Feb 23
How To Photograph
icon1 admin | icon2 General | icon4 02 23rd, 2010| icon3No Comments »

Photographing jewellery can be tricky, but with a few concepts and budget below US$500 it is possible to achieve near-professional look of the photographs. This guide is intended for absolute beginners. Terminology is simplified, and camera adjustments are discussed with only jewellery in mind.

1. Equipment

1.1 Digital SLR

Biggest spend for near-professional look of jewellery photography is for the digital SLR. This is an absolute must. Second-hand camera will be as good. Camera without many features and without high Mega-Pixel rate will work just as fine. 3 Mega Pixel is more than enough.

Note that what makes the difference is the quality of the optical system, not the number of actual pixels.

Digital SLR will allow you to manually adjust every aspect of the camera. Automatic modes are not appropriate for jewellery.

1.2 Lighting

Avoid using any flashes. Don’t use camera’s built in flash. Don’t buy stand-alone flashes. In fact, don’t buy any lighting equipment. Desk lamps 60W-100W will do just fine.

Photo tent will help a lot, but is not mandatory. You get find them for as little as US$20. Terminology varies, so "Photo Tent" will also be called "Light Cube", or "Soft Light Box". Do your searching and find one approx 20" (50cm) in size.

You will need 3 lights. Two matted lights — soft lights, and one reflector light. Place one matted light left of the area for jewellery, and one to the right. Place reflector light near where the camera is.

Whatever you do, avoid mixing light types. Use only non-fluorescent lights, and isolate your photo ‘lab’ away from natural light.

1.3 Tripod

To have freedom with many settings that will be a must, we will have to use longer exposures. For longer exposures to achieve maximum sharpness, we’ll need a tripod. Our hand shakes too much, when camera runs at exposition 1/2s or 1/5s. Buy a ‘tripod’ for US$10-$20. You don’t need a heavy duty tripod. If your setup will be on a desk, you can chose mini tripod – approx 10" (25cm), and stand tripod on the desk as well, or longer tripod, approx 50" (125cm) and stand it on the floor.

2. Setup

Position the lights as described above. Two desk lamps with soft light (irrelevant if you are using photo tent — the tent is there to soften the light), and reflector light at the front. I keep the cube open at the front, for easier adjustments and photographs, unless jewellery is highly reflective of the image of me taking photograph.

Uniform background colour is recommended. White background works great. Black background is a little harder to work with. I use one of the white wooden shelves that was sitting in the garrage. Hardware stores will sell these for a few dollars.

Jewellery neck stands look effective only on some pieces, but for most laying on the white surface is the best.

3. Jewelry Arrangement

Spend time arranging jewellery. Clean the jewellery if needed. Polish and remove finger prints. Lay it nicely. For chains, spend time to even out all links and to lay it in a perfect circle. For fashion jewellery this may be a little tricky simply because it’s made of various materials and it just doesn’t like to sit perfectly on its own. Use blue-tac to fix it where you want it.

4. Taking Photographs

Set your camera to manual. This is where you can adjust all settings yourself. You can leave auto-focus on if you wish, that is about the only setting you can have automatic. Disable camera flash. With static lighting and without using flashes, you can spend time moving the lights until you get perfect setup, before taking shots.

Learn the following 5 camera adjustments: Aperature (f-number), Sensitivity (ISO number), Shutter Speed (Exposure), White Balance, and Focus. These 5 are your bread and butter.

4.1 Aperature

Also known as f-number. This setting widens or narrows the lens, limiting the amount of light that comes into the camera. This directly affects shutter speed, and film sensitivity (since we’re using digital camera, film sensitivity is adjustable like anything else).

This setting is responsible for the ‘focal lenght’. With high f-number eg f/22 or f/11, when taking jewellery photographs, parts that are close to camera will be focused as well as parts that are further away. With low f-number, eg f/2, only the focused part will be in-focus, and parts of jewellery that are further apart or closer to the camera will become fuzzy. Use this setting as it suits you. You may want to create certain effect, but if you don’t, keep this setting to f/11. Overdoing this setting will limit the light coming into the camera, and you’ll have to make sacrifices elsewhere to compensate.

