Preparing your photos for printing

Printing your photos in the old days from film required absolutely no input from the average user. That is mostly due to the fact that the photographic labs prepared your photos for you and only the professionals bothered with developing and printing their images. With the arrival of cheap digital cameras almost everyone has a camera and because we don’t need to buy film we actually take much more photos than people use to take when we still used film. This has put an enormous strain on photographic labs who now can’t keep up with individually processing each photo before sending it to the printer.

There are however still some labs who do this for their customers for free but the person doing the processing probably isn’t as qualified as the people we had some years back working with film. If the lab you are using charges you for this service as an extra it is usually worth paying for until you are confident enough to prepare your own photos for printing.

The first thing we need to do is to calibrate our monitor. If your monitor isn’t calibrated you are most likely going to get mixed results which will frustrate anybody beyond belief. Once your monitor is calibrated we can actually see the colors we are going to get. The other important thing we need to do is sharpening.

Sharpening photos for print is an art within itself. Chances are that if you just heard about sharpening your photos before printing that you will create a very bad mess. Most articles I have read about the subject usually suggest you sharpen more than what you think you should because the print won’t be as sharp as what you see on your screen. That is true but people who are new to this tend to go over the top.

When sharpening a photo we must take into account the size at which we will be printing. For example we are going to look at a normal 4x6 print. We can’t just sharpen a 12 megapixel photo and expect it to print perfectly. We have to resize our Image to an optimum size. Most printers don’t exceed 300 DPI so we will start with that. To get a 4x6 inch image at 300 DPI we must resize it to 1800x1200 pixels. Hopefully you have a 4x6 inch photo by your side so that you can press it up to the screen to set the image magnification on screen to match the size of an actually 4x6 image.

Now we can sharpen our image until it looks good but not overdone. I actually suggest you make a few duplicates of one image with different sharpening levels and print them at your local lab to see which you prefer.

Happy Shooting!

Printing and DPI

There is always some confusion regarding DPI between the new comers. DPI stands for dots per inch. Most places on the web and printing labs will say you have to print at 300 DPI. That roughly translates to 8x12 inches (A4) for a 8 megapixel image. I have personally printed Images at 140 DPI without any problems or noticeable pixilation.

What you need to remember when making enlargements is that you won’t be viewing an A4 Image from the same distance as a 4x6 inch image. So that small difference will only be noticeable when inspecting a print with a magnifying glass. To this day I regularly print photos on A2 paper with a DPI of around 150 and I honestly can’t say that it looks any worse than a smaller Image printed at 300 DPI.

Don’t just take my word for it though. Do your own test and I’m sure you will be surprised just how little DPI you really need to get great results.

Happy shooting!

Monitor Calibration

Have you ever returned from the photo lab only to notice that the image looked different on your screen than it does on photo paper?
That is probably because you haven’t calibrated your monitor. You can calibrate your monitor in one of two ways. The first is by adjusting it manually by using your eyes which isn’t always very effective. The second and most reliable way is to use a hardware calibration device which you put over your screen to actually measure the colors. There are many popular brands that don’t cost too much or in some instances you may find someone who has the hardware and is willing to calibrate your monitor for a small fee.

So off you go to re-edit and print another batch. Now you are probably scratching your head and wondering why your colors still don’t match up. That is because you are most likely using a cheap normal everyday screen. The problem with these screens is that they are designed to be cost effective and not color accurate. There are screen which are extremely accurate but they usually cost and arm and a leg. The best screen you can get which will provide more accuracy is the Apple Cinema display.

If you don’t want to spend any more money there is one solution that I have found to work great. I Calibrate my LCD screen and then go to my preferred lab to print out some sample images. It is important to always use the same lab as there are variations between how labs go about printing your images. Now that we have calibrated our screen and with some sample prints we can start adjusting our screen manually with the screens built in controls. I must admit that it isn’t perfect but it sure has improved the accuracy of what I see and what i get in the end by a considerable margin.

Happy shooting

   

Taking Panoramic photos part 2

Now that we have our images we need to make a panoramic photo we just need some decent software to do the work for us!

As I have said in Part 1 I only use Auto Pano pro and have been getting excellent results. Make sure all the photos for your panorama are converted to Tiff or Jpeg and then open Auto Pano pro. You can select all images you want to convert and simply drag them into the program. The really nice thing about Auto Pano Pro is that we can do multiple Panoramas at once. Trust me this feature alone will save you hours of time especially when you are working with Tiff files!

