Need Help with Big Printer Problem!

by Carl Farley for Priss Fletcher . . .  

I need help!  We  have an HP PSC 2210 All-In-One printer that is “stuck.”  After removing a jammed piece of paper, the message continues to read “Clear carriage jam, and then press Enter.”  We have done this and tried several other possible solutions in our HP manual to no avail.   Does anyone have a suggestion?  I’ve tried an interesting source for ideas FixYourOwnPrinter.com, but not being much of a techie, some of the ideas are over my head?  Maybe the solution is just to buy a new one.  Sam’s has good prices.  Any low tech ideas would be appreciated.

Taking Photos with an Infrared Camera…how to increase IR light?

by Carl Farley for Bryan Edmonson . . .

I have a budget camera with infrared but it will only film objects about 2-4 feet away, in complete darkness.Do you know how I can find out more about Infrared light sources (like a separate IR projection lamp) . I would illuminate with high IR light levels, so as to be able to see film and clearly see a whole room in complete darkness. Should I Google, Wikipedia? Can you suggest a newsgroup? What would you suggest? I value the opinions of your SIG members. Thanks.

HELP!…New Bride’s Wedding Dress is too White!

by Carl Farley for Dick and Betty Brotzman . . .  

I need to reduce illumination on one SEGMENT (one person) of a photo (bride in a wedding photo.) Others in tuxedos and dark clothes look fine.  Blonde bride in white dress has an eerie white, ghostly glow. 

Can this be done with no-cost photo editing software?  Which? What is the process to do this?

All help would be TRULY appreciated.  I need to do this soon to keep bride happy.

Need Help with Rechargable Li Ion Batteries

by Carl Farley for Canadaman . . .

I have a camera (Kodak Z-712-IS) that seems to be drawing a lot of power.  The Lithium Ion battery that came with the camera only lasted a couple hundred pictures (but I did have it on auto focus all of the time). Anyway, I have tried rechargeable NIMH batteries and only get like 10 pictures before they need to be recharged.  Does anybody have any idea about rechargeable Lithium Ion batteries? What’s wrong with my batteries or ???

Need Help with Kodak Photo CD .pcd Images

by Carl Farley for John Yoder . . .

I have a project that I am working on that requires use of some images that I shot in the mid 90’s.  The problem is that I had the 35 mm film developed and put on a Kodak Photo CD  disc for digital images (.pcd).  I inserted the disc into my PC hoping to transfer the images to my hard drive.  I can’t read the files with a recent copy of  Photoshop Elements 5.0.  The Windows XP image SW is of no use. What do I do, short of digging out my original slides and re-scanning, or cranking up my old (hope it still works) 486 Windows 98 machine that I used to use with an earlier Adobe SW (can’t remember the name) to read these images just fine?

The problem is that Kodak stopped supporting this ARCHIVAL SYSTEM in 1998, thus ensuring the images would be forever protected from misuse, since nobody can read them anymore.  I have heard, though, that Photoshop (PRO) SW has the capability of reading these files?  Maybe a third party SW is available for use with Elements 5.0?  Any help will be much appreciated.

Another Way to Share Photos and Videos . . . Online

by Carl Farley forwarded from a member . . .

I have a lot of photos and several videos that I took using my digital camera that I would like to share with relatives living far away. I tried to send them by email, but the files are too large.How can I share pictures and videos?

Here’s the way I worked out. This is also a way to have files that you can access from both your home and work computers.

Head on over to www.zdrive.com and open a free account. Use a username and password that you don’t mind sharing with friends and family, since you will need to give them the username and password so they can view the files.Once you have made an account, you will need to check your email to get a message from Zdrive with a link in it, click on the link, and your account will be all set up.

Once your account is set up, you can go to www.zdrive.com and log into your account using the username and password you selected.You will see that there are three folders in your account, My Documents, My Music, and My Pictures. You can create more folders if you wish using the “Create Folder” button at the top of the page.

Click on the Folder you want to store your videos in, and a new page will load for that folder. Now, click on the “Upload” icon near the top of the page.

In the Upload page, you will have five sections, each with a browse button. Click on the top “Browse” button, find your file, click on it, then click the “Open” button.

