Photography tips

Alright, everyone knows when you buy any digital Camera that it usually comes with some sort of software. The bundled software can be good, ok or total crap! It is impossible to know if you are going to get something decent as nearly all camera reviews tend to gloss over the bundled software.

Now, like most of you, I am a bit of a cheapscape and when I can, I look for various free software. I am just making 1 assumption here and that is your camera can produce a jpg file.

No matter what when you select jpg in your camera, you should look at the camera manual and select the Biggest possible file size and the best possible quality to save your pictures. Yes, it does mean that you will fill up your flash card quicker, but it also means you have the best possible photo to use before you start editing it.

Now, in the cheap (as in free) department, you should grab 2 freebie programs. Get hold of Picassa and the Gimp. We will have a pretty good look at what each program can and cannot do in a bit of detail over the next few days. The main reason to use a 3rd party software is that no matter what camera you use you can use the same program and don't have to learn how to do the same thing all over again.

We have set up our camera to take the biggest possible pictures for a few reasons - and in the case of digital photos bigger, high quality pictures is much more flexible. It is easy to edit a picture and take part of it away (crop) bit it is pretty hard to magically find the extra pixels and put them back if you took low res pics to save space on your flash card.

We have taken some pictures, and they are the biggest and highest quality that our camera can take. Now, we download them to our computer and set about using the software that came with our camera to do some basic viewing and editing. This is where other software can help us somewhat.

The first thing that you will probably do after copying your photos onto your computer is to just have a quick look thru them. If you use windows, then the picture viewer built in is good enough for this job, if you own a Mac you are on your own ;) Now if I come across any really crap pictures - you know, the one you took of your hand or the out of focus ones, I delete them to get them out of the way. This is usually only a few photos deleted each time. What I do at this point, is to then copy all of the remaining pictures onto a CD or DVD so I have a copy that cannot be accidentally deleted then format my flash card ready to take more pictures.

Now that I have 2 copies of all the pictures, I go thru them again on my hard disk and when there are a lot of similar photos, pick the best 1 or 2 and get rid of the rest. now, we will probably have maybe 1/2 or even less of our pictures that we took to work with, and all of them on a CD just in case we made a mistake and deleted something we really wanted!

At this point, we can decide on how we are going to use the pictures we have left. Most of us only print out a few photos and tend to email or put the rest onto a blog or an online photo gallery. Now we have our best pictures, and 2 possible uses (print or web) this is the point we probably want to start looking at how we can edit these pictures.

In the next few days, I'll look at how and why we edit our photos for both print and web use.