Viewing Your Digital Photos
How do I view my photos on my digital camera's LCD?
If you want to see pictures that you've already taken with your digital camera, it's very simple. You switch to the playback mode on the camera, which generally is just pressing the little button that looks like a little arrow, like "play" on your VCR. Then you get to see the pictures. Using the scroll button, which is the up and down, left and right button on the back of the camera, you can scroll, sometimes left and right to go from picture to picture, sometimes it's up and down, depending on the camera. Then just go from picture to picture that you like. When you see a picture you want, you can look at it as long as you like. If you want to delete it, you hit the "trash can" button to delete it. If not, move on from picture to picture, and enjoy all the pictures that you've taken.
How do I watch my digital photos on a television?
Most of your digital cameras, compacts and SLRs have what's called an "AV" or "video output" cable, which is a yellow RCA cable that plugs into the camera and goes out, and you would plug it into the auxiliary input on your TV set. Then you use the playback button on your camera and you can actually make a slide show of your digital photos on your TV set. Remember, the output to the video or the output to the TV is very low quality. It's 640 x 480 resolution, so it's not made to evaluate the quality of your digital photos. It's not made to make a DVD. It's just there so when you go to grandma's house, and she doesn't have a computer, you can plug it in there or you can plug it into the hotel TV to watch your digital photos while you're on vacation.
How do I move my photos from my digital camera to my computer?
There's two basic ways to do it. The camera manufacturer wants you to plug the camera in via a USB cable and download them that way. Nobody in the digital camera arena does it that way. All professionals, all experts recommend that you physically take the memory card out of the camera and then plug it into a device called a card reader. When you plug the memory card into the card reader, the computer will generally ask you, "I see new things here, what do you want me to do with them?" Move it to the hard drive, view it, it just depends on the software you have. But moving the pictures from the memory card to the computer via a card reader is the simplest, easiest and most effective way to store your digital pictures on your computer.
What software should I use to organize my photo?
Well, it all depends on whether you're Windows or Mac. If you're a Mac person, your Mac probably came with iPhoto and that's a good place to start. If you want to do a better job downloading, I would do the Adobe Lightroom programme. It's an amazing programme with a lot of power. If you're a Windows person, you can use Windows Explorer to download, but I think you're better off using a more powerful programme like ACDC or BreezeBrowser that are dedicated downloading programmes that allow you to file, sort, categorize, and all those kinds of options. The Adobe Lightroom programme is an amazing program and what I like about it is it works for Windows or for Mac. You can share it on two different machines and, with any part of the computer the hardest part is learning software. So, if you've gotta learn software, learn one that you can take from camera to camera and from computer to computer. I never recommend using the Canon or Nikon or Olympus or whoever's software to download because every time you change cameras you need to change software. To me is a lot of wasted time in learning software that I know I am going to change shortly.
Why would I edit my photos?
Digital photographers who know anything about photography always edit their pictures on the computer, not in the camera. Why? In the camera you have a two, three, four-inch viewing screen, where on the computer, I have a 17, 19, 22-inch viewing screen. I get a lot better view on the computer, and I'm not in the field. In the field, I'm in the heat of battle. It's the baseball game, the birthday party, Christmas, whatever. I'm too busy making pictures. I edit my pictures at home. I've had an adult beverage, I'm sitting there with my feet up, and I get a chance to edit on the computer. The computer also gives me a lot of power that I don't have in the digital camera. When editing pictures in the camera, you really don't have a lot of choices. It's either yes or no, keep or delete. In the computer, I can lighten and darken the picture. I can crop, eliminating parts of the picture. The power of the computer in digital photography is amazing, and since you're looking at this on the Internet, you probably know the power of what the computer can really do for you.
What computer programs can I use to edit my photos?
