Good Tips Provided for Troubleshooting Digital Camera Images

David Cardinal recently wrote a useful article for PC Magazine called Troubleshooting Your Images. In it he tries to address some of the most common flaws in digital photos that some digital camera users repeatedly experience:

  • blurry images,
  • pixelated or grainy images,
  • images too dark or light, and
  • poor color.

Cardinal visits a sensitive and not often discussed topic right at the beginning, lack of feature knowledge on the part of the digital camera owner:

Nothing is more frustrating than looking at a photo you took of a once-in-a-lifetime event only to find that it didn't turn out. Maybe it is blurry, dark, or "noisy." Many new digital-camera owners become so frustrated that they give up entirely, or keep replacing their cameras, hoping to find one that magically takes the photo they want every time.

I've been learning how to use my new Canon PowerShot A95, and I've taken my share of photos that "didn't work" with it already. However, I am really intense about figuring out why a shot looks lousy.

Usually the problem lies in my lack of understanding of a feature of the camera, not flaws in the way the camera operates. The best example of this is probably that the red eye reduction lamp shined so brightly when it was used that I found myself squinting whenever I was in the picture. I had to figure out how to shut that lamp off unless I really needed it. It sounds like some digital camera users never bother to go that deep into the features of their cameras.

This article is useful, but PC Magazine is hurting itself by letting advertising dominate many of its pages.

Take a look at the so-called introduction page where there are two paragraphs surrounded by dozens of links and advertisements. Don't miss that little next> link to the right of the in-line square in-line advertisement, otherwise you won't even see 85 percent of the article.

While I'm at it, how about making the example photos a bit larger than thumbnails and put meaningful caption on them? This way people might realize that these images were meant to be part of the article. [ via Digital Photography Blog ]