Solving Focus & Grain

[farl]

Just starting out on digital photography(Kodak DC3400) and Corel Photo-Paint8.
Would appreciate assistance with 2 problems.
(1)Photo's taken (a)mildly or
(b)badly
out of focus(cannot be retaken), can the out of focus
be corrected to any extent in Photo-Paint8.
(2)Photo's of domestic animals have been taken with too much background where the animals face is only 10 to 15 % of the photo area. On cropping out 90% of the background to just get the animals facial expressions, and enlarging the photo and printing out, the pictures are very grainy. Is there any method in Photo-Paint to lessen the grainyness.
Thanks in advance.

 

[Bananas]

First of all, before trying any of this, I would copy all the photos you want to adjust into another folder, just in case you mess them up totally.

For the out of focus: I would try Effects >Sharpen >Unsharp Mask. Play around with the various settings and see what happens. You've always got duplicates in case you mess them up.

For the second point: Take the pictures at the largest number of pixels you can (1760 x 1168), best image quality (that really means least compression) and use that 2x optical zoom. My Fuji Finepix 2200 doesn't have an optical zoom but I've ouputted pics up to almost A3 of a cat any they are quite good.

If you're cropping to a small area of the photo then you're not leaving enough "dots" to stand up to big enlargements. The main benefit of digital photography is you can snap away to your heart's content. So I suggest retaking the photos and make sure your pet's face is almost filling the viewfinder/LCD. Use the zoom if necessary. I ignore the digital zoom - it sounds like it should be something good but all it does is enlarge the pixels that are already there.

If for some reason you can't retake the pictures you could try Effects >Noise >Remove Noise OR Dust and Scratch OR Diffue. Again play around see what you get. But retaking at the very best settings and getting in close is by far the best option. You obviously get less pics on the media but just upload them to the PC and you're ready to go again.

Good Luck! Joe Bananas

http://www.therealperth.com

An independent guide to Perth, Scotland

 

[farl]

Thanks Joe. Very good tips which have enabled me to partially improve some of my existing images. Knowing this, I will now be able to take better shots in the future.

 

[attrofy]

One thing I have had a little luck with is to resample the photo to a higher resolution, only make sure that you have the "Leave at Original size" box checked. This actually seems to do the oposite. It makes the picture resample to a higher DPI count, but shrinks the image to fit that number of pixels. So if your original image is around 8X10, you can increase dpi to about 300 and still have a very decent 4X6 or 5X7. The only thing this will do is to give a little more room when you use the sharpen tools. THere is a noticeable difference when comparing side by side photos of one left at original size, and one that was allowed to resample. Sometimes this has and adverse affect, but something you can try.
Also, higher dpi count can sometimes make a clearer picture of a "blury shot". So you can never overcome the effects of a blured picture due to moving the camera, or make an out of focus picture in focus - but you can do some digital trickerery to offset the effects.

 

[farl]

Attrofy. Thanks for the time and effort in replying. It is much appreciated and has given me two more good tips.
Corel photo-paint 8 does not appear to have a red eye corrector. Is this true our is there another way of going about it not evident in help ?

 

[Bananas]

You could try experimenting with this tutorial:

http://www.unleash.com/articles/redeye/

Joe Bananas

http://www.therealperth.com

An independent guide to Perth, Scotland

 

[farl]

Joe. Downloaded and went through the tutorial and it worked great. thanks for the tip.

 

[tjd]

Convert the image to channels, edit in grayscale, and then you can pick out which channel is the worst and fix it with unsharp masks without oversharpening the whole image. Oops! I've joined a club that'll have me as a member?