Digital Camera Master

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The joy of taking digital photographs is that you can manipulate them easily. Once your camera is full of pictures, you only need to copy them to your computer in order to free up space to take more snaps. This means that transferring pictures from your camera to your PC is an important skill to master, but how good at managing pictures are the various version of Windows?

As Microsoft Windows has developed, its handling of graphical files has became better and better. There are next to no specialised photography tools in Windows 95. In Windows 98 there is a picture viewer, but you really need your own photo-handling software (most cameras come with a suitable program). Windows Me includes the Scanner and Camera Wizard (which you can launch through the Control Panel), thumbnail views in picture folders and an enhanced picture viewer.

When it comes to handling picture files, Windows XP is the best of the lot. Most common photography tasks are easily accomplished via simple wizards, and you rarely need to install a software driver - the program that tells your computer how to operate your camera. In this tutorial we’ll be using Windows XP to show you just how easy it is to transfer your digital photos from your camera to your PC. Once you’ve got the cable correctly plugged in, the rest is a breeze. The Scanner and Camera Wizard is easy to follow with clear step-bystep guidance.

However, there’s more to transferring photographs than simply moving pictures from camera to PC. You need to name the picture files suitably and place them in appropriately named folders so you can retrieve them at a later date without problems. Windows XP handles this job well, but you might have to adopt more discipline if you’re working with an older version of Windows.

CONNECTING YOUR CAMERA

YOU NEED A USB LEAD

Most current digital cameras use the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard. The most technical thing you really need to know is which cable to use and where to plug it in. Basically, the wider, flatter end goes into the computer and the smaller end connects to your camera.

PLUG INTO USB SOCKET

This may be located in front of, or behind, your PC. It will normally be labelled, but your cable is unlikely to fit in any other socket. When the cable is plugged in and turned on, Windows should detect the camera. In addition, Windows XP might recognise which camera you are using.

THEN INSTALL DRIVER

If Windows detects but doesn’t recognise your camera, you’ll need to install its driver and photo-handling software. There’s little more to this than popping the CD that comes with the camera into the computer’s CD drive and following the instructions it gives you.

Sending photos

There are a number of ways the net can help you share your photos. One of the easiest is to send pictures to other people as email attachments. This can be done using Microsoft Outlook Express, Outlook, Netscape Mail, AOL or whatever other email service you’re using.

Watch out for the file size of your digital photo. Bear in mind that unless you and the person you’re sending the photo to are using broadband, file transfer speeds via ordinary modems are in the region of 5k per second. That means a typical 1Mb digital photo will take a little over three minutes to send and a similar amount of time to download when received at the other end.

Also remember that some email servers put limits on the maximum file size you can send to other people, so you may need to reduce the image first. If the photo’s just designed to be seen on-screen and not printed, you don’t need to send a full-sized version. Many beginner-orientated digital photo programs will resize a photo for emailing in a couple of easy steps. You can also resize photos manually. Emailing photos to other people is easy. You just attach your photo as a file, or resize it to fit the screen dimensions and embed it in the message itself

Online photo albums

A number of companies offer online albums completely free. You set up your user account, then choose the pictures you want to upload. They’re then transferred to the album site where you can organise them, rename them, add captions and more. You can then invite other people to come and look at your photos. One of the best examples is the service provided by MSN (Microsoft Network) at photos.msn.co.uk. Here you can upload full-resolution files, organise them into albums and slideshows, plus print and send them to other people. You pay for any printing you have done but the rest is free.

Your own website

You have even more control over the look and presentation of your pictures if you create your own website. Nearly all Net accounts come with free web space just for this purpose, so you might as well use it. You will need a web page creation program, and some information from your ISP about where you upload the finished pages, too, but it doesn’t take long to pick it all up. Some image-editing programs, like Adobe Photoshop, Elements and others, can automatically create web page albums from selected folders of images. If you don’t mind spending a few hours learning web design tricks, though, you can do it yourself. Serif’s WebPlus 7 (£30) is just one example of a program that makes website design easy, and you can even create web pages in Microsoft Word.

To get the most from your digital photographs, you need a computer in order to store and display your images, to print them, turn them into web pages, run slideshows, email them and edit them.

The great thing about computer systems is that you can expand them as you go along, adding the devices and internal components you need. But while upgrading your printer, scanner and digital camera won’t be a problem, improving other aspects of your PC’s performance might be.

In particular, if your PC is more than a couple of years old, it’s likely to have a pretty slow processor - by today’s standards, anyway. It’s possible to limp along with an old 500MHz Pentium III, but in order to work with today’s high-resolution images you really need something a lot faster. An entry-level 1GHz machine will be fine for nearly every purpose, but if you can stretch to it, a 2GHz PC will really race along, and you shouldn’t have to think about upgrading again for quite a few years to come.

Our annotated diagram on the previous page will show you what else you need to look out for when you’re planning your perfect digital photography system.

The Nikon CoolPix series has a set of screw-on lenses, including a wide-angle (0.66x) converter. This turns a standard lens at its widest setting, equivalent to 35mm, into a 24mm lens. It’s surprisingly cheap at well under a £100. Sounds great, but there are problems with barrel distortion and chromatic aberration at the edges. It simply isn’t possible with a cheap screw-on lens of this type to achieve the quality of a 35mm SLR lens.

