Indoor Photo Tricks

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Indoor Photo Tricks
There's nothing trickier for a digital camera than taking a picture inside a room with a brightly lit window. You have to feel sorry for the camera. It tries hard, to be sure; but digital cameras simply don't have the exposure latitude to properly expose the dark scene in the room and the bright view out the window at the same time. Your camera can give you only one or the other. This week, let's see what we can do about it.

Capturing the Great Outdoors
Suppose you're a real estate agent trying to capture a beautiful view through the kitchen window. You want it to be perfectly clear that there's a majestic mountain view out back. You frame the scene, putting the window in the middle of the viewfinder, and take the shot.
The mountains look great, but the room itself is so dark that it looks like midnight. What went wrong? In a nutshell, the camera's exposure meter correctly exposed the bright outdoors and consequently underexposed the room itself.

Brightening the Room
All is not lost, though. You can brighten the room in an image editor, improving the picture overall. Before you do that, you should isolate the room from the window. Why? Because if you brighten the entire scene, you'll "blow out" the window, ruining the properly exposed mountains.
If you're using Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, find and click the Freehand Selection Tool, which is in the toolbar on the left, in the fifth slot from the top. (Since it shares its cubby with the Selection and Magic Lasso, you may need to pick it from the list. Just click the drop-down arrow on the right side of the cubby and select Freehand Selection Tool.) Set the Selection type to Edge Seeker using the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen, then set the Feather control to 10 pixels.
Next, use the tool to separate the contents of the window from the rest of the image. Select the bright areas inside the window, clicking each time you have to change direction to follow the sill and curtains. You'll create a "fence" around all of the outdoors elements in the scene. Double-click to close your loop. When the window is completely enclosed, choose Selections, Invert from the menu. You've just selected everything except the window--now we can modify the scene without blowing out the mountain view.

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