4.2 Sensitivity

Also known as ISO number. This used to be film property, and expressed in numbers like ISO200, ISO400, ISO800 etc. The higher the number, more sensitive the film, less light it needs, and thus more expensive. In Digital SLR’s this is merely just a setting, but the higher the number, more noise camera will capture. The more light you have, you can go lower with this number. For our limited lighting, ISO800 or ISO1600 will be fine, but try not to use ISO3200 — it adds visible noise.

4.3 Shutter Speed

Also known as exposure, it is a measure of time camera will be taking the light. When photographing moving objects, you would want this fairly short: 1/200 or or 1/400. However, we’re taking static objects, and with the tripod camera is static as well. This gives us flexibility in going as low as 1/30 or 1/10, or even 1/2. Value 1/2 means that camera takes light from the object for half a second. If anything moves during that half a second, photograph will be blurred.

Adjust shutter speed freely until you get desirable effect. In fact, when taking photographs of jewellery against white background, you will want photos over-exposed. Over-exposure should affect only the white background, where small imperfections of white surface will vanish into pure white. If your camera has light meter, it will display a warning that you have too much light, number 2 or 2.5 could be flashing in your viewfinder. This is good :-) .

If your background is black, you’ll want it under-exposed. This will keep the black background black, remove some imperfections, but leave the jewellery just fine.

4.4 White Balance

With different colours present in every light source, our eyes naturally adjust to what white is. Cameras try to do the same and for general photography are quite good at it. However, for jewellery, you’ll want to try all manual pre-sets yourself and chose best result. If everything fails, manually adjust white balance, until it’s good. You won’t need to keep changing this setting from one jewellery piece to another.

4.5 Focus

Jewellery is static. It’s easy to use manual focus, but auto-focus seems to work just as fine. If camera keeps focusing on the incorrect part, just switch to manual, and away you go. For most applications, auto-focus will be fine though.

4.6 Taking photographs

Take enough photographs for each peace. Use camera built-in display as a guide only. Colors and brightness will look slightly different on the computer screen. You can adjust some of it afterwards, but try to take a perfect shot in the first place.

5. Post-Processing

Restrain youself from using too many features of the photo editing software. All you need to do is manually adjust Brightness and Contrast, and perhaps use ‘Sharpen’ feature. Don’t apply any automatic adjustments, as these will get confused with too much white in the photo, or too much black.

Crop to the area you want to keep, save in internet-friendly format (eg 400×300) and you’ve got a near-professional photograph. Reuse the same photograph for ‘zoom-in’ crops. You won’t be making images larger, instead you’ll be cropping from your original, adjusting and saving.

Digital camera with 6 mega pixels or more will preserve enough of the detail for zoom-in’s. If not happy, re-take photos of the detail.

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Feb 22

Put your great photos and memories on color photo print. Think every cheap photo prints are the same? Think again! Here are some secrets and tips on which are the best digital photo prints.

One look at Zoomin’s stunningly beautiful photo prints will make you a believer.
Professional photo print quality comes from real photo paper (No inkjet prints here!) to the finest processing equipment – all to complement our easy ordering process.

Best Quality Photo Prints

Make big and beautiful memories when you turn your photos to gorgeous photo prints from ZoomIn. Order prints of your photos and make those moments of magic last forever. Whether it is your baby’s first steps or birthday, that weekend getaway or your love’s smile – prints from ZoomIn are a great way to enjoy those moments time after time.

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Most orders ship the same or next business day and are delivered by a fast courier to your door.
Premium paper
Kodak Royal Gold, Kodak Professional and Kodak Endura Metallic paper is used for all our photo prints.

Why should you choose Zoomin for Prints ?

Quality
ZoomIn uses real Photo Prints paper from Kodak and choose best photo printer. Select from many sizes (including our new square prints). Take control with our color and crop control settings during checkout.
Shipping
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Bonus Features
Get lots of extra goodies with your order like an index print to catalog your photos, a free album and innovative tamper resistant safe packaging
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We want you to be thrilled. In the unlikely event that you are not happy with your prints, please write to us right away and let us know. We will work with you to ensure your satisfaction with every order you place with us.

How do I get these super quality prints ?

Step 1

Upload your photos
Use our easy to use upload tools and transfer your photos from your computer (or Flickr and Picasa) to your ZoomIn account.

