A gift beautifies any feast, and what embellishes any gift is a bright and original wrapping. This is why during Christmastime the packing departments of stores are so crowded by people who want to decorate their gifts with colorful paper, ribbons and bows. Indeed, sometimes a colorful envelope, a nice box or a gilt frame can turn a simple gift into a surprise to remember!

I recollect that once my aunt, a great lover of frills and ribbons, was presented a lot of interesting gifts for her birthday. But she was most impressed with a wooden comb beautifully wrapped in shiny paper and a family portrait in a nice carved frame rather than with the fancy perfume and the Beatles songs collection.

This episode suggested me a thought: if a printed photograph in a frame brings about so much joy, why then not to experiment with the decoration of digital images? Once, having noticed that my aunt was heartily looking over her favorite pictures trying to embellish them by means of Photoshop, I suggested her to use Photo Show .

“I know that if you could, you would print a gigabyte of pictures from the family archive and fill the house with shots in pretty frames! This small application will surely help you to make your dream come true and to print as many frames as your heart desires”, I told her and went out in the park with my camera.

When I returned back from the photo shoot late in the evening and started to download the pictures to the computer, I found a new folder called “Portrait Gallery”.

It contained whatever one could imagine: scanned black-and-white photographs of grandma in carved frames, Christmas pictures with Santa Clauses and snowmen in the corners, portraits of aunt and uncle framed with hearts and butterflies. Those romantic things!

Just a couple of hours and my aunt who had never done designing before got a huge virtual gallery of beautifully decorated family photos: frames, ribbons, dedications, and carefully stamped dates. It’s so easy indeed: the simple and understandable interface of Photo Show allows to easily edit images, to resize them, to change their format and contrast balance, to create frames, masks and shadows in one or two clicks. And all of this fits in a tiny application of just 5 Mb!

Do you like gifts? My aunt likes them, too. I’ll make a surprise for her: I will download an additional package of standard frames, masks and inscriptions for PhotoShow, she’s gonna be so happy!

Hi, today I’m going to tell you about how to remove noise from digital photographs. Almost every one of us, who have digital photo cameras, saw dirty, dusty, grainy looking photos at least once. That’s thanking to colored pixels (grains, speckles) that are present on photos, but do not exist in the reality. Below is an example of such a picture to clarify what I mean, saying “noise”. There are several causes why the noise happens to digital photo: long exposure times, heating of the camera sensor, high ISO settings, matrix defects, small pixel size etc. I speak here (generally) about consumer digital cameras that are built on CCD or CMOS sensors. Noise is not a frequent case with digital Single Lens Reflex (dSLR). And the effect does not appear at all in traditional film photography due to the different principal of operation.

The best way to get rid of noise is to buy a digital photo camera with a large image sensor. Photo sites of such a camera are located relatively far from each other; they are larger in size, so they can catch more real light. However, because of digital image sensors require the light to fall on them directly at 90° angle, you will need some additional big lenses for you camera. Firstly, it costs a fortune. Secondly, you will be unable to carry you camera in your pocket because of the size. Thirdly, you already have a camera, you are not a professional photographer and would not spent thousands of dollars for a professional hardware just to (occasionally) make family amateur photos. Maybe, you even use you mobile phone to make those fascinating shots you upload to your pbase galleries – who knows?

I attend concerts frequently. Heavy metal is my other life. And I take pictures in terrible conditions: lack of light, high temperature. Stroboscopes heat everything they reach – people, instruments, the sensor of my photo camera. Attach to all this the artificial smoke and fog, crush and you will understand that quality concert photo is a complete fortuity!

Believe me - photographing nature or architecture is very different from photographing musicians at a concert. There is always lots of motion: fans and musicians never stay at one place for a second. You have no that time you enjoy while taking landscape pictures to prepare for the shot at a concert. Every moment is a different picture. Each shot is unique and cannot be done once again. And it is very-very pity to realize one day that a magnificent, dynamic shot is spoiled by the digital camera sensor noise or a little bit underexposed! I have great collection of such shots.

