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Digital Photography - Tiscali Technology
Editing & Printing
Editing and printing
The fun of digital photography doesn't finish when you stop shooting. With film cameras, you have to rely on expensive, and slow, processing labs to produce your prints, but with digital you're completely in control. Your home computer can become a digital darkroom, capable of improving photos beyond all recognition and, with an inkjet printer, creating stunning colour prints to put in an album or hang on the wall.
Editing software
Digital cameras are great, but they're not perfect. You'll often want to tweak brightness or colour levels, zoom in to the interesting details and move things around. For that, you'll need image editing software. These packages come all kinds of shapes and sizes for every type of computer, from simple software suitable for beginners to complex packages for design professionals.
If you're starting out in digital imaging, you might be lucky enough to get some software free with your camera. This has you all the functions you need to get started, and will hopefully give you the confidence you need to edit your photos the way you want to.
Organising your digital shoebox
A package like this will also help you view and organise your photos - great if you're the kind of person who stores their film negatives in a shoebox (and let's face it, most of us are). If you don't use media management software like this, you can soon find yourself drowning in thousands of digital image files, all of which have unhelpful names like "IMG453.jpg".
Once you're comfortable with filing and manipulating your photos, you can always move up to sophisticated software such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 (around £70). This has extremely powerful, but easy to use, editing features and lots of output options, such as multimedia slideshows, web galleries and photo calendars.
Printing facts
Printing your digital photos at home has never been easier. All you'll need is a good 'photo quality' inkjet printer (all but the cheapest are photo quality these days), and photo paper. This is thicker and glossier than normal photocopier paper, and is designed to produce rich colours, lots of detail and last for years without fading. Always use the manufacturer's recommended inks and papers for images you want to frame and keep.
Images from three megapixel cameras produce sharp prints up to around 6x4-inches in size - the size of normal prints from the photolab. If your camera has higher resolution, perhaps four or five megapixels, it can print photos up to A4 in size.
Many printers can connect directly to your camera, where you can choose which images (and how many) to print without ever switching your PC on. Check that both printer and camera are PictBridge compatible. Most home printers can also produce special items like T-shirt transfers, greetings cards and stickers, if you use the right media.
Don't worry if you haven't got a printer at home, you can still use traditional photo labs. Simply copy your images to a CD or just take your memory card to your local shop and they'll print them out, just like traditional film prints. You can also transfer your images via the web to mail-order printers who'll create superb quality images or gifts and post them back to you. A Tiscali broadband internet connection will ensure that this upload procedure takes only a few seconds for each image.
Read on to find out more about going digital:
