Here’s a pop quiz: What company sold the most cameras worldwide last year?
If you said Kodak or Canon or Nikon or Olympus, you’re wrong.
It was Nokia. And, get this, the cameras all came included with a cell phone.
The camera phone picture is only going to get bigger, too. Industry forecasts say that 420 million camera phones will be sold this year, a huge jump over 2004 when 260 million were sold worldwide.
This is a computer column, so we’ll leave it to others to fret, as the Texas legislature recently did, over issues like imposing a $10,000 fine and two years in jail for anyone surreptitiously taking pictures for sexual gratification without the subject’s consent.
For that matter, save your minutes and feel free to clip out the tiny photograph above. It’s an image of about the same quality you’d get with a cell phone.
That question of quality is why a computer columnist might have something to offer about this particular global trend.
Already the human race is drowning in billions of still fuzzy, grainy, poorly lighted, ill-composed, too-tiny-to-print images stored on cell company computers where the picture-takers pay storage fees–not to mention transmission costs–by the upload and download minute.
Personal computers cannot turn these shots into National Geographic-quality 8-by-10 glossies, but there are software titles and techniques aplenty that can make the tiny shots more than passable.
Software like the $99 Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 on a Mac or PC can be used with a few simple tools to clean up, brighten and tighten into frame-worthy pictures those tiny images that start on a cell phone screen.
For that matter, just about all of the photo tweaking programs for personal computers include tools to handle the basics that will make eye-popping improvements in your cell pictures.
Here come the mandatory basics:
Except for a few nosebleed expensive models, cell cameras turn out images in the 640-by-480-pixel range and more often even less. Digital cameras are rated by the total number of single dots, called pixels, the images contain. So 640 multiplied by 480 gives you a 1.2-megapixel image. That’s mighty small potatoes considering that a proper digital camera today needs at least 4 megapixels to turn out photos comparable to drugstore prints.
Please put up with just one more set of numbers, those measuring resolution in dots per inch, or dpi. A cell phone-quality 1.2-megapixel photo has a resolution between 72 and 100 pixels per inch, or ppi. Dots are for inkjet and laser printers while pixels are the single dots that make up a video image.
You really need at least 300 dots per inch to make a passable print in the popular 4-by-6-inch range.
So with cell phone pictures you have 2 choices: Confine your viewing to the video screen where 72 ppi delivers substantial clarity or use software to jack up the dpi quality of your images when you want prints.
Photo tweaking software uses a technique called re-sampling to increase the resolution of a digital image. The most common sampling tool is called bicubic and it works by comparing each pixel with the ones directly above, below and on both sides to create more pixels with the same color, brightness, hue and saturation.
This creates a much larger computer file and turns out images that can be printed around 300 dpi on inkjets or laser jets to produce larger pictures. These larger pictures will look less sharply defined than when they are smaller images, but they tend to be pretty presentable even as 8 by 10s.
While it is possible to use software to resample small pictures into resolutions far larger than 300 dpi, experts tend to advise that after 300 dpi the improvements are very small.
And remember that no matter what you get told on CSI: There is no magic software that is going to read the labels on soup cans snapped by a cell phone from across the kitchen. When formulas like bicubic sampling are done, the result is a version just as blurry as what is already visible to the eye.
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Since the blowups of small pictures lack the same clarity of smaller shots, there are tools to sharpen the edges between groups of pixels that greatly improve printed results.
In Photoshop, the most commonly used of these tools is called Unsharp Mask. It uses a set of slider bars to increase the intensity of images while a Preview function lets you watch the changes in real time.
Another powerful tool here lets users adjust contrast and brightness of mid-tones, highlights and shadows separately. Finally a Hue/Saturation adjustment can make colors much brighter, greatly improving things.
Keep in mind that all of these fixes are cosmetic. They make cell snaps look far better than they began, but nothing can make these images more complete.
It reminds this cell camera addict of how my grandparents loved to have artists colorize the candid pictures they snapped using their Kodak Brownies, which I am pretty sure were legal even in Texas.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.