If you’re shifting your digital photographic pursuits into high gear and want to hit the ground running, this mini book is your fast track to pixel proficiency. You can consider the six chapters in this overview both a quickie course in digital photography concepts as well as a preview of what you can discover in the rest of the book. All the basics are here, so you can begin taking, sharing, and printing great photos right away. When you want to find out more, you can follow the cross references in this book to discover the in-depth coverage you’ll find in the other sections.
This mini book outlines the essentials of good photography and shows you how to decide which digital equipment will do the best job for you. You’ll discover the best ways to acquire digital pictures — whether you choose to use a camera or scanner — and find out the fundamentals of editing and restoring photos with image editors like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Paint Shop Pro. If you want to share and preserve your digital images, you’ll find tips on managing, archiving, and printing your photos, as well as discover the best ways to post them online for others to enjoy.
Chapter 1: The Essentials of Good Digital Photography
In This Chapter
- Choosing equipment
- Making great digital photos
- Converting other photos to digital format
- Making hard-copy prints
In 1888, George Eastman began promoting the first hand-held Kodak camera with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” His idea was to make the film camera as convenient as the pencil. However, the film king’s dream didn’t really come true until the invention of the digital camera.
Certainly, conventional photography has long been as simple as pressing a button, but the “we do the rest” part-taking the film to a photo lab, deciding what size and kind of prints to make, and then waiting for the results — is a lot less convenient than using a pencil.
Digital photography has finally put the entire process of making pictures in the hands of the person holding the camera. You press the button, and you can do as much of the rest yourself as you’re comfortable with. If all you want to do is point and shoot, you can do that. If you want to get more involved in the picture-taking and picture-making process, digital photography gives you the tools for that, too.
You compose the picture through the viewfinder (as always), but now, you can preview the exact photograph that you’re going to take on a bright LCD (liquid crystal display) screen on the back of your camera. After snapping a shot, you can instantly review the photos you’ve taken and erase the bad pictures on the spot or “mark” the ones you want to print.
10 Knowing What Equipment You Need You don’t need to remember to stop and buy film. Your digital film is almost infinitely reusable. You don’t have to drop off your digital film for finishing: It’s “processed” instantly and ready for viewing or printing using your own inexpensive color printer. No more sifting through stacks of prints of marginal images. You decide which images to print and whether to make them 4 x 6 inches or 5 x 7 inches or some other size. You can print them at home inexpensively or take a tiny digital memory card to a nearby retailer and have even more inexpensive prints made for you in minutes by an in-store digital print lab.
On the other hand, if you want to have full control over your photos, digital photography gives you that, too, to a degree that has never before been possible. Perhaps your images aren’t exactly right or could benefit from a little cropping or other improvements. You can fix bad color, remove your ex-brother-in-law from a family photo, or adjust the borders of an image to focus on the most interesting subject matter. All you need is an image editor,
such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
This chapter provides an overview of the sorts of things you find out how to do in this book. I cover each topic in more detail later on in a mini book and chapter of its own. I’ll keep the repetition to a minimum; the chapters in Book I are intended to offer an introduction to topics that are explored more deeply elsewhere in the book.
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