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Select print sizes and finishes
Click on Order Prints and select the photos you want to print. ZoomIn prints are available in a variety of sizes 1000 – up to 12×36"

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We ship most orders the same or next business day. Each order will be carefully packed, include a handy index print and free album to hold 4×6 and 5×7 prints

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Feb 21

Today we can choose among many photo printers. All the manufacturers claim that their photo printer makes the best and cheap photo prints. So which photo printer is the best?

Choose Best Photo Printer

In this article I will specifically focus on quality elements, both in terms of mechanics and results. I carry with me an experience as a reviewer of high-end printers of over ten years. Let’s start with the quality of the components.

Photo printer quality

These days, you can buy an inkjet photo printer for less than 200 Euros. Although you always get quality in relation to what you pay, most inkjet photo printers –even the cheap ones– have a decent quality of build.

The problem with very cheap photo printers is that the manufacturer cannot make a profit from them, and therefore has to find a way to generate money through other means than directly from selling the hardware. The easiest and most obvious way to do that is to sell ink cartridges that get depleted soon. Most cheap inkjet photo printers are therefore expensive in terms of ink consumption.

Many people will replace the manufacturer’s ink with third-party ink. This is a viable strategy provided you don’t care much for the longevity of your prints and the replacement ink that you buy is of a decent quality. Most replacement inks of good quality are just as expensive as the manufacturer’s.

Lyson in the UK sells fine quality inkjet inks that come in bulk packaging (www.lyson.com).

Some ink manufacturers will make larger ink bottles, so that the price per unit decreases. This is actually the only way to get acceptable quality for a decent price. However, a cheap inkjet photo printer is not built to support intensive printing, so if that is why you buy those large ink bottles, then be prepared to replace your photo printer every 3 months instead of every two years. If you’re printing many prints, the life span of a cheap photo printer may be much less than a year.

Better quality photo printers

If you have a bit of a larger budget, there are somewhat more expensive photo printers (between 300 and 700 Euros) on the market that have much better quality components, which last longer and which are capable of much better quality prints. More importantly, these printers consume less ink.

What should you ask a vendor of such higher-quality photo printer? For starters, such a photo printer should come with built-in calibration. Calibration is a technique that makes sure the printer is put into a known state. We use that state to make sure the colours and output quality we get from the photo printer are consistently the same. This also means we can create colour profiles for the printer, and have it print without colour streaks or gaps in the output.

Another issue that you must take into account is the ink spillage that occurs because of cleaning cycles. Every inkjet photo printer, including the cheap ones (I should say especially the cheap ones) have to clean their print heads from time to time. Some brands are notorious for wasting large amounts of ink during this process.

Cleaning the print heads involves flushing the head with a small amount of ink, in order to get the print heads firing their tiny bubbles of ink correctly. Ink tends to clog inside the heads, hence the need for cleaning. Epson photo printers waste a lot of ink on this process. Up to 20% of an ink cartridge can go to waste, especially when a shallow cleaning cycle is not enough for the heads to unclog.

HP has the lowest cleaning waste in its newest top-range photo printer, the Photosmart Pro B9180. Only 1% goes to waste with every other deep cleaning cycle. I reviewed the Photosmart Pro B9180 on www.IT-Enquirer.com. I also covered this printer’s capabilities in depth, as it represents a whole new generation photo printer.

With more expensive photo printers usually also comes the ability to drive them through a Raster Image Processor (RIP), which is a sophisticated printer driver that enables you to save paper and control the ink density (the amount of ink splashed onto the paper) for each colour. RIPs are usually reserved for the larger photo printers.

Output quality of photo printers

The output quality of a photo printer depends on a number of factors, but colour accuracy and the ability to fill a patch uniformly with colour must be among the determining ones. Your photo printer should be capable of printing accurate colours. Most entry-level photo printers will allow you to print your photos directly from the camera. That’s fine, but if the photo wasn’t perfect or near-perfect, the odds are that you will want to fine-tune the photo.

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involves downloading the photo to your PC, editing it, and then printing it through a printer driver. The crux here is the part where I said "through a driver". If you don’t have a printer colour profile for the paper you are using, chances are the photo will come out in a whole different way than what you expected.

Colour management will remedy this, but that’s a topic out of scope for this article. Remember that you need good colour profiles that come with the printer in order to get the most out of it. From all the manufacturers that I have reviewed photo printers from for the different magazines that I write for, only Canon and HP have excellent colour profiles. Epson’s profiles are mediocre to say the least.

If you don’t know what a colour profile is, Wikipedia’s article on color management may clarify.

