Digital Photo Tips

[DirtyHarry]

Gary, If I wanted to have some of my digi photos printed, who do you think would do the best job? Any suggestions on how to get best results?

[MarkMcJizzy]

Gary, If I wanted to have some of my digi photos printed, who do you think would do the best job? Any suggestions on how to get best results?

 

Go to the beig city. Kenmore Camera, or (best) the place next to Glazers, on 8Th.

[Gary_Yngve]

Costco (you need a member number)

 

www.costcophotocenter.com

 

Cheap ($1.50 for a lustre 8x12) and deliver for free.

 

These days pretty much anyone who owns the $25000 Fuji magic printer can make good prints.

 

They have links to their color space profiles.

 

The only other thing is you'll need to calibrate your monitor (e.g. with AdobeGamma).

[Alpine_Tom]

the folks on www.photoforum.com like gimp (www.gimp.com, of course) for photo editing, supposed to have 99% of the features of Photoshop, but free. I downloaded it and played with it some, but I'm not interested enough to learn a new program.

[fern]

If my ultimate goal is to collect my pictures together into a digital slide show, what would be some good post-processing steps to take to ensure good quality?

 

I have noticed that usually digitally projected shows lack sharpness and richness of colours.

 

Also, this is slightly different topic - I have noticed using Windows Movie Maker that when my videos are rotated 90deg from landscape to portrait the aspect ratio changes ... and it makes me look fat ... anyone know how to fix this?

[Gary_Yngve]

Unfortunately, I think the problem is usually in the digital projector. Affordable (<$5K) digital projectors have noticably poorer sharpness/colors than LCD monitors.

 

If you can get access to the projector beforehand, you have a chance of possibly tweaking things to look better on the projector.

 

Also remember that the darker the room, the better the projected image will look.

[gslater]

Unfortunately, I think the problem is usually in the digital projector. Affordable (<$5K) digital projectors have noticably poorer sharpness/colors than LCD monitors.

 

True. The usual culprit is a projector that uses DLP technology. If a DLP is used in the projector, it'll usually have the DLP logo splashed prominently on the outside. DLP systems tend to not be very bright, so to compensate, the color wheel used internally spends extra time projecting white light, which means there is very poor color saturation. We have all DLP projectors at work (even expensive ones), and I hate them because all my pretty Excel chart colors get washed out.

[gslater]

If my ultimate goal is to collect my pictures together into a digital slide show, what would be some good post-processing steps to take to ensure good quality?

 

Similar to my previous post, if the concern is the poor color saturation of a DLP projector, you can perhaps compensate by bumping up the color saturation of all the photos in Photoshop or Elements. Kind of a pain in the butt, but it should help. In Photoshop (full version, not Elements), you can probably automate the saturation adjustment process for doing a whole bunch of pics.

[Gary_Yngve]

IrfanView supports batch operations such as upping saturation.

 

My concern about the batch processing is that it's hard to know what the magical settings are without a projector to test it on. You may notice banding in the greens and blues but unsaturated reds, or banded reds but yellowish bluebird sky.

[whidbey]

After much serious thought.... I've decided that digital sucks.. In tech speak I would suppose it has the same meaning. 30 years from now my slides/negs will make a picture... your digital shit may?.... You don't know the answer.

[gslater]

Gary - You're absolutely right; it would be impossible to know how far to go without actually having the specific projector to try it on. But I doubt I could do anything that would make the apparent color WORSE than what a DLP projector would do to it anyway... ;-)

 

Whidbey - Digital doesn't suck. Just think of it as a really handy way of getting TO the print stage, where you have something that you can keep forever. True, the digital "negatives" might not be as permanent as the analog negatives, but I don't think the JPEG format is going away any time soon.

[cj001f]

30 years from now my slides/negs will make a picture

Only if they still exist. Much easier to make multiple backups of a digital file - you can store them physically seperate to protect against theft, fire, accident or carelessness.

[pup_on_the_mountain]

Saw this thread just now.. thanks very much for posting it Gary!!

 

I've been using gimp, but am not expert in using it as of now. I like it a lot though. Any more gimp-ers out there?

