Not work not geo: photo edits

As I started posting more photos on Flickr! in Kuwait, I toyed with simple improvements that adjust color and contrast. It helps mitigate over-exposure bright desert sunlight, and remove 'haze' in difficult lighting such as high altitude flying or mountains, or add virtual fill-in flash enhancing dark foregrounds. I cannot however help with the original pixel count - my phone camera has a decent 3.2 mpels @ 300dpi, but lower-res scans of JPEG settings cannot be helped much especially in sharpening due to their low pixel count.

Slide scanned 96dpi, output 300dpi 24bit 1800x1200 pixel JPEG


Microsoft Office 2007 Picture Manager Autofix


Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 > Quick Fix > Smart Fix


Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 > Quick Fix > All options

How photos are recorded and saved may belie the actual pixel counts in the file. For example my Dad's Kodachrome 64 slide above has nominally 20 megapixels, but wasn't scanned at full resolution and was saved in JPEG format - see here for details. If you look at them in full-size - click on them above twice, or save locally and open at 100% - you see the step-wise pixelation and colour banding that can only be exacerbated by the last steps above. In other words over-processing can degrade not enhance photos.