Lunch with Computers Digital Photography Dusty Stiles Tandy Wilson Overview Group Questions Holding the camera; shooting the picture Transferring images to a computer Basic photo editing Posting and sharing photos Printing; creating photo books Group Questions Who shoots digital photos now? Who shoots with phone cam, ipad Who shoots with a digital adjustable camera? Who shoots with a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) Shooting the Picture Identify the point of interest Find a spot to shoot from Frame the picture to accentuate the point of interest (Rule of Thirds) Hold the camera level and steady
Press the shutter ½ way to let the camera set f/stop, shutter speed and focus Press the shutter the rest of the way Shooting considerations Identifying the light source Using a tripod Getting close enough to the subject Getting too close to the subject Making several exposures Changing settings on the camera Settings on the phone camera, 1 For your camera, it may be useful to download the instruction manual Capture: camera, video Take: save, send, erase Save: internal, external Shutter Sound: shutter, no sound, say cheese, ready 1,2,3 Preview: full screen, actual view Settings on the phone camera, 2 Photometry: average, spot, spot multiple Resolution: 1280x960, 640x480, 320x240
White Balance: auto, sunny, cloudy, florescent, glow Color Effects: normal, negative, aqua, sepia, black and white Night Mode: on, off Self Timer: off, 3 sec, 5 sec, 10 sec. Transfer Images to a Computer There are a number of ways to get pictures on to your computer. You might need a cable, or it can be done wirelessly, or it might stream directly to the cloud. Demo: cable, wireless, cloud Organizing the Photos Don t leave photos on one device Offload to your computer or upload to a share site Organize with apps such as ACDSee and iphoto Organize on Share Sites Basic Image Editing Open an editing program and load in a picture. Crop the picture to remove distractions Adjust the brightness to make the whites white. Adjust the contrast to make the picture bolder
Adjust the saturation to brighten the colors. Remove red-eye as needed. Save-as a new picture (**a or **-2) so that you don t over-write the original image. Basic Image Editing Editing programs are many. We re using Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, iphoto and ACDSee Many people use Picasa, a free software; but their terms of use allows them to use your photos for their advertising. If you want to limit the use of your images, check the Terms of Use on the websites your use. Output and Printing Images Printing on your home printer. Printing at a local store Printing at an online website Printing mugs, shirts, almost any object!
Digital Photography Terms and Concepts AE... Auto Exposure. When the camera is set to the AE mode, it will automatically set all the required modes for the light conditions. I.e. Shutter speed, aperture and white balance. Aperture... The lens opening that allows more, or less, light onto the sensor; formed by a diaphragm inside the actual lens. Aspect Ratio... The ratio of horizontal to vertical dimensions of an image. For example, 35mm slide film = 3:2, TV = 4:3, HDTV = 16:9, 4x5 Film = 5:4, DSLR camera=3:2. Automatic Exposure... The camera sets the shutter speed and aperture for the correct exposure according to the amount of light. Automatic Focus... The lens on the camera focuses automatically when the shutter is half pressed. The viewfinder normally has focusing points shown to assist the user in knowing what will be in focus. Blooming... An effect caused by overexposing a CCD or sensor to too much light. This can cause distortions of the subject and/or color. Brightness... Value of a pixel in a digital image giving its value of lightness from black to white, with o being black and 255 being white. CCD (Charged Coupled Device)... This is a light sensitive chip used in your digital camera for image gathering. The CCD Pixels gather the color from the light and pass it to the shift register for storage. CCD's are analogue sensors, the digitising occurs when the electrons are passed through the Analog to Digital converter. This "Analogue to Digital" converter converts the analogue signal to a digital file or signal. CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor)... A type of sensor commonly found in more professional level cameras. Color Balance... The accuracy with which the colors captured in the image match the colors of the original scene. Contrast... The measure of rate of change of brightness in an image. Depth of Field (DOF)... The range of items in focus in an image. This is controlled by the focal length and aperture opening of a lens. A large or wide aperture gives a shallow depth of field (not much range of focus) and a smaller or narrow aperture give a large depth of field (more range of focus). Digital Zoom... A digital magnification of the center 50% of an image. These give less than sharp images because the new zoomed image has been interpolated. Don't be swayed by the Page 1
