Ixus II : Pictures are dark, need help!

[janeyee]

Hi!

I bought my Ixus II for quite some time.
I did play around with it but I am having a little bit problem now with the pictures taken. It was ok before. Nonetheless, the pictures seems to be quite dark now. I do not know what setting I configured made them dark.

Need advise :?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Desperate,
Jane

[dtrayers]

Are they dark when in the Auto mode (the camera icon)? If Auto is ok but the Manual mode is dark, check the metering mode. You may have it set to spot metering and you may get dark results as the camera will meter on just the center of the scene. If it's a light region then the camera will try to make it neutral and everything will look dark.

Are the pictures dark when you load them into your computer or just when reviewing on the screen? If they're ok in the computer then check the brightness of the LCD in the menu options.

If the above doesn't help, post a picture with the EXIF data and we'll have a look. If you can't post a picture or don't know how send me a private message and you can e-mail it to me.

[janeyee]

Hi Dave,

The pictures are dark when I take it in the manual mode.
What is the metering mode? How do I check if I have done anything with it.

They are ok on the LCD screen but dark when it's loaded into the PC.

Also, what is EXIF data? What's the use of that?

Sorry for so many questions but I would really want to learn all these...

Thanks a lot in advance!!!

Cheers,
Jane

[dtrayers]

Hi Jane,

The EXIF data is information recorded with the picture that contains the date and time, camera model, camera settings (shutter speed, apterture, ISO), whether the flash was used, etc.

The Zoombrowser software that came with your camera can display this information. EXIF data is one of the nice things about digital. 25 years ago when I was learning photography in school we had to write all that stuff down. :lol:

As far as the metering modes, look on pages 82 and 83 of your manual. Either you have the metering mode not set to "evaluative" or more likey you have the exposure compensation set to a negative number (like -1 or -2). You would use exposure compensation when the background is very different in brighness than the subject. Like a skier on a snowy ski slope. All that bright snow will fool the camera into thinking that it's very bright and it till try to tone it down. So the snow comes out medium and the subject is dark. You would adjust a +1 or +2 exposure compenstation to force the camera to keep the snow white. You can read about what they do in your manual.

To read more about all this stuff I would go here:

http://www.camera.canon.com.my/archive/photography/art.htm

It's focused (no pun intended) on SLR type cameras, but many of the points apply to a point and shoot like the SD100.

Lemme know how you make out.

[janeyee]

Hi Dave,

I tried doing what you suggested and the pictures seemed improved.
However, still a bit dark.

This is a link to a photo taken most recently after I tried several times.
http://www.asiancolours.com/jane/BktMerah%20023.jpg

It was a real sunny day. but the photo is not bright.

What do you suggest?

Thanks.
Jane

[dtrayers]

What your photo lacks is contrast, not brightness.

Do you use the histogram function on your camera? You should. It'll give you a good idea if a scene is properly exposed or not.

Have a read here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-histograms.shtml

Michael uses his D-SLR camera as an example, but the same applies to the IXUS-II.

Here is the histogram of your picture:
http://home.comcast.net/~dtrayers/photos/histogram.jpg

You'll see that it's very centered, meaning that there isn't a lot of bright or dark in the scene. It's not good or bad, it just is. It looks like there was somewhat of a haze which makes for a low contrast scene.

One more thing to keep in mind is that the exposure system in your camera (or any modern camera) is calculating the exposure based on a middle gray tone. It trys to make everything middle gray (also known as 18% gray). You can read about that and more here: http://www.photo.net/making-photographs/exposure

In the case of your photo, the camera tried to exposed the scene based on this 18% gray. It was actually brighter than that, so you should have used a little exposure compensation to compensate. How much? It depends on the scene, but the histogram would give you a clue. You know that the clouds should have been close to very white, and there is a little room on the histogram to the right. So you could have added a something like +1 exposure compensation and tried to get the histogram to just touch the right side. In that case the clouds would be almost pure white with little detail. But since this was a low contrast scene, adding exposure compensation would have probably made the lake and island too light.

The better way to adjust the scene is in your computer. I don't know what photo editing software you have, but you should find the tool called 'Levels' or something similar. Here's you photo after I did a levels adjustment:

http://home.comcast.net/~dtrayers/photos/levels.jpg

With the levels adjustment I spread the histogram so it spanned the entire range.

You can find out more about levels on the two web sites above. There's a lot of infomation there.

Let me know if you need more info...