You can repeat this process for the other four files, but you should  note that you can’t go over 200MB with the five files.

When you have selected your file or files, click on the blue “Send” button to copy the file from your computer to zdrive’s servers. When it is finished, you will see your files listed in the folder.

When you are done uploading files, you can send an email message to your family and friends. Just tell them to go to www.zdrive.com and log in using your username and password.They can check off the files they want, then click on the “Download” button at the top of the page.

Does anybody else use this approach?

How to Shoot a Polar Bear in the Snow? . . . this is not a joke!

One of our members is going far up north in Canada soon and wants to bring back some great photos of polar bears. But, everything is white except the nose, eyes, etc.!

Does anybody have any experience with this or have any suggestions to offer?

I also suggested that they send me some photos to post on this blog so we can all take a crack at making them look better with our software, like we did with the Christmas tree/grandkids picture earlier.

Keep watching this blog post as we’ll all learn from this one! 

How Do You Transfer Audio Cassette Tapes to a CD?

Members ask me this question from time to time and I don’t have a good answer since I’ve never done it. Has anybody out there done this before? Please comment on this blog.

Here’s a hot link to a Google search on the subject:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=%22convert+cassette+tape+to+cd%22&spell=1 

Thanks for your interest in helping fellow members.

Any Suggestions on Scanning Slides . . . How and Who?

by Carl Farley for Harry House . . .

Harry “cleaned out” over 800 slides that were about 50 years old. Now, he wants to digitize them but knows it’ll be a big job. See the many suggestions offered below.

Presentation on Camera RAW Format . . . What is it?

By Carl Farley for Guy Thibodau . . .

The presentation on the RAW format, although excellent from a technical standpoint, was a great overkill and actually presented a lot of misinformation on its value for the average digital camera user. About the only time it would be useful to me would be when I made such a gross error in exposure that I found it necessary to recover an image which even when recovered would be extremely poor at best. I’ve had little trouble getting an image which pleases me using any of a number of image enhancement programs which correct color balance, brightness, contrast, levels and hue/saturation, etc. The other problem with the raw format is that the file size is greater than 10 megapixels, more than ten times as much as a good high resolution JPEG image.

The best part of the presentation was alerting the user about the value of a gray card for exposure and color temperature (balance) corrections.

Going back to basics, what most people desire is an image of something they wished to view, keep, or share with someone else. The limiting factor on image quality is the resolution of the lens used by the camera. You could have a terepixel chip to save the image, but who cares if it was a very high quality lousy image.

As many have discussed, the camera image never represents the actual colors (shades and hues) represented by the existing lighting conditions. I can’t remember an image I’ve taken at any of the many JPEG formats that I couldn’t make more pleasing to me by some form of image manipulation. My current cameras, a medium priced Kodak camera suitable for all but the advanced amateurs or professionals, have 7.1 megapixel and an 8.2 megapixel Olympus Prosumer camera with an excellent lens. “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”.

Likewise, although the eye is a remarkable photographic instrument, unless you are a hawkeye, there is no way you can distinguish more than perhaps 20 shades and I’m not too sure how many colors and hues you can distinguish. A RAW image is useful for nit picking magazine editors who probably airbrushed the image or did some other artistic enhancement.

If you enhance an image with Picasa2 it only saves the algorithm instructions to enhance the image. The original image is always retained so it is also lossless. The basic problem with Picasa2 is that it does lousy color corrections and can’t clone burn or dodge parts of the image.

The newest version of Irfanview 4.0 is also a freebee. It also does a lot of image enhancements and corrections and file manipulations. Another good program to enhance small images is Genuine Fractals. It can convert a smaller image (megapixels) to a much larger image (megapixels). It does this by some algorithm which interpolates the data between the pixels in the smaller image and expands it to a larger image. The cheap version limits the file you can work on. The full version allows working with larger files.

Perhaps, the best way to judge your camera’s capability is to go to dpreview.com and see if it is on the list which has been evaluated. Usually there are many pictures taken under different situations, lens resolution charts and almost every possible type of data an advanced amateur or professional would want.