In one of my prior lives I was a professional photgrapher. This was long before digital, but I have kept up my skills, and added to them as the digital age unfolded. So here are a few tips for using and editing digital photos.
Digital cameras use some form of computer memory - often a card - to store the pictures. Just as a hard drive needs to be periodically defragged, you should reformat your media every now and then. This wipes everything back to a new state, and helps to stabilize the media. Be sure you have removed all photos that you want from the media first, as everything will be permanently erased.
Most digital cameras have a way to set the quality of the picture you take. This has to do with how small the bits of information are, and how many there are. The higher the quality, the more information is recorded. Think about what you will want to do with your pictures. If you might want to make enlargments (11×14 or bigger) from them, be sure and use the highest quality setting. For normal snapshots, and most uses, a medium setting is more than adequate. Just remember that you can save a picture in a good editing program at a lower setting than you took it at, but you cannot ADD information that was not originally recorded.
When you edit your pictures, again think about what you want to do with them. If you are editing to put on your web site you want to save as a small or medium jpeg - a monitor is only going to show a certain amount of information, so anything more than this does not improve your picture quality for the viewer, and radically slows down the loading time.
I generally save mine twice - once at the highest resolution, so that if I ever do want to make prints I can. Then a copy at a much smaller resolution to use on my web site or in e-mails, so it will load quickly. To keep them straight I add “web” at the end of the name before the .jpeg. Then I know which version is which.
Find a digital editing program that you like and learn how to use it. I prefer Adobe Photoshop Elements. I tried the full Photoshop, and for what I do it is way too much program! Elements does everything I need and more, is less of a memory hog, loads faster, and is easier to use. If you want a book to help you, the Adobe Photoshop Elements Classroom in a Book is very good at walking you through the program’s features. I use this when I teach classes on the program.
The next setting that is important is your light setting. Most digital cameras will allow you to tell the camera what type of light source you are using. So if you are shooting outside or with the flash you tell it natural light; inside you indicate whether you are shooting under incandescent lights or flourescent lights. This will help greatly with accurate color rendition in your photos, and minimize editing. Just remember to change it when your light source changes!
I hoep these tips are helpful, and happy shooting!
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Alaina 10.25.08 at 2:47 pm
Thanks for the tips! They’ll definitely be useful! I like the idea of saving each image in two resolutions. I use Adobe Photoshop CS2 for graphic design, but I really love Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for photography…it’s really an amazing program. I think Adobe let’s you download a trial version of it. It’s worth it just to play around with it for a while!