Conclusion

If you’re serious about photo printing, and your budget allows, don’t buy the cheapest model. It will cost you more in ink consumption and will output mediocre quality. If you have the budget and you’re a serious amateur or even a semi-pro, then a high-end photo printer will be a pleasure to use. Canon and HP are both excellent choices. Although many professional photographers use large format Epson photo printers, and while their output quality is certainly good, Epson has less appeal in the lower ends of the market than the two other brands I mentioned earlier.

There are yet other brands of photo printers. However, those are all aimed at low-end consumer usage.

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Feb 20

You took a perfect photo. Now you have two choices. Or you send it to photo service for development or you can make quality but cheap photo prints of your perfect photo yourself.

Secrets For Great Photo Prints

Most disappointments with photography being output on an inkjet photo printer have to do with the colour workflow. If your colour workflow is not set up well, you’re bound to get results that look nowhere near what you expected from the shot in the first place.

So, how should you proceed to get the best looking output on an inkjet photo printer? It all starts with setting up your workflow correctly, and to do that, you need to make up your mind about a few things first. The first issue is to determine which level of output quality you want. If all you want is to output decent looking photographs without much afterthought more or less like you’ve shot them then let the printer decide the colours for you.

Most inkjet photo printers will allow you to either hook up a camera directly through PictBridge or a USB connection. You can then download the images into the printer and have them output immediately. Most driver software will allow you to select the printer as the decision maker for the colours it will print. But if you’re passing through the PC or Mac, you should have an idea of how to set up a proper colour workflow.

The Colour Workflow

When printing an image through the printer driver on your PC or Mac, you should open the photograph in an image-editing program like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or any other image-editing application. If you shot the photo using a digital camera, and you have used JPEG or TIFF as output file format, the camera will have ‘tagged’ the photo with a colour profile. This colour profile will be sRGB in almost every case.

A colour profile describes the colour space the number of colours and which colours exactly a device can produce or recognize. A working colour space is described by an abstract profile, which serves to give you a device-independent space to edit images in.

sRGB has seen excessively wide use, as especially HP and Microsoft were promoting it as the standard RGB profile. sRGB as a colour space has serious weaknesses there are a lot of colours today’s printing presses as well as other output devices like photo printers, large format printers and many inkjets (not to speak of up to date monitors or digital cameras) can produce that cannot be stored in sRGB. If quality is important, sRGB is not an option.

Nevertheless, you should always use the correct source profile for the data at hand, and only if absolutely necessary convert from that colour space into a better one like Kodak ProPhoto, a colour space that is far larger than sRGB. ProPhoto’s ICC colour profile is delivered with most Adobe applications. In your colour workflow your first choice should be to honour your camera’s setting and keep the profile attached to the file.

If an application asks you if it’s OK to throw the profile away, click ‘Cancel’, and shout "NO!" very loudly. If you do throw it away, some information about the image’s colour gets lost. We can make that up by attaching another colour space’s profile but you always risk to throw away a tiny amount of data due to the rounding errors inside the image-editing application’s calculation engine.

If you shoot in Camera RAW mode, you’re basically taking a picture without any interference of software algorithms at all. The camera will save the image exactly as it ’sees’ it. Camera RAW is a format that you can only deal with on a PC or a Mac by using either the camera manufacturer’s dedicated software or an application like Adobe Camera RAW in Adobe Bridge or Photoshop CS2, DxO, or another specialised application for editing RAW files.

With Camera RAW you can in theory attach any colour profile as you see fit, but in reality you will want to choose a working colour space that is large enough to encompass all possible colours the camera could detect.

Such a colour space could be the Kodak ProPhoto space and its associated profile. For Camera RAW photos and JPEGs which have no associated colour profile (anymore), Kodak ProPhoto makes the most sense. The colour gamut (number of colours it supports) is larger than AdobeRGB.

So, now you’ve tagged your photo with a colour profile. You’re busy editing it in Photoshop or your favorite image editing application. And now you’re almost ready to make perfect photo prints on your brand new n-colour inkjet photo printer. But first you want to check how the colours will look when they’ve been printed.

Softproofing

In Photoshop and some other image-editing applications, you can see how results will look by checking the image on-screen. To make sure that what you see on screen will be close to what will be on the paper, the monitor should be calibrated and profiled.

