Art and Photography Articles

One especially controversial topic in digital photography is that of which operating system is better. Mac users claim that due to OS X’s ease of use and Apple’s eye for design, their systems are the best in the world for storing and editing digital photos. On the other side of the discussion, Windows users have long bandied about the assertion that PCs are more compatible, more universal, and thus more qualified to handle the workload of the digital arts community. So who is right in this battle of the software titans?

Windows

Microsoft Windows has been the long time standard for business software like Outlook, Word and Excel. The majority of offices use PC’s with windows as this is mainly due to the lower cost of PC equipment and the compatibility of different systems working with windows. However when it comes to digital photography, using Windows gives you no clear advantage over any other operating system.

Software like Adobe Photoshop run almost the same on Windows as a Mac and since Apple switched to using Intel processors now the hardware is almost the same as well. What are the pluses of using Windows? To start with, PC’s are significantly less expensive when compared to Mac’s. Most of the software you can find for OS X is also available for Windows, and you can get a decent PC capable of easily dealing with photographs for far less than an equally geared Mac. If you’re cost conscious and on a tight budget, then you should probably consider getting a PC with Windows.

Mac

It’s hard to believe that just ten years ago, many industry analysts declared Apple “dead in the water.”. Thanks to innovative design and easy to use software, Apple managed to stage an incredible comeback to become one of the leaders in the world of computers. OS X was designed and built with multi-media in mind and is often praised for its intuitive interface and seamless meshing.

Apple computers are sometimes viewed as less advanced as PCs hardware-wise, and often cost an good chunk of money. The top of the line PowerMac could run you over $4,000, and when you consider that the easiest way to upgrade a Mac is to buy a new one, taking the financial plunge can be quite difficult. That being said, OS X is an incredibly stable operating system that suffers from minimal virus threats and rarely (if ever) crashes. Another thing you’ll find better with a Mac is when you work on multiple programs at once it’s a lot faster and easier which can significantly increase your productivity.

Naturally, people are going to fall into their respective camps, and this is where the real answer to the Operating System Debate lies: You should use whatever operating system works best for you. There is no difference between the file formats that Photoshop or Lightroom create on either operating system, and having one or the other will not have a negative impact on your ability to work with digital photographs. Your best solution is to visit the Apple store and then visit a computer store and play around with both operating systems. Whichever one makes the most sense to you is probably going to be the best one to invest in, unless you’re looking for something specific your normal OS doesn’t have.

Mac and Windows each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and one or the other could reasonably be declared a victor in certain battles. However when it comes to photography, either one is a good solution for helping take your pictures to the next level. As long as it makes sense to you, everything should be just fine.

Author Bio: Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames. Visit our website and see our gold picture frames in a variety of tones, styles and sizes. Shop online and see our special gold picture frames and unique silver picture frames or call 1-800-780-0699.

Digital photography, though pretty much the industry standard at this point, is still a young technology. Many of the greatest advances in digital happened within the last ten years, and if you’re a later adopter it’s nothing to be ashamed of – there are millions of people out there that have never touched a digital camera.

And the best part? Learning to take digital pictures is a lot easier than you may think!

The Main Tool- A Digital Camera

When digital cameras first came out they were far outside most people’s price range, but now they are affordable for almost everyone. Now you can get a good point and shoot camera for less than $200 or for more features you can get a nice digital SLR for under $1000.

Try to keep in mind what you want to use the camera for so you can be sure to get a camera that’s best suited for your needs. If your primary picture taking is to capture memories of your friends and family, then the high image quality of an SLR doesn’t do much for you. Give some thought to what you want to use your camera for so you’ll choose a camera that is suitable for your needs.

The Software

Many digital cameras include some type of software for uploading images and managing your files. Some of these tools are better than others but if you have a Mac you can use iPhoto. And in terms of uploading, as long as your computer can see your camera or the card reader, you can upload the files however you choose.

As for editing software, there is a wide variety of options out there for every price range imaginable. Paint.net is a great free image editing software that offers features like layer editing and other advanced features that other higher end software offers. Another good free photo editor is The Gimp or you can go the professional route and buy Adobe Photoshop. But remember with Photoshop you’re buying a professional tool with a lot of features you are probably not going to need right away.

The Final Product

Finally, once you’ve uploaded and edited your images, you’ll probably want to share them with your friends and family. There are many different ways to share photos, but the most popular are using sites like Facebook or Flickr. Sharing your photos online allows your friends and family to see how you’re doing without you taking the time and effort to print out and mail them pictures.

You can print them to real photo paper at home, through online services like Snapfish, or share them to a site – it all depends on what you want to do with them. Or, you can write a blog and share your photos on your website for everyone to see.