incredible 500% zooms on some cameras, the images won't be really acceptable. The optical zoom gives much more clarity to an image. Download... Term used for the transference of image data from the camera to your computer. Can be done via a serial port or the faster USB port. Downloads can also be done via Bluetooth or Infra-red without the need for cables. DSLR...Digital Single Lens Reflex. This is the digital equivalent of a SLR camera. The photograph is recorded on a digital image sensor and saved onto a memory card. Focal Length... A lens' angle of view. Such as Wide angle, standard or telephoto. F/Stop...a measurement of the iris opening in the lens. The size of the opening determines how much light is allowed to pass through the lens into the camera. F/stops are calculated to double or halve the amount of light that passes through the lens. Modern lenses use a standard f-stop scale: f/1, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22, f/32, f/45, f/64, f/90, f/128 Gigabyte (GB)... A gigabyte is a measure of computer memory or disk space consisting of about one billion bytes (a thousand megabytes). The actual value is 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 megabytes). Histogram... A histogram is a bar graph analysis tool that is used to identify contrast and dynamic range of any image. Histograms are found in the more advanced digi-cams and software programs (graphic editors), such as Adobe Photoshop 7, CS or Elements, and are used to manipulate images. The histogram shows a scale of 0-255 (left to right) with 0 being black and 255 being white. Image editing software... used to manipulate a photo once it has been taken. Digital cameras store images as files on memory cards. Once downloaded to a computer these files can be edited using image editing software. Image Stabilization (IS)... An optical or digital system built in to a lens for removing or reducing camera movement, most effective with telephoto or telephoto zoom lenses. Can be found on most of Canon's "L" range of lenses as well as mid-range lenses such as the EF 28-125 IS USM ISO... Or ASA. (International Standards Organization). The speed or light sensitivity of a captured image is rated by ISO numbers such as 100, 400, 800 etc. The higher the number, the more sensitive to light it is. Similar to film, the higher speeds usually bring on more electronic "noise" so the image gets grainier. JPEG file...(joint Photo Experts Group) JPEG is an algorithm designed to work with continuous tone photographic images which takes image data and compresses it in a lossy manner (this means you do lose some information). The more you compress, the smaller the file but the more information you lose. Lossless image file... Refers to storing an image in a non-compressed format, such as TIFF. Page 2
Macro...Not strictly digital photography terminology, "macro" means the ability for a camera (or lens) to focus so near to the subject that it is captured life size on the image sensor. Manual Exposure... A shooting mode on your camera that enables you to control every aspect of shooting. You can manipulate the shutter speeds, ISO settings, aperture settings and loads more. On your camera this is the M mode. MB (MegaByte)... Memory term meaning 1024 Kilobytes. Used to denote the size of a flash memory card such as 4MB, 8MB etc. Megapixel... This is the CCD (or CMOS) resolution of one million pixels. Digicams are commonly rated by Megapixels. You multiply the horizontal resolution by the vertical resolution to get the total pixel count. Memory Card...A solid state storage device that is inserted into a digital camera and holds the digital information that is the picture. Metadata...When a digital camera captures an image it records two things in the file that is saved - image data itself, and data about that data. The "about the image" data is called "metadata". The information it contains typically includes date, time, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, camera settings, lens settings and file type. Metering... Metering is used to calculate the exposure from the existing light conditions. Includes Matrix Metering, Spot metering and Center-weighted metering. Multi-Pattern Metering... Exposure is determined by reading many different zones in the frame. This gives a more optimum exposure than those cameras using just a central zone metering system. Noise... Relates to pixels in your image that were misinterpreted. Normally occurs when you shoot a long exposure (beyond 1/2-second) or when you use the higher ISO values from 400 or above. It appears as random groups of red, green or blue pixels. Noise often goes overlooked in snapshots, but becomes very obvious if enlargements are made. Optical Zoom... Means that the camera has a real multi focal length lens, this is not the same as a "Digital Zoom" which magnifies the centre portion of the picture. Optical zoom gives better quality than a digital zoom. Overexposure... This is an image that appears much too bright. The highlights and colours are totally lost and usually unrecoverable even by top software. Either the shutter speed was too long or the aperture was too wide. Pixel... The individual imaging element of a CCD or CMOS sensor, or the individual output point of a display device. This is what is meant by the figures 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960 etc., when dealing with the resolution of a particular digicam. Higher numbers are best. Page 3