If your monitor has been set up properly, you can select the soft proofing feature from your application. Immediately, you will see the colours turn darker, more dull, less vibrant. That is because paper displays colours differently from a monitor (that emits light instead of absorbing it there it is, now you know). If your monitor is well profiled and calibrated, what you see when softproofing will be close to what your printer will deliver.

The profile used for the softproofing process will be the paper colour profile for the paper on which you intend to print.

Finally, when you’re ready to print the photograph, you will select that same paper profile in the printer driver for output. The colour profile that you select in the printer driver will describe which colours the printer/paper combination can output and will translate those colours that it can’t but nevertheless are in your image to colours it can.

For photographs you will select a Perceptual Rendering Intent think of this as the method by which colours are translated in such a way that they match the originals the most visually.

Why Translating?

The question that a layman will ask is why you should translate colours in the first place. The answer to that is: "Due to the differences between devices when it comes colour capabilities".

An inkjet photo printer may be capable of printing many colours, but it will always be more limited in that capability than a digital camera. This is due to limitations in the technologies used in both types of devices. Even the best printer will not be capable to print all the colours a digital camera can represent. (The same can be said of a monitor, by the way).

In order to somehow output those colours on paper as well, the original colours that lie outside the printer’s ‘colour gamut’ are brought inside that gamut using an appropriate calculation method. The Perceptual Rendering Intent is most appropriate to photos because it will shift all the colours in such a way that the overall visual appearance still looks ‘right’.

The reason why you should keep a profile attached to an image, or attach a nice, large working colour space profile to RAW images is that you want to be sure that no colours are thrown away from the start. As such a colour profile describes all the colours the image may contain, it pays off to choose a large gamut. That way you’re always sure that your image colours will lie inside the gamut.

There are many different ways to come to these translations, and each will have its own slightly different result. That is the domain of colour management.

Where Do You Find Colour Profiles?

Each inkjet manufacturer delivers its own colour profiles for each of its printers with the printer you’re buying. However, there may be problems with some of those profiles. Some manufacturers regard profile creation as an afterthought, while all manufacturers will deliver profiles that represent an average of the printers they make.

Unfortunately, every printer is slightly different from the next. Manufacturers will also provide you with printer profiles for all of the papers they make themselves. Again, the manufacturing process is not perfect and differences between batches of paper will exist. And papers that were not manufactured by the printer vendor come without profiles altogether.

While paper mills will create their own profiles, these may not have been created with your printer most likely they have not.

The only way to get perfect or near-perfect results therefore, is to create your own profiles. You can do so by buying a X-Rite or GretagMacbeth spectrophotometer like the Pulse or Eye-One Pro. These are excellent-quality measurement devices that come with the necessary software. The disadvantage of these packages is obviously the price. You won’t get such a device below 1,000.00 Euros, which makes them too expensive for amateur usage.

The one product that is inexpensive enough to be reasonable for any amateur photographer, is ColorVision PrintFIX Pro. Unfortunately, this device has been tested and the results were mixed: sometimes you get an acceptable profile, sometimes you just get failures. You can read the test results in the Colour Management section at IT-Enquirer.

The third, and probably most cost-effective solution, is to have a third party create your printer/paper profiles. Such a service can cost from 40.00 Euros to well over 200.00 Euros, but most remote profiling services as they are called, are reasonably priced. One good profiling service is Thinck.

For 45.00 Euros they will create a RGB inkjet profile for you. As they are specialised in semi-professional and professional photography, their profile will be specifically checked and tuned for photographers’ needs. On Thinck you can also order A3+ prints from HP’s newest Photosmart Pro B9180 printer, an excellent 8-colour printer that they drive with EFI’s Designer RIP.

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Perfect Photo Prints
icon1 admin | icon2 General | icon4 02 19th, 2010| icon31 Comment »

Cheap photo prints are the most popular way to show and share your photos with the rest of the world.

Perfect Photo Prints

Prints can be framed and hung up on the wall to show your photos off to friends and family. Creating the perfect print can become even more challenging if your monitor isn’t calibrated properly. You will have suddenly wasted your time, paper and ink on a print which doesn’t match what you see on your monitor. Read these quick tips for getting the best prints possible.