Digital photography is one of those things that is easy to learn, but tough to master. The best thing about digital is that anyone can pick up a digital camera, upload their photos, and share them with friends with very little knowledge in the field. Once you’ve got the basics under control it can get as complicated as you want it to. If you’re new to digital photography, then you may be better off getting an inexpensive point and shoot camera and seeing how it works for you. This way, you’ll get comfortable taking digital pictures and may even find yourself spending more time sending pictures to the people you care about!

Author Bio: Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames. Shop online and see our selection of unique picture frames in a wide variety of colors, styles and sizes. See our online selection of decorative unique picture frames and lovely distressed picture frames or call us at 800-780-0699.

Photo editing has changed a lot since the days of printing photos in the darkroom. Actions that used to take hours of painstaking work can now be done or, more importantly, undone at the click of a mouse. So, if you’re just getting started you first want to learn about the basic terminology of digital photography editing software. We’ve created this quick guide to help you start in the right direction.

Photo Editing Software

There are many, many pieces of software dedicated to photo editing on the market. There is a huge range in price and quality when it comes to digital photo editing software. In the end, you will need to decide what you are willing to spend and what you want to do with it. For this article, we won’t talk too much about different bits of software’s pluses and minuses, but know that there are options. If you’re looking for free editors, you should look at The Gimp or Paint.net or if you want to buy a professional program definitely check out Adobe Photoshop.

Functions of Photo Editing Software

Though editing software can be incredibly complex and allow near-infinite options, there are a few things that you’ll want to get a grasp on that will take care of most of the things you’re looking for when editing basic photos.

* Cropping: When you crop an image it involves creating a new frame so you can remove the parts of the image you don’t want. Anything inside the frame will be kept, anything outside will be trashed. One important thing to remember about cropping is that it changes the final dimensions of your photographs, so if you’re planning on printing them make sure you crop with the same aspect ratio (width to height).

* Contrast: Contrast impacts how much the colors or tones stand out from one another. By adding contrast, the darks will get darker and the lights will get lighter, but if you remove contrast your image will turn into a gray mess. Higher contrasts can make for interesting imagery, but will also make the grain of your photos stand out more.

* Brightness: Brightness refers to the level of lighting of the entire picture. If you’ve taken a picture that turned out too dark, turning up the brightness may help some of the details stand out. If you raise the brightness and the contrast together, little by little, you may be able to salvage an image that previously seemed ruined.

* Photo Saturation: Saturation refers to the intensity and depth of the colors in your picture. In a color image, if you completely remove the saturation the image will turn to black and white. If you amp it up, your colors will quickly begin to look unnatural and super-bright.

* The Hue: Hue impacts the tone of an image. If you change the hue, your picture will change from a green or blue tint to purple, red or any other possible color. Although it takes a little time to get used to, changing the hue can make a big improvement to images taken under fluorescent light.

* Transforming Your Photo: Though presented differently in each software suite, they all have some way for you to flip, rotate, or resize your images. Hopefully you won’t have to make too many adjustments of this nature, but should an image turn out slightly crooked it’s good to know you have alternatives.

Regardless of which photo editing software you use, you should be able to adjust all of the elements mentioned above so you can get your photos exactly how you want them. One way to add depth and bring out the picture’s color is to decrease the saturation amount while increasing the contrast. Otherwise, do your best not to rely on editing and try to get all of the work done in the camera. Editing is a tool, but it’s always better if you start with the best possible image and make it better, as opposed to trying to salvage an awful shot.

Author Bio: Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames. Shop online and see our selection of square picture frames in a wide variety of sizes, styles and shapes. See our selection of wood square picture frames and metal large picture frames or call 800-780-0699.

For the digital photography enthusiast, becoming well acquainted with photo editing is one of the digital photography basics that can make a world of difference in how well a photograph turns out.

Image editing software to a digital photographer is what the dark room is to a film photographer. The big benefit of photo editing software is that it’s easier to do than setting up a darkroom.

And with photo editing software, you can do standard image editing functions like cropping and adjusting color, and can also do photo manipulation.

Image editing refers to any change that is made to a picture. Photo manipulation refers to what film shutterbugs used to call “trick photography” – switching backgrounds and such. (For some fun examples of photo manipulation, look up the “National Geographic Photo Foolery” page online.)

Once you know the type of image editing you want to do, you will be better able to choose a photo editor. In this article, we’ll highlight the most popular ones:

Picasa: A free photo editor from Google. If you are just getting into the very basics of digital photography, this will serve you well for a while. It is really designed to be more of an online photo album or photo manager but can also handle basic photo editing. Picasa offers basic editing tools such as retouch, which helps you remove blemishes, scratches, etc. Like many photo editors it has red eye remover. It also has some fun functionality where you can create screensavers with your photos and even integrate them with Google Earth.

If you’re ready to advance from digital photography basics and do more with your images, consider one of the other photo editors.

Adobe Photoshop Elements: This is more user-friendly and less costly than it’s “big brother” Photoshop CS4 and is the market leader in photo editing and manipulation. It’s good for the photography enthusiast plus there is a free trial version.