Little time ago, I was asked to prepare a music band’s concert photos for publishing on their web-site. I chose the few best ones, but there was some noise on them. I had an idea that I needed some special noise reduction phostshop pugin to help me remove the digital noise grains from my shots. I did a lot of search and test and finally, my decision was Akvis Noise Buster. This noise reduction plug-in for photoshop software (both windows and macOS) brought back to life many of my photos. It wasn’t a shame to let them go public on the band’s site. You know what? I didn’t believe that’s possible with just a single photoshop plugin. But, see yourself. The image is not of great quality of course, but compared to the original it looks much better!

Akvis Noise Buster allows reduction of (together and separately): luminance noise and color (chroma) noise. Additional options include fading, blurring and sharpening edges. It is required you play a little with the plugin options to get a quality result, but there’s also an automatic mode for those who are lazy enough. Remove the most unpleasant picture imperfection. Reduce noise. Bust the noise in the nose!

“…this night I was hunting blond girls in an old park. The number or true blonds decreases dramatically with time. Such a kind of a hunt is strictly prohibited here. They girls are listed in the Red Book and I will be severely punished if the police catch me while I’m hunting. And this … well, this excites me most. I’m not Jack-the-Reaper, nor Chikatillo. My digital photo camera could hardly be compared to their scalpels. If I were asked to describe my character, I would say: mild, a kind one…”

“…I’m standing in the shadow of an old tree. I’m smoking, yawning a little bit (it’s night), and stroking my Olympus. I’m on the watch for my victim. Hm… I definitely hear the sound of spike heels approaching towards me – a blond lady is hurrying from a casino to the parking. When she is right near my ambush so I can clearly identify her perfume I step forward…”

“…my trophies. I have great collection of red-eyed ladies. I think you know why. When I blind her with my digital camera flash, the light is reflected from her blood-rich retina at the back of her eye. So I almost always get pretty red eyes. I have too little time to use double flash, the anti red-eye functionality built in to my camera. After a second of confusion a lady either begins to squeal and call for help or tries to stun me with her handbag, pepper spray, taser or whatever… As a result, read eyes are always sorted out at home, in my digital photography darkroom.”

“…a little time ago my frightened blond ladies were shameful to show to anyone. Though I have Phtoshop, it requires great experience to do common things. I must admit that I’m more a professional maniac, rather than a professional photographer or designer. As for me, the photos are ideal. The light, the composition, the motion, the feeling and the idea of every photo are great. Except those red eyes! I hate red eyes! How do I easily remove those damned red eyes?!”

“…finally, I found a solution a half a year ago. It was Red Eye Pilot. Nice software for common people getting in trouble with red eyes. The developers seem to be maniacs too. They love women and write programs for them…”

“…now I have my own gallery in the National Museum of Arts. I’m rich and famous. Thanks to Red Eye Pilot for that. You won’t believe me, but it’s true: the eyes of a frightened blond lady are shining with happiness! Remove red eyes from your photos and see youself!”

Yesterday I was digging in my grandma’s old photo album, looked at the past century from a contemporary point of view. Grandma died a long time ago but she still looks at us through the black and white pictures from our old fashioned family’s photo album. It is to be regretted that the prints yellow with time, the photos get finger-marks, scratches and dust. Each excursus to the history of our family strengthens my confidence that my great-sons will hardly recognize their great-great-grand-ma. The photos are getting deteriorated.

In my childhood I was made literally to wash my hands before I had a chance to very carefully turn over the pages of our family’s photo album. My slightly younger brother was completely prohibited to touch the shots without someone of the parents being close enough to prevent a disaster: the little boy was trying hard to do harm to everything he met on his way. We’ve got some photos torn to pieces as a result of his forbidden activities.

One day an old friend of my father invited our entire family to celebrate his jubilee. He was 60 years old. Word by word, a bit of retrospection, remembrances, and we soon found ourselves turning over pages of his family’s photo album … on a computer. All the ordinary paper prints, slides and films became immortal through scanning and placing them on dvd. What an idea!

Today I’m on my vacations, so there is some time to devote to digital imagery I’m fond of. I decided to start from the most ancient and though most respected photos. As I had had no scanner at home, I simply took my photos to a photo studio and ordered scanning them with the most possible quality. My plan is to retouch them by myself since it is rather expensive when ordered from a professional service. Nothing unexpected: after having fun for almost three hours with only two of the old photos (and I had hundreds of them queued) I’ve lost every tiny hope to cope with all that dust, scratches, flakes, stains, water spots and other artifacts in the way my grandmother could be proud of me. I must say I’m not a professional Photoshop guy, so finally, I asked a search engine: how can I fix old photos imperfections after I scan them?