Dpi and Ppi – When you make a print of one of your photos on an inkjet printer, a lot is happening inside the printer. Inkjet printers work by spraying ink dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black from nozzles while they pass over the paper. Most inkjet printers have a print resolution of 1440dpi and some printers go as high as 5760dpi. In general, the higher the resolution of your printer the greater detail you can print and the better your photo will look. The single biggest point of confusion comes from Dots per inch and Pixels per inch. Dpi is very different from ppi, which is the resolution of an image on your computer screen. Printers create dozens of tiny dots to fill the space of one pixel, and the more pixels you pack in an inch the finer the detail will look. The ideal resolution for printing an image is 300 to 400dpi/ppi.

Ink and Paper – You have a lot of options when choosing different quality inks and paper types, all of which can be combined to form a satisfying result. Different photo papers will give surprisingly different results from the same photo printed on the same printer. Photo paper comes in many different styles, weights, and photo finishes, including matte, glossy and varying degrees of gloss, which is usually called semi-gloss. Colour photos usually look best when printed onto glossy or semi-gloss photo paper, while black and white photos usually look better on matte. It is also worth while creating and saving different profiles for your printer for each type of photo paper you use. This is because on some papers a printer may use too much of one colour, instead of correcting the colour yourself you can select a profile you created before.

The cost of ink can sometimes be greater than that of paper. Purchasing brand name inks by your printer manufacturer is usually the safest option and will produce the best results. Remember that printer damage caused by third party printer cartridges sometimes isn’t covered by manufacturers. Some companies such as Lyson produce high end inks which in some cases are better than the manufacturers own. Archival qualities and resistance to colour fading is also important when choosing inks. For example pigment based inks help guarantee that your prints will remain crisp and vibrant for many years. If you are going to print a large quantity of photos it is also worth checking the prices of online printing stores to see if they are a better option for you.

Monitor and Printer – Calibration Calibrating your monitor and printer is essential when viewing and printing your photos. Your monitor could be displaying inaccurate colours and density. Adobe Photoshop comes with something called Adobe Gamma which will most likely already be installed on your computer. You can use Adobe Gamma to create an ICC profile which uses calibration settings to change the way your monitor reproduces colours. Start Adobe Gamma, located in Control Panel and then select step by step and follow the instructions. Daylight can affect the accuracy of colours displayed on your monitor, this is why its best to carry out your monitor calibration in a darkened room. The first and most important step in printer calibration is to use the correct driver for your digital photo printer choices.

Every printer driver comes with its own calibration controls and tools, designed for fine tuning the overall colour of your prints. You can visual calibrate your printer using test images with a wide range of tonal values, including colours bars, photographs, and blocks of colours. You can then adjust the colours using your printer’s controls to match on screen with what you have in print. Alternatively ICC profiles provide a way to insure consistent colour reproduction. Every printer comes with default profiles for use with different combinations of inks and paper which may be suitable for your needs.

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FREE perfect photo prints from CVS! The CVS photo deal is back!!! Get 50 free prints plus free photo storage when you sign up for a new account at CVSphoto.com! 0 comments: Post a Comment. Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments.

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School kids across the country are bringing home their class rosters for Valentines Day. Why not make this a special Valentine by creating a personalized photo postcard on SeeHere.com. With a wide range of Valentines cards to choose.

Digital Photo Frames
Firstly, buy a b photo/b printer! This may seem obvious, but try to print good quality photos on a standard printer and you will know what I mean! Epson, Canon and Hewlett Packard make good b photo/b printers.

Digital camera case and photo prints
This photo doesn’t give justice at all. The prints are all so great and we are happy that our loyal camera takes good photos. It’s our first time to print a photo taken by our camera that is why. I think I will start uploading photos.

Feb 18

Digital printers are advancing along side the technology. We can get them in all sizes and price ranges. They can transform colored digital pictures into high-quality but still cheap photo prints while you sit back and wait.

Digital Photo Printer Choices

Thanks to the inventors of digital camera, most printers are now affordable and easy to use. Many of them do not even have to be connected to a computer to print.

Before you indulge yourself into buying your own digital printer, there are questions that needed answering first to ensure that what printer you will be shopping for is the one right for you.

Will the digital printer work with your camera?

Buy a digital printer with a media slot that has the same kind of memory card your camera uses. Or a printer that connects directly, using a cable of course, to your camera. A USB-capable printer that connects to your computer is a nice option. The process is fairly simple. You just have to drop the photos into the hard drive, edit and print them from there.

