Photography tips

Most of our digital pictures will only ever be shown on a computer screen, and I'll discuss some of the aspects about some of the things that you will want to edit.

Remember how I mentioned Picassa, well, if you have not got it, then go and grab a copy. The examples I will use will be easy to understand if you can see them for yourself. I don't have every bit of software for every digital camera, that is why I choose (cheap) 3rd party programs when they are suitable to do a job, and it means you only have to learn how to use it once.

All the photos we have taken are of the absolute biggest size and highest quality that our camera is capable of - we have a lot of information to work with to "produce" a picture. Using Picassa, we can do a whole lot of 1 or 2 click simple "fixes" or changes to our photos, some of these apply equally to web and print useage.

Before any other editing, you will want to make sure that the picture is up the right way, so you will rotate it if required. Then you probably want to look at cropping - that is using your computer as a digital zoom to only select part of a picture, getting rid of some thing in the picture you don't want. Next, if you have straight lines, such as the horizon and it is not exactly straight, you will possibly want to straighten or align it. These are just 2 of the very basic things that can be done and what you are doing is just getting the chance to improve on the original picture.

There are of course some additional tuning paramaters you might want to change - like contrast and colour, fill light, highlights and shadows. The easiest thing to do is to look at your photo and make some small changes and seeing if you like it or not. Once you get the picture looking how you want it then it is ready to create our computer-ready picture.

If you are just going to use the photo on your own computer or burn it to CD/DVD to post to family or friends, then we don't need to do a lot more except to save any changes to the photo AS A NEW PICTURE (we don't want to destroy our original) You do this by exporting the modified picture. If you are going to use this photo to send via email or to post to your blog, then you don't want a 1meg file! you want it to be as small as possible, while still showing as much detail as possible.

When I post pictures on the Internet or send them in email, I try and keep the file size down to about 150K or less. Now My original phots can be as big as 7Meg out of my camera and I know that in order to get the file smaller that I will have to lose either some quality, size or both in order to do this. Lets face it, most people have a 17" monitor so it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a picture bigger than can be seen on the screen does it.

This is where things get a little complicated, but once you understand, it will all make a lot of sense. Computer screens have different resolutions such as 800x600 or 1024x768. You only want your pictures to be no bigger than the smallest screen resolution that will be showing your pictures so you don't have to scroll around to see it all.

Now, lets resize the picture as part of the export process. Now we know about screen sizes, it is pretty safe to choose 640 or 800 pixels to resize our photo to. This alone will take our big file and probably make it under 200K. Well, we want to try and make it smaller if possible, and this is where we can experiment with the JPEG quality or compression. High quality means big files, and by reducing the quality a little bit the file size will begin to shrink quite a lot. If you wanted to set up a slideshow of your pictures at full screen size, you might want to select a slightly bigger image size - like 1024 for example. If you plan on posting them to your blog, you might even make them as small as 500 pixels.

Get your picture again, and do some tests to see how low you can set the quality and still have a good picture. Start off by exporting your pic at 800 pixels in size and 95% quality. Then make more copies each time reducing the quality by 5 or 10%. Once you have 4 or 5 copies of the same picture at different qualities, then open them up in your picture viewer and take a look. You are looking to see at what JPEG quality the picture starts to look bad. With most Digital Cameras of over 4Megapixels, you should be able to go as low as 65% and still have a good picture.

Now, take a look at the file size of the different quality photos. If you selected the 800pixels and say 65 or 70% JPEG quality, depending on the photo, it is probably about 50-80K in size. We have a small file, and when compared to the original it should look pretty close to the same quality.

Now we have done the editing of our photos, you will probably want to burn them to CD. Once you do this, if you need to save space on your computer you can of corse delete them (remember, you did make a copy of the original pictues right at the start didn't you)

With our now smaller files, we can display them on our screen, send them in email or post them to our blog.

If this all sounds like too much effort, then you could always try using a website to resize photos

I'll talk about how you go about preparing your digital photos for printing, which while similar to what I have just talked about has quite a few different things to consider.