Digital Photography

Digital photography

Many digital cameras allow you to preview your picture on the LCD monitor built into your camera, and all allow you to review your results immediately. You can explore and experiment to your heart’s content—and there are no film costs.

The camera’s white balance setting lets you shoot under almost any light. You no longer need expensive and complex strobes to get good results. You can now use simple and inexpensive tungsten, quartz, or fluorescent bulbs with reflectors.

With the development of tools such as digital cameras and page layout programs, and the vast expansion of low-cost marketing outlets, a new era of self-publishing has arrived. All by yourself, you can now create illustrated catalogs, Web sites, portfolios

Questions to ask yourself before buying a digital camera:

How good are digital cameras?
What features should I look for in a digital camera and how do I use them?
What resolution do I need?
Do I want a point-and-shoot camera or one with creative controls?
How important are accessories?
How should I choose the company to buy from?
What alternatives are there to a digital camera?

Improving the quality of the image

Always resize last. Make your adjustments to brightness, contrast, and color while you still have the most pixel information. Cropping and resizing should be your final steps.
Look at your work on as many different monitors as possible. LCD screens run hotter than CRTs, so check your work on both. Eventually, you'll learn to trust your eye for the correct amounts of brightness and saturation.
Most digital photos won't need any cleaning up, but some will. Fix those blemishes with Photoshop's healing brush and the rubber stamp tool.
Avoid using the flash if you can. Natural light is best, and flashes produce brightness imbalances that are difficult to fix. Experiment with the aperture and shutter speed setting on your camera.
Study the work of others. Look at professional photographers' sites and pay particular attention to the way they display their photos and arrange their galleries.
The best way to learn the capabilities of your toolset is to experiment! Try making art adding filter effects and playing with colour saturation.

Thumbnail photo gallery

There is a useful tool in Photoshop that generates a quality HTML-driven thumbnail gallery on the fly. It's called the Web Photo Gallery tool, and it's accessed via the File menu under File -> Automate with the other batch process functions