Digital Camera Essential plug-ins

DCE Tools is a series of Adobe Photoshop Compatible plug-ins for correcting, enhancing and fixing the most troublesome problems with today digital photography.

There are seven plug-ins in the package.

AutoEnhance
This is a popular all-in-one choice for quick improvement of any digital pictures.

Auto Balance
The Auto balance will correct the Contrast and Brightness Balance of image. A typical value is above 200.

Midtones
Also known as Gamma setting. This basically tells how linear is the transitions from shadows to highlights. The Gamma of digital camera is probably different than the one of your CRT computer monitor. If you plan to view the images on monitor you can adjust the Midtones slider (to right from middle). The normal values would be just a very small step from the middle, around 145 (128 is in middle)
Before you adjust Midtones on all your images, you may want to try to do few samples and print them on your Ink-Jet. You may find that for printing on your printer a different adjustment may be necessary - try also put the midtones slider toward left from center, on some ink-jets with weak ink this may give you nicer result.

Make sure your monitor brightness is set to a reasonable normal value so you are not just adjusting images to look good on your badly adjusted monitor. Try to see if any calibration is available.

The monitor brightness and contrast controls should be adjusted so that the full range of the image above is visible. The darkest step visible should be just barely visible against the surrounding black frame.

Step back from your monitor and squint your eyes. One of the gray area should be nearly the same shade as the surrounding checked area. For most of the PC CRT monitors it will be the square on the right side in a top row. If not, you probably need to adjust your monitor settings.

Color
This will adjust the saturation. Some images may benefit from the enhanced Saturation. The zero point is in the middle, to left images will be desaturated, to right images will have enhanced saturation. The plug-in won't let you to over saturate the images.

Enh. Details
Enhancing Details by using a sharpening algorithm. A minimal sharpening is beneficial especially if you also use de-noise. Do not oversharpen.

De-Noiser
De-Noiser will help to remove a CCD noise, some JPG and skin artefacts, but also some subtle details may be lost if overused. The noise on digital images is more visible in higher ISO. By default it is set to 0. You should test the correct setting which works for you. In any case it should be used with caution.

If it is overused the image may loose its photographic feel where fine details from textures will be lost. Such image would look more like a flat painting than a photography. It is recommended that you use this filter with caution.

Landscape - the setting is good for images with many small details (such as images of landscapes, trees etc.)
Group/Portrait - For images of few people (heads and shoulders) or single Portrait.
Close-up - for images with close details - close Portraits or macro.

ColorCast Correction
Almost all digital images suffer from some sort of color cast. The Color Cast Correction plug-in can automatically tell you what type of color cast you have (for example Blue-Magenta) and it allows you to remove it with Automatic White Balance or adjust its look with semi-automatic Color Cast slider.

The ColorCast has two tools: Automatic White Balance and manual Color cast slider.

Automatic White Balance
This will test the image for the type of color cast and then remove it automatically. For example a detected color cast Blue - Magenta means that the image has a Blue cast in shadows and Magenta cast in highlights.

Prevent Histogram stretching - the AWB correction will be applied without adjusting the contrast. That means the color cast will be removed but the image will keep its original dynamics. This will prevent creating spaces in histogram

Color slider
This setting will allow you to adjust the Color cast manually to the desired look. The slider has no effect in the middle. Towards right it removes Blue cast (mostly on outdoor pictures) and towards left it removes a Yellow cast (mostly on indoor pictures).

Example of indoor yellow cast.

Flash Used
This will add more warmth to the final image. A good choice for a flash photography if the corrected images look cold. When Flash used the slider has to be moved towards right (Flash) to add warm effect.

Auto Levels
An Auto Levels will be performed which improves contrast on the image.

Corrected images will suddenly become more "alive" and the picture will gain in crispness. The Color Cast Correction is one of the best and easiest way to create vivid images without boosting its colors or loosing details.

Exposure Compensation
An easy to use correction for under or over-exposed images. This doesn't just brighten or dim images but it performs changes on whole dynamic range.

The only setting is the EV compensation slider. Simply move it to right to correct underexposed photos or to left to correct over-exposed images.
There are quite a few usages for this filter. The most obvious is when your camera calculated wrong exposition, but this tool can be also used for correcting exposition due the wrong position of subject, such as subject in front of bright light or people in a shadow.

It is usually more natural to correct under-exposed images since this has mostly just compressed dynamic range (all the information is there on picture, but with lower dynamic range) as in opposite to overexposed images where a dynamic clipping occurred. (Not all information is stored in the picture, the bright intensity colors were clipped by the over-exposing).

Hot Pixels Fix
Each CCD on digital camera has millions of pixels sensitive to brightness. These pixels are on a very small space of the CCD chip.The pixels are never the same and each of them has different charge leakage rate.
If you expose the CCD long enough, the pixels thanks to this leakage will simply lighten up even with no light. (Any photosensitive silicon material is sensitive to charge as well) Because of different quality and sensitivity of each pixel, they will start appearing as a noise - but if you would able to expose for much longer, finally all pixels will lighten up.

Hot pixels are visible as a white dots (stars) on the long exposure image. These are different from a normal CCD noise.

The image above shows the place of the Hot Pixels. (The image was sharpened for the purpose of making the dots more visible)

Hot Pixel filter (NR)
This is a special NR filter to correct the Hot Pixels (white dots) if we can't use the black frame method.

Use Black Frame Subtraction method (BF)
This is a more accurate Hot Pixels removal. First you have to have the "Black Frame". This is easy to make. When you finish taking your long exposure shots, put a lens cap on the camera and take one "dark" image with the same exposition time as the images before. This image will be all dark, but with close examination you will see that it has the Hot Pixels (white dots). These are positioned at the same place as on your previous shots. Load this file to the Correction tool using Load BF button. Now the plug-in can be more precisely guided to locate the Hot Pixels. The Filter Slider can be used to adjust the strength of subtraction.
The amount and position of Hot Pixels on your CCD changes with time (days, weeks) and temperature. Therefore it is important to re-shoot the Black Frame next time you are taking the long exposure pictures.
When using Black Frame both NR and BF methods will be used.

All CCD imagers suffer from Hot Pixels, however some more expensive cameras have build-in noise reduction (NR) procedure to overcome this on long exposures. This is often done using the Black Frame subtraction method, that is the camera after the long exposure takes also second "black frame" shot in its buffer and then correct the image based on this.
Many consumer digital cameras don't have longer exposure times - and this is all because of Hot Pixels (some people would think that the CCD is defective). Today CCD's are reasonable up to 1-2 sec of exposure without NR

Lens Distortion Correction
Barrel distortion is associated with wide angle (or minimal zoom) lenses and it causes the images to appear spherical (curved outward). You can notice this when you have straight edge near the side of the image.

As opposite the Pincushion distortion is associated with Telephoto lenses (or maximum zoom) and the images appear pinched (bent inward) toward the center. The Pincushion is often less noticeable than barrel.

Most digital and compact film cameras suffer from this type of distortions especially if it has a zoom lens. The consumer digital cameras have been criticized by many professionals mostly because of their unacceptable lens distortions - effect which shows disturbingly on architectural and similar shots.

Type of Lens Distortion
For wide angle shots select Barrel, for telephoto shots you can use pincushion (may not be needed - depending on the lens)

Repeat Edges (Pincushion only)
When using pincushion correction the result image will normally have a black border in the corner. If you set Repeat Edges then this black border will be replaced by the closest pixel from image. This is far less disturbing especially if you use low correction amount.

Lens Correction slider
For Barrel distortion most digital cameras should be in the range of 10 to 20 promille (or 1 to 2%). In our example above we used 38.6 promille to correct the image which is unusually high and only really wide lenses (or lens with wide add-on) will have to be corrected that much.

Interpolation
The Bi-Cubic produces the best results, but is also the slowest. However it is strongly recommended to use Bi-Cubic.
The Bi-Linear interpolation has more soft-like effect, which may be some times desirable.
The Barrel/Pincushion correction must be done before any Crop or size changes. (Including Perspective Correction). In fact the Barrel/Pincushion should be the very first step on the full image. If you crop image and then use barrel correction the effect would be obviously wrong.

Perspective Correction
With perspective correction you can straighten photos of pictures or buildings when taken from an angle.

Of course, when you try to take a picture of an image, you don't usually choose such a bad angle. You will most likely try to position your camera facing parallel the image on the wall. But sometimes you can't access the best angle (in a museum, for example) or simply there is a strong reflection from a window directly opposite the wall.

Grid
The grid on the large preview has four handles in the corner. By moving these handles, you are changing the perspective of the Grid.
Your goal is to move these handles so the net aligns to the desired perspective of our image. So in our case we will move the handles to align with the 4 corners of the Image frame.
When you do this, you will see that the preview shows the Image with the perspective corrected.

You don't have to drag the exact edge handle - you can click anywhere on the grid and the closest handle will be affected. Also the lines in the grid will help you to align the grid even if you can't see all the edges

Allow Grid outside image
This will let you to drag the corners of the grid also outside the picture edges. This may be good for some incomplete images; however, the result will also be incomplete.

On the image above we needed to drag the lower-right handle beyond the image edge to have as much image in the result as possible. However, the result has obviously missing some parts of the image.

Example other usage
This tool is definitely great for architectural shots since almost always you can't take shot of a building without distorted perspective - simply because you can't get too far from the building.

If the result image suffers from a Barrel Distortion then the right way is always first correct the barrel distortion and then fix the perspective.

Portrait Skin Cleaner
Portrait Skin Cleaner filter is a special filter for a portrait photography. It works on skin and skin tones. It smooths the models skin yet it retain other facial features sharp (such as hair, eyes..)

First it is important to note that the filter is obviously not for every image. It is intended for a portrait images.

The filter works really well on a portrait type of image where the main focus is on a model, not on background.

Enhance Flesh Tones
This will enhance skin-like colors to appear more vibrant and "make-up". It will also try to apply the filter mostly to the skin-color areas.