Can manual adjustments kill your digital camera?

June 6, 2006 12:56 PM

Our digital camera ruined our holiday! I adjusted the manual settings instead of leaving everything automatic. Now everything's distorted... can I salvage anything??

I brought a Canon Digital Ixus v2 to Europe -- it's an old camera (circa 2002) with only 2.0 megapixels, but has always worked great.

My photography is amateur at best, and I'd just discovered the camera's cool settings: white balance and exposure!

The entire vacation I was adjusting the white balance and exposure (which I've never done before), taking cool photos at night and in shadowy alleys. Everything looked fine (amazing even!) on the camera's tiny preview screen, but I got home today and discovered all the pictures are ruined!

The photos are grainy, pixelated, with color distortions. What happened?? Did I play around too much with the settings, causing a fatal accident of white balance/exposure chaos that overloaded my 2.0 megapixel camera? It seems like there was a loss of data, and my camera was just trying to "make up" lost pixel information.

What did I do wrong? Can photoshop correct this? It's still a happy holiday in memory, but I'd like to salvage the digital documentation.

posted by milkdropcoronet to technology (11 comments total)

doubtful, could you add some sample img for us to see ?
posted by elpapacito at 12:59 PM on June 6, 2006

Color distortions are probably due to your experiments with whitebalance. You'll be able to correct for it in photoshop, but you'll likely get some posterization as a result.

The grainyness and the pixellation are probably because of the long exposures you used to get shots photos at night and in shadowy alleys. Again, not much you can do, but NeatImage is probably the best bet.
posted by Good Brain at 1:05 PM on June 6, 2006

D'oh! The disadvantages of posting from work... I'll post some sample photos as soon as I get home to the camera!
posted by milkdropcoronet at 1:06 PM on June 6, 2006

When colour goes wrong or psychedelic, get rid of it. That is, go black and white. You might throw in sepia duotones afterwards. That makes the captured memories tolerable, maybe even lush.
posted by randomstriker at 1:08 PM on June 6, 2006

My best guess would be that your pictures are grainy, pixilated, with color distortions because the camera was set to a high ISO setting, for greater sensitivity in low light. Small digital cameras have very small sensors. Small sensors are much more prone to noise in the image. Noise manifests as the kind of artifacting you describe. On the small LCD of the camera it's hard or impossible to see, it's only when viewing on a bigger monitor that it's apparent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to rectify post-exposure. Later versions of Photoshop and other better imaging software have noise reduction filters that can help and there are (generally not cheap) third-party noise reduction plugins and applications that can be effective. The penalty of noise reduction post-exposure is usually a loss of finer detail in the image.
posted by normy at 1:12 PM on June 6, 2006

Noise Ninja is your friend. Let us see your photos and I may have further advice.

The graininess problem has happened to me too after a night shoot (when I forgot to reset the settings) and I've been able to fix it. I have a Canon S400, 4mpx that I had to learn to use way back when.
posted by seawallrunner at 1:40 PM on June 6, 2006

Listen to normy and seawallrunner
posted by nomad at 2:03 PM on June 6, 2006

I second randomstriker's suggestion. Convert your pictures to B&W.

Here's a page that describes a better technique to convert colour pictures to B&W than an "Image > Desaturate" in Photoshop.
posted by hellhammer at 2:13 PM on June 6, 2006

Yeah, it shouldn't be to hard to fix the colors in photoshop, although the noise would be more difficult.
posted by delmoi at 3:09 PM on June 6, 2006

What did I do wrong?

We'll have to see some examples before we can make an educated guess. Post a picture or two and we'll start our Photoshop engines. Provided you haven't blown out all the details, it should be possible to rescue at least a couple of shots.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:04 PM on June 6, 2006

It can be very easy to fix colour problems (depending on the nature of the problem) using Photoshop adjustment layers.

Fixing pixelation isn't so easy, my common experience with noise removal is that they usually just end up blurring bits of the picture, but that you can sometimes get a cleaner looking image by downsampling the picture a bit.

With the overexposure, maybe you can do something with an adjustment layer there as well.

As everyone else has already said, it's really impossible to know how screwed you are until you get home and share some of your photos.

Lastly, all is not lost. I think in many ways it's better to chimp around with your camera and wreck a few photos than take endless boring ass holiday snaps that almost no one is going to be interested in anyway. 'cos from time to time you'll have one of those magical accidents that leaves you with something wonderful and priceless. Plus, every photo you screw up teaches you something new.
posted by The Monkey at 5:12 PM on June 6, 2006