In this screenshot I have imported a few small Jpg images and then clicked the play button. This quickly calculates a rough preview of your image and then allows you to fine tune your panorama by clicking on the edit button.

Now it gets interesting. Don’t be intimidated by all those buttons. We only really need to use 4 of those. I have numbered all buttons in the screenshot for easy referencing.

1

Lets start with the most obvious one and that is choosing how your Panorama will be rendered. The Planar option usually works best to recreate the scene more accurately. The other functions do however come in very handy for when you actually need to fit your photo into a smaller horizontal space.

2

This is the crop button and as you have noticed we will probably have some dead space in our images that we can’t use because there isn’t any pixels there. What the crop tool does is quite simply. The moment your click the crop button it will automatically remove all those areas without pixels. You can however fine tune the crop but it usually does a fine job on it’s own.

3

This button is meant to straighten the horizon in the panorama. With all the stretching to make your photos fit into each other perfectly the Horizon can sometimes become a bit skew. By clicking on this tool it will automatically detect the horizon and level it out for you. I have tried this feature on a few occasions but it has only really worked well with one of my Panoramic photos. To get the best results from this tool you should actually correct distortions brought on by the lens when converting from the RAW file.

4

If for some reason your exposure changed while you were taking your panoramic images then you will love this button. Just one click and it will balance out the color and exposure of all photos.

That’s all there is to it. Now we can click on the render button and watch as this absolutely marvellous software does the rest of the work for us.

Happy Shooting!

Taking Panoramic photos part 1

I want to start this post by saying that even your Grandmother can stitch a panoramic photo with the advances of technology. With that out of the way let’s get you started. A few years back we only had photoshop to manually blend images into panoramic shots. Eventually photoshop incorporated a feature that did all the work for you but the results were abysmal at best! Nowadays their stitching software seems to work much better but while they were trying to make a decent offering other companies jumped up all over with some really good alternatives. The best software I have ever used is Auto Pano Pro (In the next post we will look at how to use this software). Creating a Panoramic photo couldn’t be any simpler!

To start off we need some photos that we took with the intention of making a Panorama. This process doesn’t need to be too complicated but you need to know how to operate your camera. First we need to take a photo of something that will actually be in our final image. We do this to check that we have the correct exposure. Now you can use exposure lock or just set your camera to Manual and choose the correct exposure yourself. We do this because we don’t want colors and exposure to be all over the place in our final set of images. Setting the white Balance is a must if you are shooting JPG. If you are shooting RAW we can change this when we convert our files.

Now that we know the basic camera settings we need to capture our scene. Because we are taking a panorama you need to make sure we can get the maximum amount of detail from our photos. To do that we are going turn our cameras and shoot vertically because of the 3:2 ratio in SLR cameras. If you are shooting with a point and shoot you must still do this even if your ratio is only 4:3. That will get us more pixels to work with in our final image.

We are now almost ready to shoot our panorama. Two last things to note. If you are shooting with a SLR choose a place to focus on and switch your lens to manual focus. This way we are sure to have the same focus point on all our photos. If you are using a point and shoot this probably won’t matter that much because of the increased amount of depth of field. When taking the images make sure you have a 20% overlap between each frame. This overlap makes it easier for the software to stitch your images.

In the next post we will look at how to stitch our images into a Panorama. Stay tuned!

Optimizing Dynamic Range

For those of you who don’t know what Dynamic Range is, I’ll try to sum it up in a sentence. Dynamic range is the amount of detail we can capture between dark and light. On average Digital SLR cameras capture about 9 stops. A good example of seeing it in action is to take a photo of a sunset. Your photo will either have a black foreground or a white sky. With today’s technology it isn’t possible for Cameras to capture the world as we see it with our eyes. The human eye can see about 16 stops of Dynamic Range which is in a whole other league compared to today's Cameras.

Photography books

This is one of the quickest ways to learn photography if you are motivated to read it cover to cover and apply what has been said. Most photography books out there teach you the exact same things and hope to get the buyers attention with an excellent image on the cover. Others offer very little to no advice at all but they still sell like hot cakes because it is published by a known photographer.

The truth is that none of these books will really tell you how to take great pictures. Instead they tell you how you should go about maximizing your chances at getting a great photo. Photographers try to be very secretive in general about their work because they feel someone else might use to their techniques and take away some of their business.


