Digital cameras offer such a range of capability that everyone from novices to professionals can benefit. So if you have already mastered the basics, or even progressed to creative photography, you’ll need to actually do something with the photos. Many users require very little in the way of editing, but are daunted by the sheer volume of photos that are amassed.
With digital media offering huge storage, it means that even high pixel count cameras, 6 to 8 million pixels being not uncommon, can often take 50 to 100 full quality photos in local storage before downloading to a PC is needed. So factor in a few trips, the odd family event and a night on the town and suddenly, you can have folders and folders of images with unrepresentative titles like DSC_000232.JPG! Now that might actually be granny shooting her false teeth across the room as she laughs at your brother falling off a chair while blowing out his birthday candles, but how are you to know that? Well, as you might expect, there is an application that can rescue you from the digital quagmire.
Adobe’s album app
While many cameras come these days with some kind of offering for basic editing and organisation, once again, Adobe is something, the household name when it comes to digital imaging, has a solution. Adobe’s Photoshop Album 2.0 Starter Edition is an organiser with some editing capabilities (www.adobe.com). It represents a good collection of the tools you’ll need to import and organise your photos for home, web or shop printing or safe back up and storage. Importing is easy, with several options available. There is the usual Windows native import which is fired up when you connect a storage device or media. Or you can use one of device import options in Photoshop Album (Album hereafter). Once you have selected the device you want to import from, you can specify the kind of import you want to do, choosing whether to clear the device or not once imported and where to store images.
Organise them
Now that you have the images on your PC, the next step is to organise them. With a potential for so many images from a digital camera, this is surely one of the most daunting prospects. However, any album type application should have an easy way to do this. Album allows you to view collections of images as thumbnails in the main view. To organise them, you create a new Tag. This tag is then used as the title for a category or collection of images.
Album even offers a handy way of categorising tags as Family, Friends, Events etc with the facility to define your own groups and subgroups. Once the tag has been created, and this is the clever bit, you highlight the images to be associated with this tag and then drag and drop the tag from the right side Tag listing onto the image group selected. A tiny tag icon appears on each image that shows it to be associated with a tag. It’s simple.
The tags then act as selectors. By clicking on a tag in the right hand listing, the viewing space then shows all images for that tag. There is no need to go through a complex process of renaming multiple images, this simple process allows for full groupings to be made, according to your own headings. The entire process is a few clicks and Album prompts you through the each action. Or, the tutorial walks you through it all with web links for additional information.
But custom tags are not the only possibility. You can use the built-in calendar type organisation that allows you to browse your photograph collection by date, week or month.
Image manipulation
Now that you have a place for everything, you need to choose what you are going to do with all of those photographs. Despite the capabilities of digital cameras, there might be some photos that are less than perfect. Most organisers will offer some editing capability. Album allows you to crop, rotate, eliminate red-eye, sharpen and auto adjust levels, contrast and colour. This is easily enough for most needs and requires little in the way of artistic skills to accomplish.
The red eye tool simply requires the placing of a selection frame over the area that contains the red eye, or eyes. Then simply clicking the button fires the routine to identify the eye areas in the picture and clear the reflected glare for pure natural eye colour in keeping with the surrounds of the photo. In all the times we have used this feature we have never seen it do anything other than a convincing job.
The Auto Colour takes the existing colours and enhances them with respect to each other and the light levels in the photo. To all but the professional eye, it improves your photographs, but in every adjustment option there is a before and after preview with an easy undo for multiple editing steps.
Auto Levels takes varying parameters such as saturation and hue and makes a calculated balance based on the information in the photograph. Its is one of those options whereby it is not necessary to know exactly what it does, but good enough that you can click it on and off to see whether you like what it does or not.
Auto Contrast adjusts the contrast between light and dark. It can have a dramatic effect depending on the type of image and can reveal hidden detail. Again, try it and see if you like the effect on your photographs.
Back up or be damned
So you have imported, organised and edited now what is to be done with your masterpiece? Well a good idea in general is to make a back up. A CD or DVD can hold many hundreds of your precious photos for later printing or even re-editing. Removable storage media has come on in leaps and bounds, but thankfully so have the devices. It is now easy, with Windows native burning, to create compilations of your images for later viewing on a DVD player, or to just store for posterity. The only real decision here is storage media size. A 4 million pixel camera takes images at high quality in the region of 1.5Mbyte per image. So, for a 700Mbyte CD R that means around 450 images easily stored with some captions and folder structures. For a standard DVD R, you can expect about 4.7Gbyte, or around 3000 4 millionpixel images!
There are other possibilities too. You may perhaps want to get creative with your images. That camera of yours that shoots 4 frames a second can provide a stream of images that can be nicely presented in a slideshow.
Album allows you to form the images into a PDF (Portable Document Format) slideshow. Though you will need the ImageViewer Plug-in to view them, the slide shows provide a novel and enjoyable way to present your photographs and the plug-in is a free download (www.adobe.com).
Printing to perfection
Printing though, is the usual end for photographs and most organisers have good facilities for consumer printers. Available printers are displayed when you select the print option.
Properties can be set per print allowing you to be sure that you are going to get what you want before you commit all that ink to paper. A draft print is always a good idea as it lets you see the print area and output before you make a final run.
If you don’t have a printer, don’t worry because you can also upload you photos to an online service for printing. Album currently only supports a US service, but we might see European or even Irish tie-ins for these services.
However, you can easily go online and choose an Irish photo processing service in the form of FahyFoto.com or Spectraphoto.ie to upload. Some of these services even provide an online storage facility for your images. The process is simple, enter your details to register, including credit card for payment and choose to upload. Browse for images (now easily found due to your organising them) and upload them to the online service. Be warned though, even with ADSL, being limited to 256Kbit/sec upload speeds can mean it takes a while for the images to go. Once uploaded, you can specify what kind of prints and copies you want and then place your order. The prints arrive by post a few days later and you are saved the management of a printer. These services have their advantages and work out well for high quality prints with volume savings in cost per print. Options grouped under the Share allow you to use either the Internet or e-mail for sharing your photos via e-mail.
E-mail intelligent
Album offers a nice tool that detects your e-mail client and steps you through selecting images from your library for attachment to e-mails. You can choose your file types and image size and quality to suit your e-mail capabilities. There is also a facility to use an online service to storing images. Again this feature is limited to the US in the Starter Edition of Album, but the process typifies the steps for most services. The images can be made available to other users of the services by adding them to a list associated with the images.
With these steps covered, from importing through to online publishing Photoshop Album Starter Edition offers the kind of capabilities that would suit almost all point–and–shoot digital photographers. By making the daunting task of organising a complete doddle, the overall process from camera to print or slideshow becomes a bit of fun. No longer need images languish on memory cards like so many undeveloped holiday snaps of the past, now editing and organising can be almost as much fun as taking the photos in the first place. Of course, the downside is that now your nephew can lay his hands on that picture of you at the summer barbeque wearing that rather ill chosen apron any time he likes and print a banner of it to hang above the door when you call around.
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