Tips to Prepare to Edit Digital Photos

So you're about to edit some digital photos in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, the Gimp, or whatever software is your graphics editor of choice. Hang on a second, there are a few things you should do before opening up those graphics for editing.

The My Photo Printer.net Photo Editing Preparation Tips

• Find a CRT monitor. CRT's, cathode ray tubes, are the traditional monitors that most people have attached to their computers. CRT monitors are much better at producing accurate color than the average LCD. LCD's, liquid crystal displays, being the "thin" screens that are built into laptops and are increasingly sold for attachment to desktop computers. LCD's are great for everyday use, they save space, and they save electricity, but when it comes to editing photos, beware! Here's a simple test that illustrates the dangers of editing graphics on an LCD:
  
• load an image with a range of colors and brightness levels.
• move your head around a foot or two in every direction.
• if you can see large variations in the appearance of the colors and brightness when you change the angle of view, imagine how difficult it will be to adjust your digital files correctly!
• Calibrate your monitor. Have you ever opened a graphic or looked at a website on your neighbours computer and have been surprised at how "funny" or "wrong" it looks? Chances are that one of you has a poorly calibrated monitor. It's not a big deal if your neighbours monitor is poorly configured, it is a problem if your monitor is set incorrectly and you are about to order prints of photos that you have edited on your PC! Simple monitor calibration is easy. The general idea is to turn the contrast ratio as high as possible (usually) and then adjust the brightness so that the "blacks" are as black as possible. Check out the Graphics Editing Resources Links page in our Photo Links pages, there is at least one good resource that goes into more detail on monitor calibration.
• Make sure you have some computing resources available. Editing images takes a moderate amount of memory, hard drive space, and processor time - it's all relative, for most computers manufactured in the last 3 or 4 years, editing files from consumer grade digital cameras is not very resource consuming. However, if you are editing very large files, or if your computer is older, or your PC is running a lot of other tasks in the background, consider a general clean up of your PC. There are many sites on the net that will help you "optimize" your PC.
  
• Save your original photos. If you read some of the other articles on this site, you will see this emerge as a theme of this site. Storage space on hard drives is cheap, and CD space is even cheaper. Now, if you loose your original file, or crop it, or otherwise edit it, without saving your original, you will never be able to look back! If you do keep a backup of the original files, exactly as they came from your camera, you keep more options open for the future.

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Published on: 2003-10-28 (4784 reads)