you'll crop the finished image. I chose 18 inches for my width. It's not a bad idea to give yourself a little wiggle room top and bottom on the canvas.

Perform a "Save As" and rename the file.

Next week, we'll complete the steps in creating a basic panorama.

Last week's column on Carol Rollick's scanned flower arrangements stirred a wave of response from readers and other botanical scanner artists. I've no doubt that dozens of people across the country are building background boxes for their scanners and hoping the crocuses will pop through the snow.

One of the more interesting responses came from Ellen Hoverkamp of West Haven, CT, who does beautiful scans and sells them as greeting and note cards. Take a look at Ellen's spectacular work at http://www.myneighborsgarden.com

Ellen's website then linked me to Mark Charneski's Fresh Flower Scans (http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Island/6801/mark/marks.html) where the artists offers free downloads of blossoms for personal use only.

But photographic tradition holds that "romantic" effects are best made with lenses that are less than sharp. Old timer "romantic" soft-focus tricks include nylon stockings stretched across the lens or a crumpled cellophane wiggled under an enlarger during exposure.

Cokin and other manufacturers have sold specialty filters for years: fog, star, haze, etc. Filters to decrease the sharpness of your lens.

Andromeda has introduced a plug-in that will accomplish many of the same effects in Photoshop. Called ScatterLight Lenses™, the plug-in consists of five effects that add a number of soft-focus, haze, diffusion and star effects to images.

Portrait photographers will like the SoftFocus lens which approximates the results from an expensive specialty optic. I ran a medium halo optic on this portrait of a girl and her kitties on a separate layer, then used a soft eraser brush to bring out the detail in her eyes and those of the cats. In the darkroom, this would've been done with crumpled cellophane with a hole burned in it.

DreamOptic lenses added a soft glow to this still life of flowers. In a future column, I'll detail a technique for the same effect using only Photoshop 7 tools.

The StarLight lens works on highlight selections and is ideal for adding the star effects to night photos or special effects, such as the colored stars I've added to the bouquet.

One criticism I have of ScatterLight, it is extremely slow to show the effect in the preview window of the dialog box. Each time a setting is altered, the preview starts again from the top and plods its agonizing way to the bottom. Image processing is relatively quick once an effect has been selected.

ScatterLight lenses are available from www.andromeda.com for $98.00.

Greater depth-of-field is an inherent trait of shorter focal length lenses, the wide angles. For most prosumer digital cameras, the widest end of a zoom lens is the equivalent of around 35mm (not terribly wide but still endowed with great depth-of-field). Wide angle attachments are also available for digital cameras. I own a 24mm (equiv.) for my CP990 and have used Nikon's fisheye attachment... talk about depth-of-field!

Digital photographers are at a slight disadvantage in that our lenses do not have the small apertures found in 35mm film lenses. For instance, my 990's smallest aperture at its widest angle is f:7.0. Most 35mm wide angles stop down to f:16 while f:22 is not uncommon.

The wide angle is supposedly a favorite for landscape photography for its ability to capture a greater expanse. While this is true, it also tends to make distant objects appear smaller, often defeating the purpose of the photo.

In a Utah desert, I saw this metallic-looking butte just a hundred yards off the road. I hiked a few yards to get closer and eliminate roadside clutter and came across this little wild sunflower (I guess... botanists, please don't write) about a foot high.

Using a 24mm lens, I set the camera to Aperture-preferred and chose the smallest aperture. Then I squatted to bring the flower higher in the foreground. Although the butte is the point of focus, depth-of-field brought the flower into sharp focus and completed my composition.

Of course, using a small aperture requires a long shutter speed to obtain proper exposure. This can be very useful in photographing water. My friend Dave Huss made this shot of an Austin, Texas, waterfall using a Neutral Density filter, a small aperture and an exposure of 1/2 second. The result is a soft, gauzy waterfall blurred by the movement of the water during the long exposure. This technique is terrific in a deep woods setting, allowing water to become a plastic shape around a stationary object such as a leaf on a rock in the stream.

Here's a last example where depth-of-field doesn't apply. This night shot of the Potomac River from the heights of Georgetown would have received a proper exposure of about 1 second in the Auto mode. By switching to Aperture-preferred mode and its smallest aperture, the exposure time lengthened to about 8 seconds.

This long exposure allowed light sources such as automobile headlights and taillights to paint their trails on the image. The crowning glory is the departure of a jet from Reagan National Airport, completing an otherwise flat composition.

Without going all scientific, depth-of-field is an optical characteristic of lenses which can provide more apparent image sharpness by using smaller apertures. Roughly speaking, depth-of-field is a zone approximately one third in front of, and two thirds behind, the point of focus.

The rules of depth-of-field are as follows. The smaller the aperture, the greater the zone of focus. Conversely, the wider apertures produce less depth-of-field.

Depth-of-field is greater in shorter focal length (wide angle) lenses, less in telephotos. As the subject (point of focus) gets closer to the camera, depth of field decreases. Here's an example.

I set up to miniature figures from my ephemera collection on a tabletop. The Guardsman is about three inches high and roughly five inches from the lens. The armored knight is roughly five inches high and placed about 13 inches behind the Guardsman.

I used a tripod and manually focused on the Guardsman, set my CP990 to Aperture mode and opened the lens to its widest: f:2.5. As can be seen, the Guardsman looks pretty sharp (I find it difficult to use the Nikon's manual focus) but the knight is a blur on the background.

The second shot was made with the lens set at its smallest aperture of f:9 and no change in focus. Depth-of-field takes over and brings the knight into much sharper focus and even reveals more of the background detail.

Hand holding the CP990 outdoors in its Macro mode, I focused upon the nutmeg blossom with the macro setting at its optimum focal length (about equivalent of 50mm). Since it was a bright day, the Auto exposure mode stopped the lens down to its smallest aperture. As the shot above shows, even a macro photo a lot of background detail due to depth-of-field.

Switching to the Aperture-Preferred mode, I opened the lens up wide (f:2.5) and repeated the macro shot. The combination of close focus and decreased depth-of-field throws the background into a blur. Since too much background detail is a complain of digital photographers about macro shots, using depth-of-field to blur the background is a handy technique.

Next week, we'll examine some of the ways depth-of-field can be put to use creatively.