Digital Editing

by Noah Caraker

There are 2 main reasons you may be interested in digital editing of your pictures, first being if you want to send pics to me for the web site or to email to your friends, or second being you want to print out some photo's of your work.

The distinction between these 2 important categories is paramount as you will want to save your pictures differently. For web purposes you want to have small file sizes which are fast to upload or download but will suffer from lack of resolution and will not be good for printing out. For printing purposes you will want a more detailed file format which is much larger is file size and has better resolution for printing but is horrible for web based applications.

First the format's, for web based applications you will want to save or convert your files to one of 2 formats, jpeg or gif. These formats are compressed and take up very little space, but have poor resolution and aren't what you want to be using to print out good pictures.

For printing, and what seems to be the format for most digital picture cameras, is bitmaps. They take up considerable more space and have better resolution. Other suitable uncompressed formats like bitmaps are targa's and tiff's.

How do I save as one of these formats?? From your image editor click on File>SaveAs> then enter the name and below the name chose your format from the drop down menu. Not all programs have all the different formats to choose from.

That's basicly all you need to know about picture formats. When your sending me stuff for the site just remember to convert it to jpeg or gif, and when you want to print stuff, leave it in bitmap. And one last note, when you convert formats from say bitmap to jpeg or gif, you lose image quality, but when you convert from jpeg or gif to bitmap, you don't gain image quality because you cant add quality to it if it's not there to begin with.

A program that will do the file format changing for you, as well as a lot of other picture organizing and viewing is ACDSEE, you can download it here.

Now for a bit of photography,

No amount of "post" will fix a bad picture. Out of focus in the original is not fixable. Too dark or overexposed a photo is not very fixable. Take the best picture possible and then if it's needed digital fixing will be feasible. Using a solid neutral background is best as it wont distract from the model that your taking a picture of. Make sure you light your model well, or get it in some indirect sunlight. Follow basic photography rules for taking good pictures!!

Choose a good nuetral background and light your model well

Bad Background and lighting	Good background and lighting

Too dark is not easy to fix so light well from the get go

the original is too dark	color corrected	lightened up

 

If you've taken your pictures electronically then you can transfer them to the computer, or if you used a film camera then you can scan in the pictures. If your scanning them in, and you want to print these pictures out on your computer, then chose your printer's max resolution for your scanning resolution (usually 300 dpi for most printers) and save it as one of the uncompressed formats like the bitmaps. This way you have a good printable copy saved and you can always make a lower quality web friendly version from that good one. Or if your just scanning for web work, I usually still scan in at 300 dpi myself but you can scan in as low as 100 dpi.

The biggest tool I suggest any of you use in editing your pictures would be the Crop tool. Cropping allows you to remove a lot of dead space in your pictures, further reducing your file size, and allowing you to "re-center" your subject in the frame.

Cropping will focus the view on what you want them to see

What are we looking at?	oh, that jet there

Next would be the rotate tool to fix sideways pictures. Then the Text tool if you 'd like to put your name at the bottom of the picture. Color correction, or removal, are nice but not a standard in all paint programs but in more advanced versions.

Sometimes you gotta turn the camera to fit it all in

It's Sideways!	Rotate it!!

 

A breakdown of File types.
Jpeg .jpg compressed
Gif .gif compressed
Bitmap .bmp uncompressed
Tiff .tif uncompressed
Targa .tga uncompressed

Compressed pictures have much smaller file sizes at the price of picture quality.
Uncompressed pictures are of course much larger in size to keep picture quality.

All the digital cameras I've seen take very large jpegs or some take bitmaps. If you try and take your photo and you're too close to the subject you'll be out of focus. Some cameras, even digital, have a Micro lense for closer pictures. Read your documentation to be sure.

DPI is dots per inch. Higher the dpi the larger the file and picture size, also better quality for printing.

Going Crazy

If you master these steps and get good like i have from playing with some paint programs, you can do a little of what you see below.

Sepia tone look:

Boom!!

It's a U.F.O.

Before

After