Digital Photography

By : Julia Hall
Ongoing advancements in technology have now provided us with the ability to print our own pictures at home, and soon the days of dropping off film rolls for developing and waiting for up to a week for the finished pictures will be a thing of the past. The only items necessary for printing pictures yourself is a computer, proper photo paper, and a printer. Digital imaging technology has made it possible to immediately download imagery onto a computer for viewing and emailing or to print pictures on special or plain paper.
Special software makes it possible to transmit digital pictures from the digital camera to a computer. After the images are transferred, pictures are displayed on your screen and you are given the option of editing, printing, or saving each image. Just knowing the steps to create high-quality photographs will heighten your ability to print excellent pictures. Software tends to differ somewhat with some decreasing the size of pictures making them great for emailing or posting on the web; however, this is not good for printing. Be sure that the software you use will not automatically downsize images. When printing, one desires full resolution of 300 pixels per inch to produce high quality prints, and this may very well depend on the type of digital camera you possess.
A pixel is one of the individual dots that collectively create a picture. Cameras are usually presented in terms of megapixels, and this indicates the total amount (in millions) of pixels the camera is capable of handling or processing. The number of pixels per image is already set inside the camera and increasing the size of the picture spreads fewer pixels per inch making it a bit blurry. Increasing the size too much drastically reduces the clarity and appearance of imagery. Good quality imagery is achieved with a resolution of at least 300 pixels per inch. An added option with digital technology is the ability to change images before printing. Colors may be changed, lighting changed, images cropped, angles changed, in addition to the ability to completely erase undesirable objects.
One must be aware the each time a JPEG image is saved, some of the data is lost as quality decreases with saving. Avoid this by minimizing the number of times you edit pictures and save the image to your computer under a different file title. Another tip to preserve image quality is to save or store pictures in a TIFF file – then you can edit many times without losing any photo quality. A TIFF file is a tagged image format file with a header of fixed information fields (tags) that include information like image dimensions and color space specifications. It is versatile and enables one to define application specific information – private or custom tags. The framework used by TIFF is called IFD or Image File Directory, and it is a set of tags that the TIFF writer software wishes to determine and specify.
There are two methods for consideration when ready to print pictures from a digital camera – print them yourself or transfer them via computer to a shop that processes and prints photographs. Online services enable one to upload imagery to retail servers for processing with the pictures being either mailed back to you or available for pickup at a designated location within a short period of time – often in less than 24 hours.
Such are the conveniences of digital photography – capture images and enjoy the experience more by printing them yourself.
A pioneer in technology reporting, Julia Hall has published articles about the latest digital devices and gadgets for over ten years. After graduating from MIT with a degree in electrical engineering, Julia turned down huge salaries from some of the most recognized fortune 500 companies in the world to pursue her dream of becoming a leading consumer advocate. Julia uses his expertise to cut through the too good to be true deals offered by high tech companies to reveal the real steals and the real duds that we're bombarded with daily. If you enjoy staying on the cutting edge of technology, whether for business or pleasure, but find yourself occasionally confused by the overwhelming and convoluted information out there let Julia show you the way.

Romeltea Media

Information Technology & World News Updated at: 1:46 PM