Digital Photography - Class 1
Overview
- First Off
- What this class is NOT about
- Color Pre-Press, CMYK output
- Advance Lighting Techniques
- Babies Balancing Bimmers
- Course Material
- Recommended Reading for class
"Digital Photography" - Defined
- "Photography"
- "Photography" comes from the Greek word
photo and graphia
- It means "Writing With Light"
- "Digital"
- "Digital" means 1010110101101001010
Building a Digital Photography system
- Camera
- SLR vs Digicam
- Storage
- Batteries
- Computer
- Mac vs PC
- RAM Lots of RAM
- Exotic Video Cards Don't Make Huge Difference
- Monitor
- CRT
- Prone to fluctulate, but still used for critical work
- Cheap compared to LCDs
- Able to make adjustments other than brightness
- LCD
- Brighter, Lighter and Cooler
- Consumes less power and flicker free
- Not whether but when
- Calibration Hardware
- Gretag Macbeth Eye-One Display 2
- Colorvision Spyder
- Monaco Opix XR
- Tablet
- Wacom Intuos line is preferred over the Graphire series
- Scanner
- Flatbed for prints 1200x2400 dpi on the low end
- If using Flatbed for negs or slides then look for at least 2400x4800 dpi
- Dedicated film scanners go from 2700 dpi to 4000 dpi
- Drum scan for high end (about $100 for 100MB for commerical work)
- Manufacturers quote in "dpi" but really its "ppi"
- Printer
- Canon among others make fine lower end printers
- Higher end Epsons use archival ink though
- Epson 800, 2200, 4000, 9600 are very popular
- Out sourcing to a Lightjet
- Dye-Sub Printers are great for quick 6x4 prints with amazing quality
- Software
- Phototshop CS - 800 pound gorilla
- iPhoto
- Image Ready
- RealViz
- Just in case you got $5000 laying around
^ top
What's new for photographers in Photoshop CS
- File Browser and Camera RAW
- Extended 16 bit support
- Live Histogram Palette
- Shadow/Highlight Correction
- Match Color
- Photo Filter
- Image Interpolation
- Photomerge
- Metadata
Quick Look at a Picture
- Info & Color Palette
- Luminosity Values and Color Channels
- 8 bit channels, 24 bit color
- 16 bit channels
- Tonal Range: Shadows, Midtones, Highlights
- Histogram - Visual Tonal Range
Getting Around
- Zooming and Moving Around
- Full screen
- Hiding palettes
- Doc Info
Image Resolution
- ppi (Pixels Per Inch)
- dpi (Dots Per Inch)
- Upsampling
- Able to upsample digital photos by 200% be careful of scans
- Use the newer Bicubic Smoother
- Downsampling
- Usually no problem with digital or scans by going down
- Use the newer Bicubic Sharper
- Bicubic - Older method
- Bilinear - Upsampling (rarely used)
- Nearest Neighbor - Only use with solid color graphics
Digital Lightbox
- The Browse Window
- Scan Through Hundreds of Pictures
- Able to Embed Metadata such as copyright
- Create Custom Workspaces
- Batch Renaming Of Files
- Save as TIFFs
- The Mac Finder
- View with large thumbnails
The Digital Camera
- Resolution
- Don't be too concerned between CCD and CMOS
- More pixels the better
- Beware of mega-mega most likely involves interpolation
- ISO
- Usually have 100, 200 and 400 settings
- Higher number lower light
- Higher number more noise
- Operating Modes
- Program
- Aperture priority
- Shutter priority
- Manual
- Light Metering options
- Center weight
- Spot
- Matrix
- Exposure Compensation
- Usually range between -2 to +2
- Some cameras also have "best shot" or bracketing
- White Balance Control
- Adjust for various lighting situations
- Zoom Lens
- Usually decent zoom out length but not very good wide
- Try to avoid any "reach" or digizoom
- Some cameras have lens attachments
- Expect about a 1.5 ratio to calculate try focal length
- Flash Modes
- Red-Eye Reduction
- Forced Flash
- Slow Sync
- SLR (RAW, Wide Angle Lens, Speed, Flash)
Great Photographers
- Steve's Favorites
- Neil's Favorites
Next Week's Assignment
- Your influences
- Sample of your style
- 5 Cool sites including one of a photographer you admire