 

I searched for the gamma utility in it, and couldn't find it. Is there some other utility in gimp which performs the

same/equivalent modifications?

[whidbey]

As long as I have a light bulb and some photo paper and such I can make a photo from anything taken in the last 100 plus years. I'm not saying your wrong about your stuff. I will say that no matte what I can always scan my negs/slides onto digital. It is archival. Digital media isn't constant.

[bstach]

Gary,

 

How do you pronounce 'Yngve'? You definately need to buy a vowel. Where's Vanna these days?

Edited July 19, 2006 by bstach

[Cobra_Commander]

you can make animated gifs with just about any image editor

 

[Gary_Yngve]

I've been using gimp, but am not expert in using it as of now. I like it a lot though. Any more gimp-ers out there?

 

I searched for the gamma utility in it, and couldn't find it. Is there some other utility in gimp which performs the

same/equivalent modifications?

 

Sorry, not familiar with Gimp. But Photoshop doesn't call it Gamma either. In Photoshop, go under Levels and slide the mid-gray around. You'll see a number that started at 1.0 get bigger (brighter) or smaller (darker). This is Gamma.

[Gary_Yngve]

ING-vee

[Gary_Yngve]

As long as I have a light bulb and some photo paper and such I can make a photo from anything taken in the last 100 plus years. I'm not saying your wrong about your stuff. I will say that no matte what I can always scan my negs/slides onto digital. It is archival. Digital media isn't constant.

 

No offense, but you're completely wrong here.

 

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/dli/white-paper/dli.html

http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/

[justybug]

i've had pretty good luck with Google's Picasa, and for doing the panorama shots i've started using autostitch, as long as you preset the output to a high resolution, the 360's turn out pretty good. low quality=utter crap though..

 

Picasa 2

Autostitch

Edited August 2, 2006 by justybug

[Weekend_Climberz]

I found autostitch just the other day and was very impressed with the results. It's about as easy as putting your pants on in the morning to use, and you can tweak all sorts of settings. Now, Gary, where is a good place (translation: cheap) to get panoramics printed off?

[Gary_Yngve]

The best thing to do would be to find some place that prints 20x30s and put multiple panos on a sheet. If you want bigger, you'll probably need to pay a lot.

[Gary_Yngve]

Autostitch is good stuff. Its main research contribution was to solve for the arrangement of the images without having the user to lay them out.

 

But I'm not sure if it deals with a few specific things:

-radial lens distortion

-vignetting

-advanced blending

- different exposures

- parallax/ghosts

 

There's a shareware program PTLens that addresses radial distortion and vignetting.

 

I have my own custom software that I use for panos, and I can output just the individual frames so that I can composite them manually in photoshop.

 

Some guidelines that will improve your panoramas:

-take vertically oriented shots

-overlap by 40-50%

 

Personally I haven't been using too many of my panoramas, except for making the equivalent of a wide-angle shot out of them. Panos are cool-looking, but you have less artistic control over them, the aspect ratio is huge, and the composition isn't often clear.

[Gary_Yngve]

Q:

 

What postprocessing did you do to get from here:

 

 

to here?

 

 

Why so much blue in the original?

 

A:

 

That's the camera's CCD response and its choice in white-balance. Some digicams have smarter algorithms than others and will choose a better white-balance. My opinion is that good ol' film can be more consistent regarding choosing a good/pleasing white-balance.

 

To correct it, I do Image -> Adjustments -> Match Color -> Neutralize in Photoshop.

 

It usually corrects by too much, but the vector direction is correct, so I use the slider to eyeball what's best. You can also look at the RGB values of sky/snow/rock and calibrate based on that (what do you want to be gray?). Another trick is to pump up saturation all the way. The image looks like crap, but it tells you what your subtle tints are. I'd prefer my images to have tints of several colors in them, not be all solid blue.

[WhiteLightning]

So you all may have coverd this but....I'm taking pics and getting them on to my computer. CC won't let me post them cause their the files are too large. Do I need to change a setting on my camera before taking pics??? Or can I (or do I have to) change settings on my comp??? Thx