Technically Easy

Category: Digital Photography

All posts relating to digital photography, including both hardware and software. Tutorials and reviews are the most common types of posts.

  • My VueScan Photo Scanning Workflow

    My VueScan Photo Scanning Workflow

    It has been a while since I have talked about scanning photos to create a digital archive of those photos. As I mentioned in previous posts, I recently purchased a new desktop computer, and have been busy setting it up. I have also installed both the scanner and VueScan on my new desktop, and have enjoyed the increase in performance when archiving my photos.

    One thing I have begun to finalize is my workflow for scanning and archiving the photos. After doing some reading online on using VueScan, I have come up with my own workflow. While you can follow my workflow, and change it as you see fit, it is important to remember that a workflow must work for you. The one I outline below works for me.

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  • Tips for Taking Tack-Sharp Digital Photos

    Tips for Taking Tack-Sharp Digital Photos

    It has been a while since I have written a post regarding digital cameras. Since that time I have been learning more about digital cameras, especially on apertures and shutter speeds. While I am enjoying the learning process the one element that I have also been focusing on is taking tack-sharp photos.

    For the most part, I usually hand hold my cameras when taking pictures. It is easier to move around chasing my boys while hand-holding the camera than keeping it on a tripod. At the same time, I have also started to look into taking photos of still life, and eventually want to look into landscape photography. During my experimenting I have learned about some points that will help make sure I take tack-sharp photos.

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  • Digital Photos: Should You Use Raw or JPEG?

    I purchased my first digital camera in 2002, and it included two very different image formats: a Raw and JPEG format. Back then I didn’t know much about the Raw format, but quickly learned what it was, and soon began using the Raw format instead of the JPEG format.

    Much like the camera I had back then, many digital cameras include the option of choosing between the two formats. There is a great debate about which format is better, and why you should choose one over the other. In this post I will add my two cents to the debate and allow you to choose.

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  • Scanning Old Photos? Get VueScan

    Scanning Old Photos? Get VueScan

    I have been archiving some of the old photos, negatives, and slides that are lying around my house. As with most people, many are located in unlabelled boxes that are not organized in any way. Besides being unorganized, the other issue is that there are no safe copies of the originals, so if I was to lose my house for some reason, such as a fire, then all these memories would be lost.

    I decided to scan in as many of these originals as I can, and then back them up as I have done with my digital photos. Unlike digital photos, however, scanning, the photos, slides, and negatives takes more time and effort than simply taking a picture. For the scanning process, I use a tool called VueScan.

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  • Examples of Colour Management

    I have previously talked about colour management in the past, and those who are serious about digital photography will need to know about colour management. While it can get technical, colour management is simply the process of ensuring an image is display/printed properly from one device to another.

    It can be difficult to explain, but with some of the newer browsers, it is much easier to show how it can affect the look of an image. In this post I’ll show how colour management can change an image, and what you should do about images on your web site/blog.

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  • Photo and Image Editors

    As I visit web sites one thing that always get my attention is the amount of time it takes to complete a page download. With web sites using more images to display the content, it can at times take much longer than necessary to finish downloading a page.

    The biggest problem with the sites that do use a lot of images on each page is the size of the images. Some who manage web sites don’t realize that images need to be resized outside of the browser to decrease the download size. Specifying the size of an image in the HTML code will only shrink the displaying of the image, not the actual size. To shrink the file sizes you will need an image editor. In this post I will list a few image editors that can be used to edit your images for your web site.

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  • How I Organize My Digital Photos

    If you are like me you probably have taken thousands of pictures with your digital camera. Digital cameras make it very easy to take photos, since you can view the photos immediately, and only keep the photos you like. Once you are done taking pictures, it is usually very easy to transfer them to a computer and then print them out.

    Once you have transferred them, how do you organize the photos? There are many methods that people use to organize their photos, and I have my method, which I explain below.

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  • The PNG Image Format

    I have written posts about the JPEG and TIFF file format, including the advantages and disadvantages of each. Digital cameras use the JPEG format because of it’s small size, so you can store more photos on a memory card. The downside to the JPEG is that is is lossy compression, so you lose some data with each save.

    An alternative to the JPEG file format is the TIFF format. While you won’t lose any informatoin with the TIFF format, you will require a lot of disk storage as each file can be quite large. For those looking for another alternative, you can try using the PNG format, which is a nice compromise between the two previous image types.
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