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needing photography help


JeffM

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I'm a point-and-shoot guy from the era of film. Got a pretty nice electronic camera (thanks to a truly excellent mother-in-law), but have never been happy with my postings. I can set the camera for about the right number of pixels (800X600 I think is the limit), but can only guess at file size at the time I take a photo. It seems I only take two kinds of pictures: beautiful pictures that need to be butchered (i.e. cropped) to fit, or grainy pictures in which nothing can be seen clearly. Is there a cheap (better yet, free) user-friendly alternative?

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Jeff, you might start by setting the camera to the highest resolution you can get. Then use photo editing software to reduce the image size later if needed. For printing, you won't want to reduce resolution but for posting on the web you will. Starting at the highest resolution will give you the option to crop if needed without causing a dramatic loss in quality.

The camera probably came with software for editing although I've been finding Picasa, a free downloadable program, to be capable of nearly everything the average user would need.

Another thing to look at in the setup of the camera if it can be set is the ISO rating. This is sort of akin to adjusting film speed on your old 35mm camera. Frequently there is an auto setting and then a range of manually selectable ones. Leave it on auto most of the time. If it is set to some higher setting--400 or higher--you'll get grainy images. In a digital camera it is the gain that is being adjusted. You might need higher gain in a low light situation especially if the flash isn't used. For outdoors on a sunny day you don't need that high gain. Think of increasing gain as turning up the volume on that old AM radio so you can here the ball game on a radio station that's a long way away.

See if that gets you on the road to better pictures. Let me know what happens.

Dave

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Dave, are you telling me I want high res even for web postings? I'd assumed that I should take pictures not much bigger than the pixel limits so I wouldn't have to butcher them. I'll try to find Picasa and see what it can do. Thanks!

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I think what Dave is saying (correct me if I'm wrong Dave) is that taking big pictures is good because you can always reduce the resolution but you can't increase it.

If you start with a big picture you can first crop it to get the things you want into the frame. THEN resample it to a manageable file size. Cropping a photo changes where the actual borders of the photo are and cuts out the stuff on the edges. Resampling a photo leaves you with the same general view but reduces the file size and the amount of fine detail you can see.

If you start with a photo that has a small file size you're pretty much stuck with a small photo - You can't increase the file size to get the detail that is missing from the photo.

If I understand Dave correctly Picasa is a program that will allow you to crop and resample the photos. It probably does more than that but those two things (as far as I'm concerned) are the two basic functions that allow a person to change the file size of the photo without altering it drastically.

Whenever I'm editing photos the first step is to save it as a copy so I still have the original (too big) picture to work from if I don't get it right the first time. I only modify the copy.

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Jeff, I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough. Ken translated what I said correctly, though. Thanks Ken. As he said, shoot at the highest resolution your camera can do. Readjust on the computer if needed for the application. For posting to the web, by all means reduce the resolution for. Screen resolution isn't that high. If you shoot at a low resolution you've limited your options for adjustment at the computer.

Picasa is a photo editing application that is quite easy and quick to use. Ken makes a point about saving the original and then editing a copy. Picasa has an interesting feature in which the original image is left alone. If you just open the image and edit it, the editing parameters are saved as an INI file in the same folder and tell Picasa how to display the image. The edited image will only really be edited if you export the image and then the exported image is a copy of the original.

There isn't the editing capability of Photoshop but the average user doesn't need all that for the average photos, either.

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Dave' date=' are you telling me I want high res even for web postings? I'd assumed that I should take pictures not much bigger than the pixel limits so I wouldn't have to butcher them. I'll try to find Picasa and see what it can do. Thanks![/quote']

Picassa is a great program, and if you want an easy to use program for creating pictures sized for the web, you can get Easy Thumbnails, free from [a href=http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/index.php]Fookes Software[/url].

You can set default settings in it to make thumbnails of your larger photos at 400 x 300, or 600 x 400, which works well for displaying in posts on the forums. 800 x 600 should be the largest you use, and it will completely fill the screen of some users. Any similar sizes will also work well, so don't fret if you aren't exactly at 400 x 300.

You can set it to use JPG Quality at 80%, and it will compress the file size but still give good looking pictures. I have lowered the quality down to 40% before, and its acceptable.

If you are using photo editing software, remember that having any better quality than about 100 DPI is wasted on our monitors, so aim for a final pic in the sizes above at somewhere around 100 DPI.

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