Organizing and Printing Your Digital Photos

OK - I filled up my memory card with great shots - now what?
There are places with kiosk machines where you can plug in your memory card and walk away with prints, and there are photo printer “docks” to plug your camera or memory card into, and print directly. But we are going to talk about using your computer to get your prints because that puts the control of their quality directly into your hands.

Downloading
First, you download your photos into your computer.

Digital cameras come with software that will allow you to plug the camera into the computer and download your photos by copying them over - just like any other file. When the camera is plugged in - usually via a USB port, an icon will appear on your desktop representing the memory card in the camera. This is often called “Unlabelled”. You open this icon and sometimes the folders within (this will depend on the software) until you discover the location of a bunch of numbered files - those are your pictures.You select those files and drag them to the proper folder on your desktop. It is also an option to use a Card Reader which pluges into your computer. You then take the card out of the camera and stick it in the reader. It will look the same in the computer.

Organizing
Your photos will have strange titles like those in Figure 1 - with each picture consecutively numbered. This creates your first problem. Your camera always starts over with those numbers. If you copy a second load of pictures into the same folder as the previous load, the files will have the same names and overwrite the first batch. So, the first order of business is to create a new folder for each new batch of pictures.

I have a folder on my desktop called “Photo Depot”. Within that folder, I create a new folder each time I am going to download my latest batch of photos from my camera’s memory card. If there is an obvious title for the shoot, like “Dixon” for example, I will use it. If the card contains a bunch of miscellaneous pictures, I use numbered folders called Olympus 1, Olympus 2 and so on.

Figure 1. Your pictures look something like this.

Figure 2. It is really important that you create a storage system like this, because you will find yourself shooting tons of digital photos (they are free), and you can get into a confusing mess very quickly - and maybe lose your pictures.

Deleting Your Files and Emptying Your Memory Card
After the copying operation finishes, select all the files again and drag them to the Trash or delete them according to your computer’s delete procedure.

Make sure to Empty the Trash so the files are actually erased from the card. If you forget this step, your memory card will still be full, but the files won’t show up. So you will have a big mystery on your hands. And the camera won’t be able to “see” the files, so you will not be able to use the camera’s erase function either. If you are in the field at the time, this will make you really mad. (Can you tell I have already lived this story?)

It is really important that you completely erase your memory card and Eject its icon before disconnecting the camera from the computer. If you do not go through the Eject procedure before unplugging, you could mess up your memory card.

This step is the equivalent of buying a new roll of film for a traditional camera. You will be all ready to start shooting again with a blank card.

Using the File Browser
Both PhotoShop and PhotoShop Elements have a File Browser. This is a window in which you can view thumbnails of all the pictures in a folder at once. You can double click any thumbnail to open it. Then, you can resize, do color corrections, etc. within the software. You can also delete any pictures that are really no good right from the File Browser. Be careful though, because since we are digital, many parts of bad pictures are editable - and useful. While you have a photo open, it is a good time to change the size and resolution and Save As a TIFF file.

Why save as a TIFF file?

Figure 3. Thumbnails in PhotoShop’s File Browser

Remember that we said the JPG format is “lossy” and throws away pixels every time you save? After a pretty short time of editing and saving changes on a JPG file, you will actually start to get holes in your photo (called artifacts). For this reason it is a good idea to Save As a TIFF file to edit. You can retain the original JPG as a source file if you wish. You can also save in PhotoShop native format (PSD) but the files will be much bigger (heavier) and take up lots more hard drive space because they won’t be compressed at all.

Before you save your TIFF file, go ahead and do your resizing, as reviewed below.

Figure 4
With your photo open in PhotoShop, go to Image Size under the Image Menu to get to this window.

Notice that your file is poster size and only 72ppi resolution.

First, uncheck the Resample Image box.

Then change the 72 to 240 or to 300 ppi if you want a very high quality print.

Figure 5. Notice that the document size has come down to something much more reasonable for printing - a little bigger than a 5" x7". Click OK and save your document.

Should you then want a different size - 4"x6" for instance - at the same 300ppi resolution, use this Image Size box again - with Resample Image checked - and enter 4 in the Width box. Height will fill in automatically if the Constrain Proportions box is checked. Click OK and you will have a 300 ppi 4"x6" photo to print.

It is better not to overwrite your saved photo with this resampled version because your original should remain intact for future resampling or printing as is. If you want to save that 4"x6" version, save a copy by using Save As.

You can now print your photos. If you find that some of them could use a little help to become perfect - i.e. too light, too dark. too fuzzy, there are ways to fix that in PhotoShop/Elements. But there isn’t room to go into that in this issue, so we will have to tackle it next time.

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