Point and Shoot... Term used for a simple, easy to use camera with a minimum of user controls. The camera does everything automatically so you literally just point and shoot. RAW Image file... RAW files store the unprocessed image data at 12 bits per channel. Directly from the camera's imaging chip to its memory storage device. "Lossless" compression is applied to reduce the file size slightly, without compromising the quality. RAW image files must be processed with special software before they can be viewed or printed. These are normally in the form of a plug-in for Photoshop or as a standalone product.. The advantage is that you have the ability to alter the white balance, exposure value, color values, contrast, brightness and sharpness as you see fit before you convert this data into the standard JPEG or TIFF format. Professional digital photographers import RAW image data directly into photo-editing programs like Photoshop CS (which comes with a Camera Raw plug-in that works with most popular RAW formats.) Red-Eye... An effect caused by an electronic flash reflecting off the retina at the back of the eye making it look red. Compact cameras with the flash located close to the lens suffer the worst from this problem. Professional photographers use a bracket to hold an external flash unit above and off to the side of the lens to eliminate red-eye. It can also be easily reduced using most post-editing software. Resolution... The quality of any digital image, whether printed or displayed on a screen, depends on its resolution, or the number of pixels used to create the image. More, smaller pixels add detail and sharpen the edges. It works by a simple bit of math multiply the number of pixels along the bottom of the sensor by those up the side. For example, a sensor with 3000 pixels along the bottom, and 2000 up the side equals 6,000,000 pixels in total. That would make it a 6 megapixel camera. Sensitivity...Sensitivity settings on digital cameras are the equivalent of ISO ratings on film. Just about every digital camera will have settings with a sensitivity equivalent to ISO 100 film and ISO 200 film. Many will have an ISO 400 setting, but above that the images from cameras with small sensors gets pretty noisy. The more expensive digital SLRs with much larger sensors have much higher sensitivity settings. Sensor Size...The size of the digital sensor element (which is equivalent to the size of the negative for film cameras) is pretty small in all consumer digicams - typically around the size of a fingernail (and a small fingernail at that!). As I said above, a 35mm film frame is 24mm high by 36mm wide but most digital cameras use sensors very much smaller than this. Shutter Lag... The time between pressing the shutter and actually capturing the image. This is due to the camera having to calculate the exposure, set the white balance and focus the lens. Is worse with smaller digicams whereas the better DSLR's now have little or no shutter lag, like the better film SLR's. Shutter Release... Shutter Release is the button you would use to take the photo. On a point and shoot it will take the picture as seen on the display screen. On a digital SLR this will open up the mirror in the camera and expose the sensor for the time defined by the current shutter speed. Page 4
Shutter Speed... Shutter speed is the amount of time light is allowed to be exposed on the sensor of your camera. With electric sensors the "shutter" is controlled by the camera's computer. A short shutter speed means the sensor is charged for a fraction of a second. For longer shutter speeds, the sensor is kept charged for longer. In the same way as one f-stop corresponds to a factor of two in light intensity, shutter speeds are arranged so that each setting differs in duration by a factor of approximately two from its neighbor. TIFF file...(tagged Image File Format). These keep all the original information, but at the cost of much bigger files. TIFF files can be compressed in a non-lossy way, but they don't get very much smaller. USB... (Universal Serial Bus). This is the data I/O port on most digicams and is also found on modern home PC and Mac computers. It is faster than the serial port and transfers up to 12Mb/s (megabytes per second) with v1.1 interfaces. The newer USB standard, USB 2.0, is close in throughput speed to FireWire, up to 400Mb/s. Vignetting... The term that describes the darkening of the outer edges of the image area due to the use of a filter or add-on lens. Most noticeable when the zoom lens is in full wide-angle. It is also sometimes used as a special effect in the photo editing stage of development. White Balance... Refers to the adjustment of the brightness of the red, green and blue components, so that the brightest object in the image appears white. With digital cameras you can pick your white balance to suit your light source, so that white looks white, not yellow or blue. When the camera is set on AUTO, the camera decides what white balance setting to use. However if you know what your light source is you can usually set the camera to it (daylight, florescent, cloudy) and this may give better results. Most digital cameras have settings for sunlight, shade, electronic flash, fluorescent and tungsten lighting. Zoom Lens... A variable focal length lens. The most common on digicams has a 3:1 ratio (i.e. 35-105mm). Detachable zoom lenses include, for example, 24-70mm, 70-200mm and 100-400mm Zoom, Digital and Optical...Optical zoom works just like a zoom lens on a film camera. The lens changes focal length and magnification as it is zoomed. Image quality stays high throughout the zoom range. Digital zoom simply crops the image to a smaller size, then enlarges the cropped portion to fill the frame again. Digital zoom results in a significant loss of quality. It's pretty much a last resort, and if you don't have it in camera, you can do a similar job using almost any image editing program. Sources: http://www.all-things-photography.com/digital-dictionary.html http://photo.net/equipment/digital/basics/ Page 5
