Dude, how do you do that?!?!

jbswear

I post up a lot of my shots on my MySpace page. For me, the site isn't about meeting people, it's about showing my friends one of my main addictions.

I got a question last night from one of my friends on the site, and thought I would share my response to it, in case any of you were faced with the same situation.





Dude, your photographs are amazing! Is this like asking the family Texas BBQ secret, or Houdini "how did you do that?" May i ask you what kinda camera(s) you use? I'm assuming this is digital since it's online? Maybe it's not, and MAYBE you got them developed at CVS and they gave you one of those Kodak CDs. Wait does it have to be digital to get one of those CDs? Yeah I don't know how that works. Anyhow. Your pictures are beautiful (seriously). Have anymore on the computer?

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Thanks, Kat. I really do appreciate the praise.

Here's a review of the camera I use. It's an in-depth every-thing-you-want-to-know-about-it kind of review, which also compares it to cameras in its price range. Just cut and paste.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos400d/

Honestly, and this isn't bragging, it's the photographer, not the camera. Even with a very inexpensive, simple camera, one can take good pictures. With a good camera, it's just easier.

But to learn to take good shots, you've gotta shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and, well, you get the idea. In another week or so, I'll hit 8000 shots with this camera. Yes, 8000. This camera body is good for about 100k shots before you have to worry about the shutter wearing out and failing, so it'll last me another few years.

Having said that, I still consider myself an extremely amateur photographer. Go to www.dgrin.com and look at some of the stuff there. Some of those guys make my shots look like crap. On dgrin my screen name is jbswear. It's a forum dedicated to digital photography. I learned much of what I know from those friendly people.

Now then, you may ask, "What the hell do I do with all those shots?" Well, you see each of those nice shots that I post up? For each 'good' shot, there are 15-30 that aren't so good. With a digital camera, I can shoot and shoot without worrying about wasting film and money getting it developed. Digital cameras have done wonders for 'poor' photographers like me. Ten years ago, before digital cameras, I was limited by my budget in how much I could shoot. If I couldn't afford the film or development, I couldn't shoot. If I couldn't shoot, I couldn't improve my composition and 'eye' for a good shot. Now I have nothing to lose in experimenting with my shooting.

As for developing the shots that I want to have printed...Well, I NEVER have a 'bad' picture now, because I can see it before I develop it. You know how you go to pick up a roll of film that's been developed, and you find that one third of them are out of focus, the color's bad, or it's just a bad shot? Well, I don't have to worry about that. I view it on my computer, touch up the color, crop, adjust, or whatever. If I'm happy with it, I'll store it on my hard drive. If not, it gets deleted (like 80% of my shots).

Now, for some technical mumbo-jumbo that is easy to understand if you use it, but difficult to grasp if you don't. I shoot in RAW, which basically means the image is uncompressed and undeveloped. All the raw information from the shot is loaded directly into my computer. With my camera, that means an image between 8 and 10 megs in size. This kind of file can only be viewed with the camera's proprietary software, or with a special program like Adobe's Photoshop. It's not like a JPEG, which can be viewed by any camera or computer (most point and shoot digital cameras automatically shoot in JPEG). But, I can 'tweak' it, which is something you cannot do with a JPEG.

After I've fixed the color, the lighting, and what-not, I'll 'develop' the picture by changing it to a 16-bit TIFF format, which now results in an image in the 57-65 meg range. It's an absolutely HUGE file. Nice thing about it is that I can print a poster sized picture with the file, it'll show no graininess, and will look like it was taken with a film camera. Remember those pics I showed you at work? I had 'only' developed them to 8-bit TIFF files, which are about 27 megs in size. I did that because I knew that I was only going to print at 4x6 inches. Also, I did that file size because it took my computer 30 minutes to load those 30 files, at that size, to my memory card. Doubling the size to 16-bit TIFF would have taken more than an hour to load them.

I then took the memory card to Ritz and had them printed.

Like I said before, if you want any of those shots for your own, all you have to do is let me know which ones, what size, and I'll let you know how much it'll cost for me to have them printed for you.

So, I'm sure you weren't expecting such a wordy response to your question, but I like to explain in detail how it's done, especially because I enjoy doing it so much, and would love to see others get into photography also. Let me know if you've any more questions.


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Was this a proper response?