What printing technology suit you best?

There are basically two kinds of technology that is inherent in photo printers. Dye sublimation and inkjet. Both kinds can produce brilliant images.

Some people believe that dye sublimation excels at continuous tone printing. While others prefer the crisp colors, inexpensive supplies and print flexibility of inkjet and bubble jet printers. Whichever kind you choose, remember that optimizing a printer for photo printing will do a much better job than general use printer.

How much resolution do you need?

Take note that the higher the resolution, the crisper the print result will be. For example, a 400 dpi resolution is finer than a 300 dpi resolution.

Take note also that resolution cannot be compared between dye sublimation and inkjet printers. The numbers of dpi required to make the same quality photo print may vary depending on the different aspects of the printers.

Does the printer have editing capabilities?

Some printers let you edit digital photos. This editing capability can range from a few limited text messages and crop sizes to a touch screen LCD that allows multiple picture editing before printing.

The type you will use would depend if whether you want to do some editing, in the first place. And if you do want, choose if you rather do sophisticated editing on a computer or quick adjustments from a printer to make great digital photo prints.

You choose. Your digital printer will do it for you.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit http://www.digitalprintingcompany.com

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Feb 17

A great image has interesting composition utilizing leading lines and proper subject placement within the scene. The eye of the viewer is drawn to the darkest areas in high key images and to the brightest areas in low key images. The eye is also drawn to the meeting of extreme light and dark tones. A square is more noticeable than a triangle and the triangle is more noticeable than a circle. If you have to reduce the importance of any object in a composition you can crop into the object slightly, place something partially in front of the object or alter the lighting on the object. Tip: The Rule of Thirds is a good place to start your composition training.

A great image has wonderful lighting, the stuff that makes a two dimensional surface resemble three dimensions. Making your images have depth is a key to what you are trying to do. Tip: Study old Black and White movies for lighting and composition techniques. Speaking of Black and White photography, without good lighting it really is horrible. Much of today’s Black and White digital photography is just poorly lit de-saturated color shots.

A great image has detail, clearly focused. It can have soft focus but do not confuse that with out of focus, two different things. The former is artistic and can convey a mood. The later is an accident, poor technique or faulty equipment but in any circumstance unacceptable and does nothing to enhance the image, throw these images away.

A great image is not blurry from vibrations or camera movements during exposure. Good quality tripods are very useful.

A great image has correct exposure.

A great image has full tonal range, shadows and highlights, both with detail. Tip: For photographic printing, black areas below 15 or highlights above 245 will not reproduce with detail.

Quality image compositions combined with excellent technical skills create winning photographs.

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Feb 16
Home Photo Printing
icon1 admin | icon2 General | icon4 02 16th, 2010| icon3No Comments »

You just took an unforgettable photo and would like to share it with the rest of the world. You have two options. You can take it to the photograph service and let them develop it for you or you can develop it by yourself if you have the right equipment.

Home Photo Printing  

There are a few simple things you can do to ensure your photo prints look their best when using your home printer.

First, you want to ensure you aren’t trying to print a photo on a cheap photo prints paper that is larger than what the image resolution can support with sufficient quality and sharpness. Typically, you want a photo to be a minimum of 200 dots per inch (dpi) but preferably 300 dpi. If you want to figure out the maximum size you can print a photo, simply divide the image dimensions by either 200 or 300. So, for example, if your image dimension is 1200×800 pixels, the largest you can print it would be 6" by 4". You can find out the dimensions of an image by right-clicking it and choosing Properties and then Details.

You also want to choose a paper that is optimal for printing pictures. If you use plain paper, there is a good chance that the ink will bleed and reduce the image quality. In general, the best types of paper for photo printing are glossy and semiglossy. You can try both to see which gives you the results you like best.

If you’re tempted to save money by purchasing cheap refill ink, you should think twice. There are a number of reasons that the original manufacturer’s ink gives better results. Most notably, it is generally a higher quality ink that requires less to print a photo. And it also creates less ink build up in your printer.

You should also take a look at your printer settings once in a while. Most printer software comes with different settings from draft quality to high quality. You can modify these settings to see how it affects the final photo quality.

Finally, take the time to maintain your printer. This generally involves running a print head cleaning routine (found in the printer software) approximately once a month. Keep it dust free by lightly blowing it off with compressed air. In addition, check the printer manual for any other recommended maintenance.