Digital Camera Resolution Chart (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/framework/charts/resolutionchartpopup.html) Print Size*** Capture Res. Video Display* 2x3" 4x5", 4x6" 5x7" 8x10" 11x14" 16x20" 20x30" 320x240 acceptable good acceptable poor poor poor poor poor 640x480.3 Meg Good Excellent good poor poor poor poor poor 800x600 Excellent Photo Qual Very Good acceptable poor 1024x768 Excellent Photo Qual Excellent Good acceptable poor 1280x960 1 Meg Excellent Photo Qual Photo Qual Very Good Good poor 1536x1180 Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Excellent Very Good acceptable poor 1600x1200 2 Meg. 2048x1536 3 Meg. 2240x1680 4 Meg. 2561x1920 5 Meg. 3032x2008 6 Meg. 3072x2304 7 Meg. 3264x2448 8 Meg. 3264x2448 10 Meg + Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Very Good acceptable acceptable acceptable poor Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Excellent Good acceptable acceptable Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Very Good Good acceptable Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Excellent Very Good Very Good Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Excellent Very Good Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Excellent Exc ellent Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Exc ellent Excellent** Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual Photo Qual
Digital Camera Resolution Chart Poor...Noticeably Grainy (pixelated) Acceptable...Obviously not a real photo, but some details are visible Good...Can tell it is not a photo but most details are discernable Very Good...Can tell it is not a photo at normal distance, but good enough for many uses Excellent...Difficult to tell from real photo at normal viewing distance Photo Quality...On a photo-quality printer, the human eye should not be able to tell the difference at a normal viewing distance * Either television or computer display (e.g. Web Page) ** Will produce an excessively large file size that would be inappropriate for web applications *** Using a typical Photo Quality Desktop printer
A Few Digital Photography Apps! 4/11/12 Software on your computer ACDSee (pc/mac) - currently $40 iphoto - (mac) - $15 (available through App store) Photoshop Elements - (mac/pc) - $80 Photoshop (mac/pc) - $545 Lightroom (mac/pc)- $149 Aperture (mac) - $80 Apps- smart phones, ipad Camera - takes pictures and video, can use either front or back camera HDR, zoom, touch to highlight (standard on iphone) Camera+ - ($.99) http://campl.us/ - takes pictures and videos, with more options that camera; including timers, filters, stabilizer, burst setting. Diptic ($.99) - http://www.dipticapp.com/ Diptic lets you create photo collages to: Juxtapose contrasting images, create a before-andafter sequence, produce a photographic series Fuzel ($1.99) - http://www.notabasement.com/ Fuzel combines photos. Create your very own layouts, retouch individually with gorgeous photo effects, base colors, frames and captions. Instagram - (free) - http://instagr.am/ Take pictures with fun filters and share with family and friends. iphoto ($4.99) (ipad 2 or later, iphone 4 or later)- similar to iphoto on your computer. Photo 365 - ($.99) - http://photo365app.com/ Itʼs an app that helps you save a photo a day. Review your photos by the day or by the month. Share your photos on social media or email them. A great way to remember your year in photos. Store and Share pictures Facebook - (free) share with friends, you can control who sees pictures, lower quality of photos, not a good storage solution. Instagram - (free) - http://instagr.am/ Shutterfly - (free) stores photos, can create albums and have special share sites. Not easy to download. Can create and order books, calendars, prints etc. iphoto/photostream/icloud (apple)- on computer/iphone/ipad keeps all three in sync. Photos only stay in photostream 30 days. In iphoto make prints, books and cards. Flickr (yahoo)- (free) stores photos, create sets and collections and share with specific people and/ or have a public feed. Can create and orders ʻstuffʼ, edit photos with piknic, photo community. Photobucket - store, create and share photos and videos. Share with FB and twitter, photo community, competitions and categories Picasa (google)- organize, edit and share photos, free download. ZangZing - (free) stores photos, can pull photos from all your different collections. Share with specific people and/or have a public feed. You can follow otherʼs public feed. Share with FB and twitter.