scott wrote:
>> - "Colour balance" has three options:
>>   - "Normal".
>>   - "Indoor", which makes the picture slightly more blue.
>>   - "Outdoor", which makes the picture slightly more yellow.
> 
> So obviously you will need to tweak these later in an image program.  
> Take a photo of something white in the same location to get a good 
> reference for later post-processing.

I have had some limited success with this. Certainly if the problem is 
the image having too much of one colour, that's usually fixable. What 
isn't fixable is lighting problems. (E.g., part of the image is 
correctly lit, but everything else is too dark.)

>> It has slightly more colour now, but it's nothing like the lush greens 
>> and deep browns you'd see in a glossy magazine.
> 
> Just tweak it as much as you want in your software - I didn't want to 
> make it look too fake though.  Here's your other photo attached.  With 
> digital it's so easy to make it look so much better.

Now that's more like it. (Although, again, obviously you can't do much 
about the over-exposed leaves.)

>> Once the picture is taken, any detail which isn't captured in the 
>> image is gone forever, and can never be brought back. You can turn the 
>> brightness up or down, but you can't turn pure black (or pure white) 
>> into detail.
> 
> That is why it is very important that the exposure is not set too high 
> when you take the photo.

Or too low, for that matter.

>> If you're lucky, you might be able to reveal the JPEG compression 
>> artifacts, but that is all.
> 
> IME cameras save JPEG with extremely low compression, like the 1/100 
> setting in an image editor.

My camera has several image quality settings. Unfortunately, as I 
explained, it eats batteries. If you're not using the camera even for 
five minutes, you have to take the batteries out or they won't last the 
day. Unfortunately that resets all the settings, which you then have to 
go and put back in. Most particularly, the camera defaults back to 
lower-resolution images.

Anyway, the available settings are "1 MP", "2 MP", "3 MP Natural" and "3 
MP Fine". The difference between the last two is in the amount of JPEG 
compression. (It's plausible there's also some image sharpening or 
something, but that doesn't appear to be the case.)

>> You also can't focus a fuzzy image
> 
> Your photos didn't look fuzzy to me.

These ones aren't, no. I was just making the point.

>> In short, post-processing is a hopeless task.
> 
> Professionals would disagree with you.

Professionals would have taken decent photos in the first place. ;-)

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