Art Scott

Looked good to me...but then what do I know........as for the part on saving as a tiff......I have taken a mere 8mp file (Konica Minolta A2 Prosumer point and shoot) done all my 'shopping to it (except the sharpening which is done after Genuine Faractals), did a resize (be sure to constrain proportions...this way p'shop doesn't take away or try to add pixels...your not upresizing just changing the dpi) to approx 8 X 10 (300dpi) and then ran it thru G-Fractals 4 to uprez to 30 X 40 inches, sharpend in unsharp mask and printed a 30 X 40 300 dpi print for a client in Michigan (interior decorator).....the print was awesome as it was an 8x10 quality print so it could be viewed nose to print and not see any pixelation (no graininess)....as my Pro House Processor told me....Unlewss you really need to go back and do more work on that file then tiff is a waste of time as p'shop rememebers all the post done on a raw file, so the next time that raw is opened it opens as it was last processed....so save room and save that final image as a jpeg......I have over 300 gigs of images and for some on here that is piddly.......I do have a couple of Tiffs but those are for repeat clients that i have done custom poster and sign work for ...so I have the fully layered tiffs saved for the next time they want to make changes....if they keep the same layout it costs them less thena me totally rebuilding the product.....

Sorry for the ramble sitting here waiting on mail person to hopefully bring my new to me Konica Minolta A2....a replacement for one sold about a year ago.......

jbswear

Wow. I understood only about 3 out of 10 words there. The only editing software I own is what came with the camera--Canon's Digital Photo Professional.

Art Scott wrote:

Looked good to me...but then what do I know........as for the part on saving as a tiff......I have taken a mere 8mp file (Konica Minolta A2 Prosumer point and shoot) done all my 'shopping to it (except the sharpening which is done after Genuine Faractals), did a resize (be sure to constrain proportions...this way p'shop doesn't take away or try to add pixels...your not upresizing just changing the dpi) to approx 8 X 10 (300dpi) and then ran it thru G-Fractals 4 to uprez to 30 X 40 inches, sharpend in unsharp mask and printed a 30 X 40 300 dpi print for a client in Michigan (interior decorator).....the print was awesome as it was an 8x10 quality print so it could be viewed nose to print and not see any pixelation (no graininess)....as my Pro House Processor told me....Unlewss you really need to go back and do more work on that file then tiff is a waste of time as p'shop rememebers all the post done on a raw file, so the next time that raw is opened it opens as it was last processed....so save room and save that final image as a jpeg......I have over 300 gigs of images and for some on here that is piddly.......I do have a couple of Tiffs but those are for repeat clients that i have done custom poster and sign work for ...so I have the fully layered tiffs saved for the next time they want to make changes....if they keep the same layout it costs them less thena me totally rebuilding the product.....

Sorry for the ramble sitting here waiting on mail person to hopefully bring my new to me Konica Minolta A2....a replacement for one sold about a year ago.......

pathfinder

Many of better images seen here on dgrin have been edited in some manner by their owners, either in Photoshop, or Lightroom or Aperture, or some other image editing program.

The images that have not been edited after shooting, came baked in the camera as jpgs. In camera jpgs can be be very good images, if properly exposed, and set with the correct white balance at the time of shooting.

Digital Photo Professional is probably one of the less frequently used image editing programs by most shooters here, for a number of reasons, even though it comes with every Canon DSLR sold. It is not currently stored on my hard drive since I rebuilt my computer.

ChatKat

Dpp
I went to a professional level class taught by one of the Canon Reps about a year ago. It totally changed my photography. I was not shooting RAW until I took that class. One of the things we learned was using DPP. I use it as my RAW converter as well as I use PS. But, it allows you to change any setting on your RAW image that you might have made in the camera BEFORE you snapped the picture. I really like it alot. That said, I still don't think that if you are a serious photographer you can do without CS3 - but that isn't why I piped in. DPP is a really good underrated program.

jbswear

ChatKat wrote:

I went to a professional level class taught by one of the Canon Reps about a year ago. It totally changed my photography. I was not shooting RAW until I took that class. One of the things we learned was using DPP. I use it as my RAW converter as well as I use PS. But, it allows you to change any setting on your RAW image that you might have made in the camera BEFORE you snapped the picture. I really like it alot. That said, I still don't think that if you are a serious photographer you can do without CS3 - but that isn't why I piped in. DPP is a really good underrated program.

Yeah, I agree. I guess, with all my other addictions, er, uh, habits, I mean, uh, hobbies, I can't justify purchasing PS when I'm very pleased with the shots I get with minimal touching with DPP.

The only things I generally adjust are the white balance and the exposure. Otherwise, I let them be.

Tuna

jbswear wrote:

Yeah, I agree. I guess, with all my other addictions, er, uh, habits, I mean, uh, hobbies, I can't justify purchasing PS when I'm very pleased with the shots I get with minimal touching with DPP.

The only things I generally adjust are the white balance and the exposure. Otherwise, I let them be.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

jbswear

Tuna wrote:

I have no idea what you're talking about.

BWAHAHAHAHA! Fancy seeing you here! What do you shoot?

Tuna

jbswear wrote:

BWAHAHAHAHA! Fancy seeing you here! What do you shoot?

I've got a D40x.