And the machine told me about AKVIS Retoucher. It’s a Photoshp plugin software that is specially designed to remove unwanted artifacts from the surface of damaged, torn, or simply dusty photographs. You just select those imperfections with the selection tool and push a single button to start the retouch plugin. See yourselves:

I showed my 10 years old son how the program works. He’s now sorting out the old photo album with pleasure. Join him! Start with digital imagery, retouch, restore, remove defects, push the button, make you photos immortal! Long live grandmas!

This early morning you are walking through the forest in search for snowdrops to take pretty bright pictures. You are in a hurry since there still is an annoying necessity to go to the work today. When your digital camera memory card is filled enough you decide to change it to the new, just formatted one. The old card is left on the laptop’s cover till the evening awaiting for you to return to home. You are planning to devote this evening to organizing your photos: snowdrops to snowdrops, sunflowers to sunflowers.

But in the evening the flash card full of flowers photos mystically disappears from the place you left it at. After seeking for the lost card a little bit you decide to ask your 10-years old son if he took it. Exactly! He used the digital camera memory to copy a computer game from a friend. As he explained there had been nothing like cd-r, dvd or flash token at hand, so he noticed the card on the fathers’ notebook and used it. Unfortunately his friend’s computer was equipped with the appropriate card reader. As a result, you have got a stupid shooter game instead of your beloved snowdrops’ photographs. This is life.

The pictures seem to be lost forever. The first thought is about inventing a cruel punishment for the advanced offspring. Count to ten, calm and begin thinking: how to recover the files? The game recorded instead of my photos was 7 megabytes in all, but my high resolution photos occupied something close to 256. Maybe it is possible to restore some of them? All in all, you ask Google and look through the software promising you to cope with your problem.

Yes, that was CardRecovery software to rescue my photo files. I just plugged the memory card with the lost files, launched the program and - oh that’s magic! – I saw my snowdrops in the preview window! So, the morning wasn’t spent in vain and I’ll be able to present beautiful desktop wallpaper to my wife. She is crazy about snowdrops.

Thanks to CardRecovery, my son has got a bunch of cd-rw for exchanging games, files an data. With that he was prohibited to take anything at his father’s desk. The wife was happy to receive my small present, and a happy wife is a family’s happiness pledge.

To be serious, CardRecovery is designed to restore occasionally deleted photos, videos and files from almost all kinds of storage media. Restore your photos! Drive happiness to your family!

You are an online photo album owner. Imagine you play guitar in a metal-band and combine that with the band’s official website maintenance: prepare members’ photographs, publish photo reports from recent concerts ant tours, send photo-materials to the press, etc.

As usual, there were a lot of obstacles during the concert to take really quality pictures: bad (too bright or too dark, constantly changing and arbitrary colored) light, much motion, inconvenient camera placement, etc. As a result, you’ve made gigabytes of image data, but as a matter of fact, the quality pictures worth publishing on the musicians’ site are really few. And even more, you still need to work them slightly up: remove red eyes, adjust levels and contrast, think about color balance. Finally, having a bunch of images, you upload them to the website and publish in the news: Hooray! New photo from the recent concert available! Enjoy!

Before you go…

Before you go, if you value what you do and especially the time you spent to take and bring your photographs to perfection, do not forget to place a watermark at the right-bottom corner of each image. That will protect your images against illegal use, copying and republishing them without your permission. Additionally, if you watermark resembles the band’s logo, name or website url, that will serve as an additional advertisement.

It’s as easy as pie to add a semi-transparent watermark to your images when Photoshop is your best friend and you are a professional photographer or designer. There are even some ways to automate the whole process (as you remember, you have tens of photos). But there is a problem: you are just a musician and a tiny bit webmaster, not that professional. Even more, it’s a first time you face the problem of placing a watermark to you pictures.

How to?

As for me, I liked Visual Watermark software. It’s as easy as pie: you select a list of photos to stamp, define an image or text to show through your images, adjust watermark position and its transparency. See in the preview box how the photographs will look like after the processing and, finally, press the Protect button. That’s all. The smart program will quickly place the watermark to all your photos.

Protect your images now with Visual Watermark. Watermark your photos! Let them know that Star is You!