Photographic prints from your digital files

Preparing files in Photoshop: Starting and Finishing

Color balance

Choosing a digital camera

Tradeoffs between using Photoshop (or other editing software) and on-line editing

Stitching images together to increase the pixel count and/or the field of view.

Tradeoffs between high quality ink jet (the kind we use) and traditional photography

Choosing a digital camera

Although it might not be at the top of everyone's list, one of the items to pay attention to is what your digital camera will do when there's less than optimal illumination.

• Use a wider aperture, and risk getting a poor focus.
• Use a longer shutter time, and risk blur due to camera and/or subject motion.
• Shoot with insufficient light, and lighten the result later in a photo editor.
• Let the camera simulate a faster film via digital techniques

In normal lighting, the camera has 256 grayshades between black and white.  The way some cameras simulate a faster film is by reducing the number of available grayshades between black and white, e.g., to 128, 64, 32, or 16.  The result is that 

objects which otherwise looked very dark now look properly exposed.  However, objects may look cartoon-like, with visible discontinuities between grayshades.  Color may be poor.  For other cameras, the result is an increase in noise.

The ideal solution is to choose a camera with a larger CCD array.  Chip manufacturers like to keep the chip size small so as to reduce cost.  However, the size of the photodiode which captures the light for each pixel is the primary determinant of what the signal to noise ratio will be under poor lighting conditions.  In general, the larger the CCD array chip, the better the quality will be under poor lighting.  Camera manufacturers usually say so if they have a larger than normal CCD array chip.

Interchangeable lenses are another feature to consider.  Most of the advantages of interchangeable lenses are obvious.  However, a non-obvious fact is that in order to use 35mm lenses, a larger CCD array chip must be used.  This results in better low-light quality.

Most cameras provide a digital zoom.  In our opinion, this is a useless feature.  You can crop your photos in a photo editor.  The digital zoom is not doing anything other than cropping your photo, at the expense of overall detail.

An optical zoom, on the other hand, is essential.  However, if you have and plan to use anything better than 3x optical zoom, you should either bring your tripod with you or shoot with very good lighting and fast shutter speeds.

The item that most people look at first is the resolution of the camera, i.e., the number of megapixels.  

The more the better.  However, the difference in price between 5 Megapixels and 6 Megapixels is substantial.  If you earn your living with a camera, than 6 or more is a good choice.  Otherwise, you might want to live with 4 or 5.

If you don't plan to make very many large (8 x 10 and up) prints, you can do very well with a 2-3 Megapixel camera.  Viewed on the screen, or on small prints, these cameras are very adequte.