Author: Abdullah Yahya

With so many video codecs and containers, it’s easy to get confused. Here’s a simple explanation.

Codec (Video Format)

Codec stands for coder-decoder. Video codecs are algorithms for encoding and decoding video data.

• An encoder compresses video streams, which reduces the amount of data for storage and transmission.
• A decoder reverses the conversion for playing or editing a video stream.

For simplicity, you can think of a video codec as the video format.

Examples of video codecs are H.261, H.263, VC-1, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVS1, AVS2, AVS3, VP8, VP9, AV1, AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266, EVC, LCEVC

Currently, the most popular codec is AVC/H.264.

Container (File Format)

With respect to video, a container is a data storage. It can include compressed video and audio sequences, subtitles, service information and metadata. It is a package or bundle.

For simplicity, you can think of a media container as the file format.

Examples of media containers are MPEG-1 System Stream, MPEG-2 Program Stream, MPEG-2 Transport Stream, MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, FLV, IVF, MXF, HEIC

Currently, the most popular container is MP4.

There are many ways and tools you can enhance a photo. If you’re a professional photographer, then you’ll likely have advanced methods, but for the average person, you’ll probably just want some quick and easy solutions. Like most average people, my photos are mostly taken from my phone (currently, Google Pixel 8). However, when vacationing, I also take a lot of video using my Insta360 X3 camera, and I’ll occasionally want to take snapshots of a video frame to add to my photo collection. With this in mind, here’s my current (simple) workflow for upscaling and enhancing photos.

Enhance a Photo Using Google Photos

First, upload your photo to Google Photos. Then, use one of the presets to enhance the photo. Here’s an example photo without any enhancements applied.

The average person might that the photo looks fine, but it can significantly be improved. Here’s how the photo looks when you click on each of the suggested improvement options.

Note that Color Pop tried to isolate the subject and convert everything else to grayscale. It’s not perfect because the subject’s right arm is partially gray. To fix this, you could select the subject in Photoshop either manually or automatically, invert the selection, and convert the selection to grayscale.

Now, let’s say that you have a heavily underexposed (dark) photo. (Learn more about under and overexposed photos).

If you click the “Enhance” or “Dynamic” options, you’ll get this.

For comparison, here are the photo’s input levels in Photoshop.

If I were to manually correct the exposure in Photoshop, this is what I’d get.

The photo is significantly improved, but it doesn’t look exactly like it does using the Google Photos presets.

If the Google Photos presets don’t look good enough, you can make many adjustments in the Settings tab. In the example below, I started by choosing the “Dynamic” preset, and then in the Settings tab, I increased the brightness.

So, for the average person, using Google Photos to improve photos is easy and usually adequate.

Enhance a Photo Using Topaz Photo AI

Topaz Photo AI can do many things to a photo, including

• remove noise
• sharpen
• adjust lighting
• balance color
• recover faces
• preserve text
• upscale

You can also just run autopilot and let Topaz choose settings for you.

For me, I mainly use Topaz to enlarge (upscale) photos, remove noise, which can result from adjusting the levels of a heavily underexposed photo, and to sharpen photos. These improvements are particularly useful when I take a snapshot of a 1920×1080 video frame. For example, here’s a frame from a video.

I want to zoom in on the subject, crop it, enlarge it, and enhance it. Here’s the zoomed-in part cropped. The dimensions are 1048 x 589 px.

Now, I’ll drag it into Topaz and run autopilot to upscale and enhance the photo. It will take a minute to process. Here’s how the photo looks enlarged by 34% before enhancing it with Topaz.

Here’s how it looks with Topaz enhancements applied.

There is a difference, but it will be more obvious when you zoom in. Below is a comparison zoomed in at 67% before and after using Topaz.

At this point, you can copy the upscaled and sharpened photo from Topaz and paste it into Google Photos to enhance it.

Topaz Photo AI isn’t perfect, but depending on the original photo, it can often product amazing results.

Chances are you’ve taken photos where the faces are too dark. This can be due to a low-quality camera and/or incorrect camera settings. Fortunately, there is a way to easily fix this using Photoshop. As an example, I’ll use this photo of me in the Wynwood district of Miami (below). Notice how my face lacks detail because it’s underexposed (too dark).

Levels

First, I like to check and adjust the levels for the image. Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels. You’ll see a histogram like this

In the input levels, there are 3 markers from left to right

• black marker (left) = shadows
• gray marker (middle) = midtones
• white marker (right) = highlights

The left and right markers should touch the left and right edges of the histogram. In this case, there is a small gap between the right marker and the right edge of the histogram, meaning the image is a little underexposed. If we move the right marker to the right edge of the histogram, the image will become a little brighter.