These photography books are still an excellent read and will most likely share something with even professionals they didn’t know. One book that helped me tremendously when I started with photography was Understanding Exposure by Brian Peterson. Brian explains everything you might want to know in very easy and understanding terms with examples!

The Ultimate Guide to Digital Nature Photography is another book which I got only recently. It covers mostly the same as the above but with focuses more on modern day digital photography that is meant to WOW the audience. I strongly suggest you get both these books and start reading Understanding exposure first because the second book can be quite technical if you don’t already know some of the basics.

Alternatively you can support this website. By making a small donation you will  receive our ebooks for free which cover everything these books do and even more! Click here to go to our ebook page

Happy shooting!

   

The proper way to handhold your camera

There is a quick way of making sure you get sharper photos right out of the camera and that is by holding your camera correctly. Most people who upgrade from a point and shoot think they can still just use four fingers to support their digital SLR. Unfortunately this practice will result in a lot of blurry pictures and a very frustrated user.

When working with an SLR camera we should always support the lens with our left hand while having a firm grip on the camera body with the right hand. You will know your left hand is in the correct position when you can zoom your lens while still supporting your camera. With your right hand in the correct position you should have your thumb free to operate all the necessary controls at the back of the camera without too much effort.

UV Filters

When I bought my first camera the salesman suggested I buy a UV filter to protect my lens. I, like most other people thought this was a good idea. For the next few years I religiously used a UV filter on all my lenses and never took them off. Then one sunny afternoon it finally happened. I accidentally dropped my camera and it landed right on the lens. It was a sight that will bring almost any man to tears. Luckily I had my trusty UV filter on the lens which took the full force of the impact. The impact was so brutal that it bent the filter and cracked the glass. For a second I thought that I was very lucky to have the filter but it was unfortunately not enough.

Sharpening your photos for web publishing and email purposes

Good day dear readers!

It took me a few years to figure out it isn’t the expensive lenses or cameras that make most professionals images look so good on the web. It is just a matter of how you prepare your image! Off course you need a good photo to begin and that is technically correct or just pleasing to the eye.

sRGB or Adobe RGB?

This is a very common question people ask when they start with digital photography. I am pretty sure all recent digital SLR cameras give you the option to choose between them in the camera. If cameras didn’t give you the option you probably wouldn’t even know they existed. The quick and short answer is to shoot in sRGB. If you want a detailed answer then you should continue to read this post.

Showcasing your photos on the web

Today we are going to take a look at hosting your photos online. We can sum up most of these hosting sites into two categories. Category 1 consists of community type galleries like Deviant Art and Flickr. Category 2 is more portfolio orientated like Smugmug and zenfolio. If you opt to get your own website it would most likely fall into the second category.

Why you don’t need a Teleconverter

A few months ago I got rid of the Amazing Nikon 70-300mm VR lens and bought a 70-200mm f2.8 VR II lens with the new Nikon TC 2x III. The only reason I got the teleconverter was to make up for the reach I lost with the new lens and shooting on a full frame instead of a crop sensor.

Nikon 35mm f1.8

Some people were confused when Nikon first announced the 35mm DX lens. At the time there was some speculation whether the DX format would be cancelled down the line. It was only a year and a few months after the D3 came out which boasted the first 35mm digital sensor for Nikon.

Why you need a fast prime lens

When I started photography back in 2006 everyone recommended I buy a 50mm prime lens. Unfortunately I didn’t listen to them. In December 2008 Nikon launched the excellent D300 and the temptation was too much to resist. So I sold my Canon equipment and bought the D300 as well as a 50mm and 85mm prime lens to see what all the hype was about.

Choosing your first camera

Choosing your first camera can be a life changing event. That is why it is very important you choose a camera you can grow into and at the same time won’t cost you an arm and a leg. You don’t need the best camera and lens to take great photos. I have seen countless images taken with entry level cameras that simply took my breath away. In the end the photographer counts more than the equipment.

Introduction

So this is my new blog and my first post on it. This is probably a good time to introduce myself and tell you what this blog is about.

My name is Josef Naude. I started photography in early 2006 when I got myself a Digital SLR camera for my 21st birthday. I opted for a Canon 350D with the 18-55mm kit lens. The reason I chose that camera was because it was one of the cheapest options on the market and I knew absolutely nothing except that Canon has been in the business for years.