I have a Canon S-10 and my outside photos have to much contrast to them. usually the faces of my subjects are dark ant they are too far away to use fill-in flash. Is there any way to reduce the contrast even if the background is washed out, I dont think the camera has a spot meter. Thanks for your help Glenn Patch

-- Glenn Patch (glennpatch@hotmail.com), June 01, 2000

Answers

You may be reading the light value off of the background (bright sky) and it underexposes the faces. You should try to lower the camera and make sure the center focus area is on your subject with no sky in the center area. Depress the shutter half way to lock exposure and focus. Re-compose without lifing the shutter and take the picture.

-- Dennis Pereira (dpereira@ultranet.com), June 01, 2000.

This is the property of all the digicams, the higher the the pixel count of the camera is, the worse is this error. With the 2Mp and 3Mp digicams it is very difficult, nearly impossible to correct, they add some seriously cockeyed tweaking over the image data. The Casio 3000ex is the worst in this but Canon s-10 and s-20 are not far from it. The 1.3Mp and maller size digicams only have tweaked transfer- function, images from them are rather easy to correct. With the images from 2Mp and 3Mp digicams, if you try to "open the shadows" then the rest of the image goes totally bad.

I have written a Photoshop filter (or am still currently writing it but it already does a rather good job) for s-10 and s-20 images, I have not found out any image editing procedure that would do the same. Is it possible for you to upload an example image, I will then run the filter over it and we can judde the result.

Are you btw using a PC or a Mac? Mac users see the digicam images a little better than PC users since the Mac OS applies a partical gamma correction in the display path. (Also I believe that people at the Imaging Resource do base their results/opinions on the image appearance in Mac not in PC).

Timo Autiokari http://www.aim-dtp.net

-- Timo Autiokari (timothy@clinet.fi), June 02, 2000.

Not very experienced, so this might not be useful... but doesn't the S-10 default to center-weighted metering? Have you tried switching to spot metering and, as a previous reply suggested, metering directly on your subject by pressing the shutter button half-way, then composing and shooting your shot?

-- Greg Philmon (gphilmon@yahoo.com), June 02, 2000.