Digital Photo Help
Back in the "old" days when photograpy was done with film, the procedure for most casual photographers was very simple:
- Shoot a roll of film (which took about a year to complete for some people).
- Have film processed, yielding negatives and one (or more) sets of prints. This includes prints of the inside of your camera case when you accidentally pushed the button getting the camera out.
For most people, that was about it. Maybe, if you really liked some of the pictures, you'd get a duplicate print (usually 4"x6"). If you really REALLY liked one, then you would get an enlargement. Very few non-professional people went beyond that. That is, no cropping (or cropping was done with scissors). No color-correction. Red-eye was a fact of life. No custom printing to lighten or darken parts of the picture. What you shot was what you got.
Compare that with today. Now you have a "digicam", one of those magic little boxes that doesn't use film, yet takes great pictures. You can still
- Take a picture
- Make a print
You can easily print only the photos you want, and not all those that didn't turn out right, like those where the main subject had her eyes closed, or your dog left the picture just before you pushed the shutter release. But you now have so many more options. Things just got a lot more complex. We're here to help.
You can edit the picture to correct problems or to improve the picture in ways that were impossible with film. And you can do this yourself at home on your computer without going for expensive custom processing. You can make copies and edit each copy a different way.
You can print your own pictures. Or you can someone else do it for you - either on-line or at your local drugstore or Wal*Mart (or many other locations). How do you decide? How do you do it?
With film, once you had the film processed, you had to store the negatives somewhere so you could locate them again later if you wanted another print. (How many of us actually did that?) The prints got stored in a shoebox, or maybe put in an album. If you wanted another to give to your grandmother, good luck finding the negative! It's not much different with digital photos. How do you store them? But with digital, there are tools that make cataloging and locating your pictures a snap.
Of course, having all of your pictures on your computer has its downsides. What if your hard drive crashes? Or your computer is stolen? Or a computer virus eats all of your picture files? So you now need to have backups of your computer hard disk. It's heart-breaking to lose all of those pictures, and so easy to make a backup. But so few people do it. The upside is that as long as nothing happens to your computer, those files don't degrade over time. Look back at your old prints from negatives. Those have probably faded and color-shifted over time. And so have the negatives they were made from.
What else can you do with digital photos? Look no further than your Windows Screen Saver for starters. It can sequence through your pictures, displaying each one in turn. It's easy to create a DVD to play on your TV, along with your favorite music (much easier than setting up a screen and projector to show slides!). Look on the Internet. There are so many products offered that are just a click away. You can get a coffee mug with your favorite photo on it. Or a calendar filled with your best photos from last year. Or a Photo Display that will continuously cycle through hundreds of photos. Or make a bound book of special photos. You can share your photos on the internet with friends, family, and even strangers. Geotag your photos, and make them available on Google Maps or Google Earth. Combine multiple pictures into a panorama.
And lots more!
Catch up with what's new on digital-photo-help.com
Photo Import: get your pictures from your camera to your computer.
It isn't a matter of IF, but WHEN you disk drive will crash or a virus will destroy the content. Be sure you have a copy of your important files.
Where to put your digital photos, how to catalog them, how to find the ones you want.
Here's a rundown on some of the tools available for editing your photos, from FREE to Professional.
Print your digital photos.
If you have prints, film, slides or movies, you can convert them to digital images.
Digital Photo Frames are a good way to display your pictures.
Color Management helps make your photos look the same on all of your devices - from camera to monitor to printer.
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