At smaller sizes, or on web pages, you won’t notice the lack of quality, and the lens is small and easy to carry round. If you want to preserve image quality, it may well be better to move further back. We have been known to get our feet wet in a canal.

If you want to include the whole of the building and use your camera’s built-in lens at its best, then that’s the only easy option.

Or you can take a panorama. Holding the camera vertically, take a series of overlapping shots. Then simply stitch them together in an image editor like Elements or Paint Shop Pro

It sounds like you may have resampled the photograph down to a small size rather than changed the display size. Here we are dealing with the thorny subject of resolution and print size - one of the most misunderstood concepts in digital photography.

When measuring the size of digital photographs, there really is only one sort of measurement that’s important, and that is the pixel dimensions. A digital photograph is a certain number of pixels wide and high. Many digital cameras produce pictures at 1,600 x 1,200 pixels. The size you display the image is up to you. If you’re making a digital print, then 200 pixels per inch will give you good results.

This resolution gives a print size of 8 x 6 inches. A problem lurks on screen when preparing the image for printing because most digital cameras produce images that have a default setting of 72 pixels per inch (ppi), which is the resolution of the average computer monitor.

At this resolution, our picture will fill the entire screen area of a large size 1,600 x 1,200 pixel monitor, which is approximately 22 x 16 inches - far too big to fit inside the dimensions of an 8 x 6 print.

We need to change the picture dimension settings and shrink the display size down from large screen size to small print size, and this is where many people go wrong - they reduce the display size but keep the resolution at 72ppi.

The computer, being the dumb machine that it is, will then resample the image from 1,600 x 1,200 pixels (5.5- megabytes) down to 576 x 432 (just under three quarters of a megabyte) throwing away over 85 per cent of the picture information

Auto-exposure is a marvel of camera technology, the result of years of development work by talented R&D teams. But there are times when we’d rather dump the auto-exposure technology and use manual settings. This may be under unusual lighting conditions or for creative work - roughly 20 per cent of the time for many users.

The more expensive cameras have manual over-ride, but if your camera doesn’t have this facility, it is still possible to exert your control and get the camera to do your bidding, not the other way round! Auto exposure controls are generally adjusted for the average, but many routine pictures have characteristics that fall outside the average, such as a bright sky and a dark foreground. The average exposure is often below the correct level for the sky, so it comes out white, and above the correct level for the foreground, so it comes out dark. In this case, we can manipulate the camera and get it to do our bidding.

To expose correctly for the sky, aim the camera at the sky, lightly hold down the shutter, reposition it and take the shot. To expose correctly for the dark foreground, aim the camera down, and do the same. We now have two pictures that can be merged into one in image editing later

Many cameras have auto-exposure compensation. However, if you’re aiming at a dark subject against a light background, then you can set the compensation to the plus setting, making it overexpose, and vice versa. Apart from switching off the flash, there’s not much you can do to manipulate the autoexposure settings, so if you really want to take control, then it may be an idea to get a higher specification camera.

The answer is not to scan prints, but to either use a film scanner or to have your film scanned by some of the excellent scanning services that are available. Despite advances in digital camera technology, film remains an excellent medium for the capture and storage of picture information. It doesn’t matter whether the film is colour or monochrome, negative or slide.

A high-resolution film scanner will extract an enormous amount of information from the film and turn it into digital format.

A print is a copy of an image on film. In the analogue world, every time you make a copy you lose information. In the case of a print from a negative, it’s possible to lose over half the picture information – bright and detailed clouds burn out to patches of white, shadow detail is reduced to a dark pool of black and sharp edges are softened. If the colour balance isn’t right because the chemicals haven’t been topped up correctly, you lose colour information.

So why bother making a print? Well, a print contains more than enough picture information for our eyes to extract and we tend not to notice the lost information. We may not realise that it’s a bad copy of a negative or slide – after all, the film is too small for our eyes to read and you’re unlikely to be able to make sense of a negative.

The problem starts when, often using a low-cost flatbed scanner, we make a copy of what is already a rather ropy copy.

The best way to see the difference is to compare an image scanned from a print on a flatbed with one scanned from film. The answer is clear – always try to scan from film!

Printing services often crop photographs, removing a strip off all four edges.

A more serious problem may be a mismatch between the shape of the window or frame used at image capture to the one use at printing stage. Cameras use many aspect ratios, ranging from panoramic to square. If you capture an image using one aspect ratio and wish to display it using another, then you have two choices: either include the entire image with blank borders or crop it so it fills the new frame size.

We encountered this problem when we made a 6 x 4-inch print of a picture captured using a popular digital camera. Most digital cameras use an aspect ratio of 4 x 3 (that is, computer screen aspect ratio), but the smallest standard print format uses an aspect ratio of 3 x 2 (the same as 35mm film). If you don’t want blank borders, then you have to crop. If the picture was originally 1,200 pixels wide and 900 pixels high, you’ll need to crop the picture at the top and/or at the bottom reducing it to 800 pixels. See our print techniques article later on.

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