To edit your pictures on the computer, the absolute best program is Adobe Photoshop, whether you spend five or six hundred dollars and buy the full version, or one hundred dollars and buy the Lite or Elements version of Photoshop.I recommend Adobe Photoshop for every digital photographer. There's a lot of other stuff by Microsoft, and JASC, and Corel and other people out there who make programs. Any digital photographer who's worth his salt is using the Adobe Photoshop family of products. That's where I recommend you go edit your pictures for a number of reasons. Number one, it's clearly the best. It may not be the cheapest, but it's the best. Secondly, it clearly has the most support. If you Google Adobe Photoshop help, you'll get a thousand responses and you can't even read all of them. If you try to get help on some of these other programs, you're pretty much on your own. I would highly recommend Adobe Photoshop for everybody who's serious about doing photo editing.
What options do I have for printing my photos at home?
If you want to print your photo yourself you're going to either use inkjet or pigment-jet technology. Pigment-jet: Epson, Canon, HP make pigment-jet printers that last between 1 and 2-years. Those are great prints, and that's what I recommend for digital photography for my home people. Otherwise, if you use inkjet, and that's what happens when you send your pictures to a lot of the online places is that you get inkjet technology--1 or 2-year life at the most on your prints. Take an inkjet print that you make at home or one of your friends makes, put it up in the living room, see how long it lasts. Maybe 18 months and the picture is all faded. What are you going to do with your kid's baby pictures or birthday pictures after 18 months and they're faded. That's not what you want.
Who can print my photos for me?
I have a camera store. We print a lot of pictures for people. I like it when people send me their prints. I know I can make a better print for you then you can at home, because we use top quality equipment, the best quality technology, and make a print that... It looks like a real photograph because it is a real photograph. It's not Inkjet, it's not anything. It's real photographic paper that's been developed. You get that by Emailing your picture or uploading your picture to a server that uses a lightjet process. Lightjet is the best. It is a half million dollar machine. You're not going to find that everywhere, only at certain places.
What printing options do photo labs offer?
We can make enlargements, we can crop for you, we can make posters, we can make books, we can make cups, we can make mugs. There are all kinds of cool stuff you can get at your camera store today that you can't get anywhere else. And we have a lot of fun and we can help you do it, and we make photography easy and exciting for you and make it simple so you can do it at home. If you go to any camera store website you'll generally find a thousand different options you can use when printing your pictures. You know friends of mine make blankets, they make jigsaw puzzles, calendars, mousepads. Anything you can imagine, we can generally put a picture on today. T-shirts, caps, you know, undershorts, I don't care, we can do it. If it's cloth, or plastic or metal, we can put a picture on it today. So if you want that, check out your local camera store and see what they can do to help you make the pictures into what you want them to be. And as time goes on, we're only going to get more options, and not less.
How do I resize my digital photos?
It's very simple. You can use Adobe Photo Shop and use the image size command, if you're familiar with that. Most of your emailing programs, though, have the ability to resize the picture. So, on AOL or EarthLink when you drag a picture in it will ask you "you want to send this as an email size picture or you want to send it full size resolution." Always check that email size. The program I use is ACDC and there is a function right on there so, when select a picture I can hit "email the picture" and immediately size is at the right size, 4 or 5 kilobytes. So when I send it everybody loves the pictures. It just depends on what your software you're using. Some of the cameras today, most of the Nikon cameras today have an email size function for it. So you can actually tell it when you're downloading the pictures to download two pictures: one at full resolution and one at email size. It all depends on what options you're using. It's really a hard question to answer in this kind of a form because there are so many ways to do it. You can do it manually. You can do it automatically. It just depends on what software and hardware you're using.
How do I email photos that I edited on my computer?
One of the biggest problems I hear from people today is they try to email their pictures. You take this picture at the birthday party, you crop it you color correct it, it's really cool. Now you want to send it to grandma. Well, you try to email it to her and she calls and says "you broke my computer"; because you sent her too big a file. The secret to emailing pictures is they have to be very, very small. The biggest picture I'll ever send to someone is a four by six picture at seventy two dots per inch. Now, the problem is you can't print that picture, but you really, to be effective emailing you want to send pictures that are less than 1 kilobytes email. If you want to send grandma or someone a bigger picture that she can print and enjoy; the easiest way to that is to burn the pictures to a CD, put the CD in an envelope, and put a forty one cent stamp on it and send it. That's the easiest way to get high resolution in the pictures to people.