Anyone Can Do It Like The Pros Do Now

 Author:  David M Peters

However, newer LCD displays and such are fixed at a certain Resolution; making the resolution lower on these kinds of screens will greatly decrease sharpness, as an interpolation process is used to "fix" the non-native resolution input into the displays native resolution output. The best thing about digital cameras is that it's easy to take thousands of pictures. That's also the worst thing about digital cameras. After you've owned your camera for a few months, you won't be able to find that great picture you took a couple of months ago if your pictures aren't well organized or named logically. Folders are the best way to organize groups of pictures, and the My Pictures folder is a great place to start. In your My Pictures folder, create a sub folder for each year: 2004, 2005, 2006, and so on. This might seem silly the first year you own your camera, but after five years, you'll be glad you did this because you can go back to your 2005 folder and easily find a picture from a vacation you took that year. Arranging pictures by year is also helpful if you're scanning older photos stored in shoe boxes or albums that you took before owning a digital camera. This is also a good way to start organizing the pictures that you currently have on your computer.

When you upload your pictures from your digital camera to your computer, most of them will probably be a little blurry. Probably it won't be enough to make you want to change it, but if it's not, there's always the UnSharp Mask that you can use to sharpen the image. Most cameras don't apply any kind of sharpening filter to pictures they take, and so they won't always look as crisp as you might want. Most likely if you have a basic editing program you will be able to sharpen your pictures successfully, and you can sharpen them as much or as little as you want. What's the "right" size for a picture? Well, that depends on the photo. Most monitors display at 72 dpi (dots per inch). So, if you want the picture to be 5 inches wide (probably about the biggest you would want for an e-mail message), the picture would be 360 pixels wide (5 inches x 72 dpi = 360 pixels). Pixel is short for "Picture Element" and is the smallest unit of visual information used to build an image. If you have ever zoomed in on an image, Pixels are those little squares that you see. The more pixels in an image, the better the resolution.

In earlier times, you took your snapshots with your trusty old Brownie, removed the film cartridge and dropped it off at the drug store for developing. After about a week, you picked up your prints. What you got was exactly what the film was exposed to. No cropping, no sharpening, Brightness or Contrast adjustments were available unless you had your own film processing and print studio. With the onset of digital photography, it has become possible for everyone to learn and perform successful photo editing. There exists a plethora of digital photography software that allow differing levels of image manipulation. With a decent digital camera, a computer with a quality printer, and one of the many versions of photo editing software, you can produce stunning photographs. You can crop for closer views of your intended subject, darken or lighten the exposure, adjust the contrast, sharpen the image, change it to black and white, sepia, or grayscale. Add a good scanner and you have the ability to edit your old standard photographs. That old faded photo of you as a child can be brought back to life with a few clicks of your mouse. With the right software, you can place objects from one photograph into another. Create a montage of any person containing their pictures from birth to present. That beautiful old Ford you took a picture of at the cruise-in brings back fond memories?

When comparing traditional vs. digital photography one of the arguments may be the ease of use. In utilizing a digital camera it is simply a matter of pointing and shooting. The image is captured by the digital camera and embedded on the memory stick contained within the digital camera. Also, using the easy viewing screen on the camera, the photographer can instantly see whether the picture is what they wanted or if it needs to be taken again. In fact if the picture has movement or does not capture the image that the photographer wants, it is easy to delete the picture from the memory stick.

Stop down metering. In most lenses, the aperture remains fully open and automatically changes to the aperture setting for the shot when the shutter button is pressed. However, when using an adapter for screw mount lenses, the connection between the lens and the camera is lost. In "stop down metering", the aperture is adjusted to the desired size before pressing the shutter button. The inbuilt light meters in Pentax DSLRs will operate in manual or aperture priority mode, giving some degree of automatic metering for using screw-mount lenses. There may be menu options to enable use of the lens aperture ring when it is not set to the A position or, in the case of the screw-mount lens, there is no connection between the aperture controls and the camera. When using small aperture settings, focusing be may difficult, so set the lens to its maximum aperture for focusing and composition and then do the metering last. If the in-camera metering presents problems but lens mounts properly on the camera, use an external light meter. Another alternative is trial and error, using the LCD screen and the camera histogram.

At times the subject of a picture is lost in the surrounding parts of a picture. If this happens, you can always crop your picture. This means cutting down the picture to a certain size. There are many ways to do this in terms of the size of cropping. In just about every photo editing program there is a cropping tool, and you can experiment with the size of the area that you take out of your photograph. If you don't like what you've done, all you have to do is click "undo."

There are basic photo editing programs available that allow you to do basic adjustments and learn basic photo manipulation. Some of these programs can be found for free such as Gimp for Windows, Serif's Photo Plus, Paint.NET, Image Forge, Pixia, Ultimate Paint, and several others. Which ever direction you take in choosing a photo editing program, be prepared to become totally hooked on working with digital photography. As you discover the many tricks and tweaks possible with photo editing, don't be surprised to find yourself immersed for hours at a time tweaking and manipulating your photographs.