(1) How does Digital Photo Finalizer make my photos look better?

The automatic photo enhancement done by Digital Photo Finalizer primarily tries to expand the 'dynamic range' of your photos. Dynamic range is the range of tones from white to black that are displayed in an image. Digital cameras sometimes don't take advantage of the full dynamic range available in digital photos. The result can be 'foggy' pictures. Digital Photo Finalizer analyzes each photo separately to make the best use of each photo's dynamic range.

(2) Will Digital Photo Finalizer make all of my photos look better?

The amount of enhancement depends on each individual photo. If you have a photo that already makes use of most of its dynamic range (e.g. there are dark, true blacks as well as bright, true whites already) then Digital Photo Finalizer might not do much to the image. On other photos you will see a more dramatic improvement.

(3) What does the 'Allow HUE adjustment' option do? Should I use it?

By default Digital Photo Finalizer only adjusts the 'tone' of an image. Adjusting the 'tone' can make an image lighter, darker, or change its contrast. This does not change 'hue'. For example, without hue adjustment allowed, a blue color might be changed to be a darker blue or a lighter blue, but it won't be made to be red or green. If the 'Allow hue adjustment' option is checked ON, then Digital Photo Finalizer will be allowed to change blue to red or blue to green if needed. Generally, it is more conservative to leave this option unchecked, and then turn it on only for photos which have bad lighting or otherwise have incorrect color. Anyway, it is easy to check this option on and off to try it out and see the effect any image.

(4) What does the 'Size of automatic adjustment' control do?

Digital Photo Finalizer analyzes each photo individually and basically tries to stretch the dynamic range of each image so that the blacks are dark enough and the whites are bright enough. When you look at the results, if you think that the changes that were made were too strong, then you can reduce the changes by sliding the 'Size of automatic adjustment' slider to a negative number. Sliding it all the way to -5 will cause almost no adjustment to be made to your images. Sliding it to a positive number will make stronger adjustments to your images.

(5) What is the 'Extra lightness adjustment'?

The 'Extra lightening adjustment' gives you a chance to manually adjust the overall lightness of your image. This lightness adjustment (otherwise known as a 'gamma' adjustment) is very useful because it effectively lightens images while maintaining most of the image detail. This is extremely useful for backlit images or images taken with inadequate flash lighting.

(6) What is the 'Dark/Light Area' adjustment and when would I use it?

The 'Dark/Light areas' adjustments are two controls that separately adjust either the dark or light areas of an image. Moving these slider controls to the right makes detail in the dark/light image areas more visible but reduces contrast in those areas. Moving these slider controls to the left makes the dark/light areas of your image crisper (more contrast) but can clip detail in those regions. Usually you will be using these controls to salvage detail from the dark or light areas of a photo that is poorly exposed. For example, if you have a photo of a person and the scene is backlit (sun is behind the person), then the person's face is likely in a shadow. To remedy this, sliding the 'Dark area adjustment' control to the right can make the details of the person's face more visible. It will fix the exposure of the face and other dark areas in the image but will not affect the other parts of the image.

(7) What is the 'save to zip' batch processing option?

The 'save to zip' option will create a 'zip' compressed file and places all processed photos into that single file. This is very convenient when you want to attach many multiple photos to an email. Instead of having to attach one photo at a time, you can just attach (and download) the one zip file.

(8) What does the 'Skin Tone Finalizer' feature do?

The 'Skin Tone Finalizer' feature refers to the controls on the 'Fix skin tone' tab of the Digital Photo Finalizer main window. It is a really critical feature to use when working with photos of people. Skin tones are regarded in photography as a 'memory color'. This means that most people know exactly what it should look like and are very sensitive to small changes in skin color. Digital cameras usually do not do as good a job as they could capturing skin tones, especially in indoor lighting situations. Cameras have to make a 'best guess' about the color of the light in a scene, and then adjust the image accordingly. The results are often imperfect. The 'Skin Tone Finalizer' feature in Digital Photo Finalizer specifically adjusts skin tones in your image to make them just right. You just click on the skin tone, and it is adjusted to match your selected 'aim' color.

(9) How does the 'Skin Tone Finalizer' change skin color? Does skin lightness matter?

The 'Skin Tone Finalizer' changes the 'hue' and 'chroma' (saturation) of the skin tone colors in your image. The definition of 'hue' is the color angle (e.g. the difference between red-green-blue-yellow). The definition of 'chroma' (saturation) is the amount of color (e.g. the difference between a pale color and a deep color). No lightness adjustments are made. Furthermore, the same 'hue' and 'chroma' adjustments are made regardless of the skin lightness (these adjustments are equally effective for any skin lightness).

(10) How can I make emailing photos easier with Digital Photo Finalizer?

The 'resizing' and 'batch processing' options make preparing photos for emailing much easier. Suppose you have a folder full of photos from a vacation and you want to pick a few out to email to someone. You will want to select a few 'good' photos from the many that you took, possibly give them meaningful names (e.g. 'Trip to Florida...' instead of 'CP003948'), resize the photos, make sure the photo colors/exposure is good, and then save them into a folder or single zip file. In Digital Photo Finalizer you would do all this just by turning on the resize option, and then using the 'batch processing' feature to do the rest. It is fast and simple. You can also save your selected photos to a single zip file in order to make attaching and downloading easier.

(11) When is it good to use the sharpening feature?

The sharpening feature adds perceived sharpness and detail to any photo. Scene images with lots of detail benefit most from extra sharpening. For example, nature photos (trees, leaves, beaches, etc.) greatly benefit from sharpening. In portrait photos, a certain amount of smoothness to de-emphasize blemishes is desirable, and so extra sharpening is not always as important. When using sharpening, remember to use the special 'sharpening preview' window (by clicking the 'Preview' button on the sharpening tab page) to accurately see the effect of sharpening on your image. Sharpening is NOT shown in the 'Final Image' preview image. This is because image sharpness and noise can only reliably be judged when a photo is shown at its natural resolution.