In this particular example, this adjustment isn’t significant. But, if there’s a big gap in the histogram like this

then adjusting the levels will make a big improvement to your image.

Exposure

If adjusting the levels doesn’t brighten your subject’s face enough, you can adjust the exposure of just the face. First, make a circular selection around a face.

Then, add a feather to it. Select > Modify > Feather. For a 1920 x 1080 image, I create a 50-pixel feather.

Then, adjust the exposure by going to Adjustments > Exposure

You will see a slider for Exposure. Drag it to the right to increase the exposure.

Notice how the face is brighter.

If I increase the exposure too much, the face will look nice and bright, but it won’t look natural against the darker surroundings.

The problem is there appears to be a white glow around the face. In this case, I can select just the subject or the subject’s face to limit the exposure adjustment area. In this case, no feather is needed.

Now, only the subject is brightened.

I can also tweak the levels by adjusting the shadows and the midtones so that the subject doesn’t look unnaturally bright against a darker background.

Before and After

As you can see in the before and after image below, my face looks much brighter while still appearing natural.

Many people wonder why their website doesn’t rank high for a particular keyword. Let’s take cybersecurity as an example because I am familiar with that space. A cybersecurity company usually has products and events, and a need to market them. One type of product is a tool to manage vulnerabilities. The industry refers to the topic as “vulnerability management” or “VM”. Marketers would then often ask, “why isn’t my VM product page showing up at the top of Google when people search for “vulnerability management”. Likewise, if the company has an annual user conference with session talks about cybersecurity, marketers will again often ask why their conference website doesn’t show up for the keyword “cybersecurity”. The main reason lies in search intent.

Search Intent

When people search for “vulnerability management” or “cybersecurity”, they are most likely not searching for a VM product or a cybersecurity conference. These generic terms likely indicate that they are searching for information about them rather than a tool or a conference. Consequently, search results for those terms show informational pages containing content explaining what they are as if a user searched for “what is vulnerability management” or “what is cybersecurity”.

There are 4 types of search intent:

• Navigational intent: Users want to find a specific page (e.g., “reddit login”)
• Informational intent: Users want to learn more about something (e.g., “what is seo”)
• Commercial intent: Users want to do research before making a purchase decision (e.g., “best coffee maker”)
• Transactional intent: Users want to complete a specific action, usually a purchase (e.g., “buy subaru forester”)

Therefore, for the VM tool and cybersecurity conference examples above, the correct search terms to check would be something like

• (best) vulnerability management tool
• cybersecurity conference

The qualifiers “tool” and “conference” make it clear what people’s search intent is so they find content relevant to what they are actually looking for. But how do you know what keywords people are searching for? This is where keyword research tools come in.

Keyword Research

To do keyword research, you can use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner or a paid tool like Semrush. I’ll use Google Keyword Planner. You can use it to

• discover new keywords and
• get keyword search volume and forecasts.

Continuing with our example, let’s see how many people search for the following keywords:

• vulnerability management
• vulnerability management tool
• cybersecurity
• cybersecurity conference

I enter those keywords as shown below…

and Google spits out the following data

The keyword “vulnerability management” gets many more searches per month compared to “vulnerability management tool”. But, since people searching for “vulnerability management” are probably not looking for a tool or software, people will likely ignore your VM product page even if it does show up in the #1 spot. The keyword “vulnerability management tool” gets fewer searches, but ranking for it will at least match your product page with a targeted group of interested people. Therefore, you’ll want to optimize your page for the keyword “vulnerability management tool”, e.g. by adding the word “tool” to your page copy, and monitor your Google page rank for that keyword.

As for the conference example, though the keyword “cybersecurity” gets a huge number of searches per month, it’s such a generic term that most people are probably not looking for a cybersecurity conference when they search for “cybersecurity”. On the contrary, the keyword “cybersecurity conference” is more specific / targeted and gets a decent search volume. Therefore, that is the term you should optimize for and monitor your page rank for.

In addition to the keywords you may already know about, you can using Google Keyword Planner to discover other relevant keywords. For example, if I enter “vulnerability management tool”…

I get the following results.

It looks like some companies like “Qualys” and “Rapid7” are known for having vulnerability management tools, so people looking specifically for their respective product pages just use the company name as a qualifier. However, there are some non-brand keywords that get a decent amount of searches as well, including “vulnerability management program” and “vulnerability management process”. While these keywords can be included in a VM product page, they may deserve to have their own pages.

How Long to Rank High

Now that you know what keywords to target, another misunderstanding people have is that adding keywords to a page will result in a higher page rank in just a matter of weeks. First of all, keywords are just one of many factors that affect page rank. SEO is a long-term strategy. Unless you’re looking to rank high for a long-tail keyword – a keyword so specific that there is very little competition – don’t expect immediate results.