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- Kerry Flatley, Analyst, Infotrends

General tips about digital photography
Learn more about your digital camera
Taking photos using your digital camera
Editing and printing your digital photos
Sharing your digital photos

General tips about digital photography

Have you just converted from a regular film camera to a digital camera? If so, chances are that you're taking more photos now than ever but not printing as many. The computer screen has probably also become your preferred medium for viewing your photos.

Your digital photo collection will continue to grow over time as you capture photos of your life events. With a growing collection, you'll need a way to organize them now for later viewing. Filing photos away into random folders on your computer hard drive won't help you find that one photo you are looking for a year from now.

Be sure to create a folder structure on your hard drive which is conducive to both your present and future needs. For example, you won't want to create a folder titled 'January' because a year from now you will have the need for another January folder. You might want to title folders by date to allow for easy sorting. Naming folders with the YYYY-MM-DD format will allow you to sort your photos in chronological order with ease.

While naming folders in the above format will allow you to locate photos from a particular date it won't help you locate a particular place, event or person in the photos. Preclick's PhotoBack™ enables you to 'tag' each of your photos with a caption, person, event, place and rating. Preclick's photo acquisition wizard helps you tag batches of your photos with a place and event when importing them from a digital camera, memory card or CD. Once the photos are tagged, you can then search your photos for the desired keyword. If, on your five year wedding anniversary, you want to see photos from your wedding, you can search for 'wedding' and you will see the results almost instantaneously!

Learn more about your digital camera

Megapixels and maximum print sizes Below are the megapixel conversion ratios for maximum print sizes. The maximum print size is the largest size a photo can be printed without quality being adversely affected.

Megapixels (MP)	Typical Image Dimensions (pixels)	Maximum Print Size
VGA SVGA	640 x 480 800 x 600	Web / email use only
1 MP	1,154 x 852	4 x 6
2 MP	1,600 x 1,200	8 x 10
3 MP	2,048 x 1,536	8 x 10 with cropping
4 MP	2,384 x 1,734	11 x 17
5 MP	2,560 x 1,920	11 x 17 with cropping and digital zoom

Common battery types used with digital cameras:

High Drain Alkaline (Premium Alkaline)
- Easy to find
- Need to replace less often than standard alkaline in high energy devices
Photo Lithium
- Similar to or better than alkaline in terms of cost per unit energy
- Substantially better high-current performance than alkaline batteries
- Excellent low temperature performance
NiMH
- Higher capacity than NiCad
- Minimal environmental concerns
- Rapid recharge capability
- Fairly inexpensive relative to other rechargeable batteries
Lithium Ion
- Higher capacity than NiMH
- Minimal environmental concerns
- Greater power supply efficiency

Tips for extending battery life in digital cameras:

Minimize the use of the LCD screen when taking photos or video, especially when using alkaline batteries. Try to use the viewfinder to frame pictures instead of the LCD screen.
Use the Auto flash setting rather than having the flash continuously active.
Use an AC adapter when the camera will be on for extended periods of time, or when unloading pictures to your computer, printing, or connecting to the television (TV).
Whenever possible, use a memory card reader when downloading photos to your computer rather than attaching the camera directly to the computer.

Taking photos using your digital camera

Using your flash
Most cameras default to using the flash automatically when needed. You should always use your flash when in low light environments. At night, if you are taking a photo of something close up you will want to use a flash. Alternatively, if you are taking a photo of something far away (such as a city skyline) at night, you will want to take the photo without the flash.

Keep it steady
Make sure you hold the camera as steady as possible while taking the photo. Using a tripod is the best option but any solid surface can help. Shaking the camera while taking the photo can cause the photo to come out blurry.

Selecting the optimal resolution on your camera
If you have a large memory card (128 MB or higher) in your camera and ample storage space on your computer, we recommend setting your camera to the highest resolution possible. You can always downsize your photos later but you can never effectively increase a photo's resolution after it's been taken.

If you have a small memory card (64 MB or less) in your camera and select the highest resolution setting, you risk running out of room on your memory card. However, in digital photography, for most users quality is more important than quantity. Selecting the lowest resolution in order to take more photos can result in poor quality photos and poor quality is usually reflected when your photos are printed

Editing and printing your digital photos

Rotate your photos - If you have photos with different orientations, you will want to rotate the photos so they all are show right-side-up for easier viewing. Preclick uses lossless rotating which enables you to rotate your photos without diminishing their quality.

Remove Red Eye - One of the major advantages of digital photography is your ability to remove the red eye BEFORE you print the photos. With just one click in Preclick, you can remove the red eye in your photos.

Crop your photos - Another major advantage of digital photography is the ability for you to removed unwanted areas from your photos via cropping.

If you plan on printing your photos, here are some tips on cropping them first:

You want to make sure you don't crop too much of the photo as the quality will actually decrease making the photo blurry when you print it.

Crop your photo to the size ratio you plan to print. For example, if you plan to print a 5"x7" version of your photo, you will want to select the 5"x7" option from the crop menu. Cropping to one size and then printing to another size will cause the photo to be automatically stretched or cropped to fit the layout.

Don't crop too closely to the details (people, objects, etc) you wish to have printed. Certain professional photo-finishers and home printers will actually remove an extra 3% from each side of your photo upon printing.

The beauty of Preclick's editing functions is that no matter how many edits you make to a photo, you will always be able to undo the edits individually or revert back to the original untouched photo with just one click.

Tips for using Preclick's Home Printing Option:
Preclick's home printing feature enables you to automatically edit your photos to fit the selected layout. Selecting 'Rotate the photo' automatically changes the photo's orientation to fit the selected layout. Clicking 'Crop the photo' automatically crops part of the photo to ensure that the photo fits the selected layout without being distorted.

Sharing your digital photos

Whether you or your recipients' are on a dialup connection or not, it's a good idea to compress your photos before you share them. Compression will save you time uploading and your recipients time downloading the files. It will also help you to avoid exceeding size limitations on your recipients' email servers. Preclick automatically compresses your photos for emailing when you click the Send Photos button on the Share tab.

Did you know that you can share captions and other descriptive information with the photos you send to your friends and family? Everything you enter in the Preclick PhotoBack™ (Caption, Rating, People, Place, and Event) is embedded in the photo itself. If you share these photos with others, they will be able to view your captions and any other information you have entered into the PhotoBack if your recipients have Preclick installed on their computer.

Note: Embedding information will not change your photo's appearance in any way.
Note: For BMP files, the PhotoBack data is kept in a separate file (designated with a file format of .bmp.xmp) located in the same directory as the image.

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