Hello,

I just bought a Sony Mavica 7.1 (new). It is a wonderful camera, but I am having a little trouble with the images once I bring them into my sofware.

I am photographing small base metal jewelry items. I attache them to a white piece of cardstock and then use the Mavica to put them on disk.

When I view them on my computer, I always get some unexpected background color, like a murky gray or blue.

Does anyone know what could be wrong?

When looking through the viewfinder on the camera, the background shows as white.

I viewed them on a friends computer and the same thing happened.

Whatever is going on is a permanent change. If I put the items on my webpage, the same murky color is there.

I also have a scanner and have had this problem with scanned photographs also.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

-- Kathy Wujek (aimee@theramp.net), April 19, 1999

Answers

Most (if not all) cameras will not output true white on the computer or printer. Digital editing software would be required to produce true white. I use Microsoft Picture It!99. With this software you select the "correct tint" entity which comes up with an eye dropper. By selecting an area that is suppose to be white the software will automatically correct the overall tint of the image. It works great and is easy to use. Good Luck!

-- Bill Kap (kap@funtech.com), April 20, 1999.

Kathy: I think there are a lot of important details missing from your description - so I'll make some assumptions. If I'm way off base then just ignore me (my friends do). I'll assume you are simply judging the color you see in the viewfinder as "white". This is really not reliable. These little monitors and LCD screens are convenient, but not calibrated for usefulness in determining color ballance. Don't trust them. Your Sony comes with a white ballance capability, I have the FD91 and it has both an automatic and manual mode. If you want accurate color use only the manual mode. Point the camera at a white piece of paper that fills the frame, and white balance it. You will be providing the camera with a "reference" to the color white. A properly aligned camera will now interpret all colors properly based on this calibration. Auto white balance constantly looks for average colors, mixes them all up and assumes they add together to make white. In many cases this works very nicely - but not always. It's particularly acute if you have a dominant non-white color in your frame, and this is typical when you do mostly close up work. Stick with manual white balance. Your LCD viewfinder should be pretty close, but it will never be accurate. If it's really far off then you should get the camera repaired. Another mistake often made is when a user tries to use the viewfinder to judge exposure. Bad idea. There are too may variables, learn to use the camera's meter and trust it ONLY. Trying to judge exposure in the viewfinder will yield wildly differing results depending on factors such as ambient light, color temperature of ambient light, the temperature of the device, the contrast and brightness setting of the viewfinder - and a whole host of other uncontrollable variables. Exposure effects color - and under exposure particularly contributes to "muddiness". Take your camera and do several test shots under various lighting conditions. "Bracket" your exposures - shoot several at different EV settings (-1.5, -1, -.5, 0 +.5, +1, +1.5) of the same scene and then settle on a setting that yields the best results - then trust it. You may find that you need one setting for outside and another for inside. (and you thought this would be easy!) You may have to make occasional adjustments for heavy backlighting, but you'll figure this out quickly. Remember that LCD's simply do not have the exposure lattitude of the camera's CCD. Things will always be more contrasty in your viewfinder then in the final image.

OK, in this lesson you learned to:

1. ALWAY White Ballance Manually 2. Set and trust your cameras exposure meter

Try these and see what happens. Enjoy and have fun with it.

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@avstarnews.com), April 22, 1999.