Adobe Photoshop CS4: This has everything you could possibly need as a professional photographer or graphic artist. It sells for about $700 on their website, but you can find it half that price by some vendors or look for a free trial version.

Paint Shop Pro: This is a close competitor to Photoshop Elements and also runs about $90. They also offer a 30 day free trial.

The GIMP: An odd name for such a powerful program, the acronym stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This open source, freeware continues to improve and has a good community of users should you need help. It is available for Unix/Linux platforms, as well as Windows (NT4/2000/XP/Vista) and Mac operating systems (OS X). It doesn’t quite have everything that you get with Adobe Photoshop CS4, but it has more than Elements or Paint Shop Pro and is used by some professionals.

No matter what photo editor you have, read through the guide or help sections so you understand what you can do with it.

It takes time to learn but you will be impressed with what you can do with your images.

For example, here are a just a few of the things you can accomplish (the top 5 even with just Picasa):

* Crop
* Resize
* Lighten or darken shadows, highlights, and midtones
* Correct Colors
* Remove blemishes, a stray branch, a logo, or anything else you don’t want in the picture
* Blur Backgrounds (Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro and The GIMP all offer background-blurring applications. Picasa doesn’t.)

You can also create all sorts of special effects with a photo editor. For example, you can convert your photograph into an impressionistic painting. You can turn a color photo into black and white to capture the tones, lines and highlights without the distraction of color.
Or for a more vintage or antique look, you can choose sepia.

Even if you don’t want to do any cool special effects, learning the basics of any photo editor will let you fix “mistakes” in your photos. Just cropping alone can do wonders if you couldn’t get a close enough shot or you’ve got too much clutter in the picture. That is why photo editing is an important part of learning the digital photography basics and why it’s important that you learn it. Before you know it, you will be editing and producing quality images perfect for framing on your wall.

Author Bio: Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames. If you’re looking for frames to decorate your house or to display some photos at work then check out this website.

If you want to learn the basics of digital photography, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re using a digital compact or a DSLR with the exception of these few important differences.

Digital Compacts

One of the biggest advantages to digital compacts is the cost. Another thing to consider when buying a DSLR is that you will need to purchase at least one lens for your camera especially if you want to take distant photographs. Digital compacts always come with a built in lens and sometimes even come with a zoom.

If you have an optical zoom on your digital compact, you can get some good quality telephoto shots too. An Optical zoom is always better than digital zoom because a digital zoom works like cropping and takes away pixels. The more you zoom with a digital zoom the lower the image quality. Unlike regular zooms, an optical zoom maintains the quality of your picture.

Some compacts will take such high quality images that many a pro will use one when they don’t want to carry all of their DSLR gear. The quality of the photograph is largely dependent upon the photographer’s skill.

While digital compacts don’t have as many megapixels as DSLRs, with only 5 megapixels, you can produce an 8×10 print of the type of quality you’d be proud to frame and hang on your wall.

Finally, learning the digital photography basics of a compact is far easier then learning how to use a DSLR to its full advantage.

Digital Single Lens Reflexes (DSLRs)

A Digital SLR is the digital version of a single lens reflex camera or SLR. You can call a DSLR a single lens reflex camera but you can’t call an SLR a digital camera. With the release of cameras like the Canon Rebel and other moderately priced DSLRs, more photography enthusiasts are enjoying the benefits of using a DSLR.

The big advantage of the DSLR is its creativity and versatility.

For example, by adding a long telephoto lenses, you can capture a close up of an osprey at the top of a towering pine tree or a child at the soccer goal post when you’re at the other end of the field. With a DSLR, you can find all kinds of accessories to suit almost any photographer’s need.

Another advantage to the DSLR is its ability to take crisp, focused sports and other action shots in places with low light where flash isn’t allowed. The larger sensor on a DSLR allows you to do this; whereas with a compact, if you set the ISO high enough to take the shot in the dim light, it would have digital noise (sort of a multi colored grain). If you’re taking still shots, it’s not an issue. The problem with Sports Mode in a low light setting is that the shutter must close quickly so there is just not enough light to hit the image sensor even with a large aperture setting. The only way this can be compensated for is with a flash or a higher ISO setting.

However, you can get rid of most digital noise by using photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop.

Another advantage of using a DSLR is that you can use an external flash instead of always having to use natural light.

DSLRs have more megapixels than the best of the digital compacts, meaning you can take and print in high quality really big pictures, like posters and large prints for framing. And lastly, digital cameras are slower to take pictures than film cameras but DSLRs are much faster than digital compacts.

Although the digital photography basics do start with selecting a camera, the quality of your images will largely depend upon how you use your camera. So no matter what type of camera you have or will be buying, it pays to practice.

Author Bio: Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames and loves taking pictures. Shop online and see our large selection of picture frames in colors like white and blue. Visit our easy to navigate website or call us at 1-800-780-0699.

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