These tips can make the difference between good print quality and great print quality of your digital photo prints for display. You’ve taken a great picture, now make sure the print looks great too!

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Feb 15

For a professional photographer to get recognized a photo displays are the only option to get noticed. But the problem many photographers face is a financial burden. To display as many photos as possible they have to use photo printing services. Cheap photo prints are usually not of a high quality.

Digital Photo Prints For Display

How about refocusing your thoughts and make photo print displays an exciting part of your professional portrait photography studio to enhance your cash flow and profits. How? Read on! We will discuss several methods to get sample display prints at a profit plus later articles will also explain how to find and get display locations.

Method 1. Sell the idea during your initial customer phone contact. Someone calls you about a professional portrait opportunity and inquires about how much a 16×20 portrait costs. Say "It’s great you called today!", we are right in the middle of; just starting our; in the final two weeks of our preparations for our nifty next display." Talk a little about the fun, excitement and prestige of portrait displays. Mention that you could include them in your next display and they could get a regular display size* for only a little more than the cost of the 16×20 portrait. This display size is actually a 20×30 digital photo print, the little more could be the cost of a 20×24 print. You will GET this portrait session, your 1st priority, plus you will get a display sample and make more money than you would have from just the 16×20 portrait.

Method 2. Sell display digital photo prints during your portrait sales presentations. You show several larger size portraits to your customer. Assume she is balking at the price or the idea of a wall print. The pride and prestige of being in a photographic print display can overcome both of these objections. Get her excited about your current or next portrait display. The idea of being in a display will melt her resistance to a wall picture. Ask her if someone on your staff had mentioned your ‘Display Option’ to her. She will be curious now.

Explain you could let her have the picture she had been considering for $x because she would let you borrow it for a few weeks while it is on display. You could alternately offer her a print one size larger for the regular price of the print she had picked, sort of a display BONUS. This way you would not be discounting, just giving more value.

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Feb 14
Digital Photo Prints
icon1 admin | icon2 General | icon4 02 14th, 2010| icon3No Comments »

Any professional photographer knows that the best way to his promotion is a display of his work in galleries, schools, hospitals etc. But the problem is that it is very difficult to find quality cheap photo prints to display photographers work.

Digital Photo Prints  

Method 1. Include a letter or a personal note in the customers portrait delivery package. This letter states that their portrait would be just perfect for the next display you will be having. In the letter, express that the customer was very photogenic and how they just ‘Made’ the picture perfect. The sales person should act surprised when finding this letter in the portrait package. This will get the customers attention and they will be curious about the letter. In explaining the letter to them, talk about the display and how much fun it is when the family goes to see the print display. Sort of forget but remember just in time to mention to your customer that you will also give them five invitations for them to address and send to their friends announcing the display dates. All they have to do is ok the use of their print and place a small deposit on the print today to get things started. They can pay the balance when they pick up the print after the display. $25 works well for 16×20 size prints. This will cover most of your costs. When they pick up the print after the display you will collect any balance due. You could also offer them a frame at this time explaining that you have several used frames from the displays. Show the styles and ask which goes best with their home furnishings. Offer to use a brand new frame just for their picture if they would like to purchase it after the display. This way the customer gets a new frame at a used price. Get a deposit to cover your cost plus shipping of the frame. Even if they never pick up the frame, you have a sample for free.

Method 2. A letter could be sent to many of your past customers stating that they have been selected for many of the same reasons as the above display letter. Remember, all of these display ideas only work because the customer is made to feel good, special, important and needed. This appeals to their ego. The price of the print (assuming you are offering these at a discount) only helps keep the idea sold. You get them to go for the idea of being included in the display emotionally. They use the logic of this being a good value, a savings, to remain committed to the plan.

This promotion works best when you only send it to some of your customers. When they start to check with their friends (this really works great with high school seniors) and find out they were ‘one of only a few selected,’ it makes them feel very special. Include a mail order form listing three display* sizes and their prices. Let them sign a model release and include their check or have a place for them to indicate their charge card information if you accept this type of payment. You should also include an addressed return envelope.

*Display free photo prints sizes can be nearly any size you like, 11×14, 16×20, 20×24 or 20×30 prints. The display location might influence the size that is best or the subject composition might indicate that a couple of the sizes are more appropriate than the others.

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