[Digikam-users] What's the easiest way to lighten some underexposed pictures?

[gerlos]

On venerdì 02 ottobre 2009 16:33:35, Chris G wrote:
> I have a dozen or so pictures taken with my Fuji S8000fd which are
> somewhat dark because I left the camera set on the 'Sunset' position
> by mistake.  By the looks of the pictures all that the Sunset setting
> does is to underexpose by a stop or so.
> 
> What is the *simplest* way to simply lighten the pictures somewhat
> using Digikam?  I don't want to spend hours on each image trying to
> get the best out of it as they're not incredibly important but it
> would be good to just make them a bit better to look at.

Maybe the "right" tool for this kind of things is the batch queue manager from the latest digikam release, but afaik the only tool you may find useful for your purpose is the automatic color correction tool, that may do what you need or not, it depends on the images. It would be nice if we could use the curves tool in the batch queue manager, but it not seems possible at the moment.

Another way, is just to open the first image in the editor, do the changes you need for example using the curves or the leves tool, save and then move to the second image, using PageUp or PageDown or the arrow buttons in the toolbar. If you try to open the same tool in the next image, you will see that the settings are the same of the previous, so you just need to click "OK" to apply the changes. This way you just open the image, apply the changes, save and go to the next. Maybe not the fastest and most elegant way of doing, but it should work.

There are a lot of other ways to get the same result not using digikam, for example you could use imagemagick from the command line or script gimp. For a gui tool you can try Phatch (http://photobatch.stani.be/); I didn't try it, but seems easy and useful.

regards
gerlos

-- 
"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more
of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something
else. The trick is the doing something else."
           < http://gerlos.altervista.org >
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