Original Digital Photography Short Course by Mike Kimball

Introduction

Digital Camera Features
Digital cameras have many advantages: they use a storage format that is reusable, hence no need for film; they usually come with an LCD to review your shots, so you can easily delete pictures and retake them; digital photos can be edited, retouched, printed, and emailed or posted easily to web sites. The cameras themselves come with many of the same features as film cameras, and some additional ones. These options obviously affect the price and can be bewildering to first-time digital camera buyers. This section explains what those features are and what to look for.


Taking Good Pictures
As technology improves, digital cameras do more and more to aid users in getting good shots without a lot of hassle. Their automatic functions for focus, exposure, flash, or aperture, have greatly improved. However, there will always be conditions when using manual settings will be preferable. This section will explore the settings to keep in mind when shooting pictures.


Publishing Digital Photos
Publishing brings into play a whole array of issues, most of which come down to a basic conflict: file size vs. image quality. In the printing world, file size is rarely a concern - when an image is to be printed on paper, the greatest possible image quality is the only priority. However, as this is a course on digital photography for web multimedia, file size becomes an important consideration, since it translates to the amount of time it takes for your audience to download your content.


Photoshop Editing Basics
Even if you are a photographer and not a graphic designer, Photoshop is an indispensable tool for editing your photos. Enough said. In this section we'll examine a few frequently used functions that Photoshop performs for us. The basic order that I follow for this is Crop, Resize, Adjust, Sharpen, Save. I realize this forms an acronym of "CRASS", but...