Digital Photos

[Mike.C]

For a number of years now I have kept on saying that I will have to get myself a digital camera so that I can show you guys my workshop, tools, and any projects I am doing etc. Well to tell you the truth I kept putting it off because the bloody things scare me to death. I mean to say, the photos that all the members up load to the forum look pretty good to me (Greenfield Bobs Hawk and RogerM's Bald Eagles for instance) and I am sure that mine will let the side down.

Anyway I recently bit the bullet and got myself a cheap FUJI FinePix so that while I am putting my new table saw together I can take some pictures and do a review. I have to review my Dewalt mitre saw too.

Now I need to know what the ideal setting for uploading and viewing on the web is?
The only problem is the saw is nearly ready and so I have already taken some photos and these were set at 640x480 pixels which according to the manual is 90kb in size.

I probably got it all wrong but my reasoning behind the above setting is so that it would load faster for those members who are still on dial up. Is this the right setting or should i have set it to 1280x960 or even 1600x1200?

Is there anything else to I need to know about taking photos to upload?

Cheers

Mike

 

[Lord Nibbo]

Mike you only need to use a high file size/quality such as 4M Fine if you are going to enlarge your pic, it you took a picture on that sort of setting it will use a lot of memory and when you look at it downloaded into your puter it will be enormous, far to big to put on the net.

I generally use 1M Fine and using a 128MB chip you can get 500-600 pics even then I resize down to about 20cm using photoshop.

PS.... Forgot to say I have a Fuji Finepix mine is pretty old, it's a 4800zoom

 

[Mike.C]

LN thanks for the info. So 640x480 is ok then?

LN,

PS.... Forgot to say I have a Fuji Finepix mine is pretty old, it's a 4800zoom

S--t/sugar mine hasn't got a zoom on it. The trouble is I don't know anything about camera's.

Thanks again.

Mike

 

[RogerM]

Mike - it depends on what photos you are taking, and why. If you are taking pictures that you will want to print on paper, then use the highest definition your camera will allow. Also if your subject is in the distance, then also use the best definition. You will find it hard to tell the difference between 640 x 480 and 1600 x 1200 on screen, but the difference on a printed photo will be very obvious. Also if you want to zoom in on a small area, a high definition piccie will allow you to do that whereas a low definition one will loose sharpness very quickly.

For WIP, 640 x 480 is fine. But if you use the highest definition, your picture will be huge on screen. My pic of the bald eagles was taken on highest definition at 12x zoom and 6 mega pixels, but I cropped the image to show the eagles alone to post in to this site. This is the original picture, uncropped and reduced by a factor of 4.

See the difference? Now here is the centre of the original image, without reduction, but cropped to just show the eagles

and here is the same image, but this time cropped from a picture that was first reduced in size by a factor of 4

All this tweaking has been done in Paintshop pro. So I would always shoot in as high definition as the camera will reasonably take, and then you can always tweak it for posting here afterwards.

The danger is that if you shoot in low definition, you will take some spontaneous pictures of the family at an un-repeatable venue, or doing something that can't be repeated, which turn out to be unexpectedly good and where you only have a low definition picture. DAMHIKT !!!!

So experiment. If you have no failures then you are not pushing the learning curve hard enough! I think you will find that having gone digital you will take 10x more pictures than you ever took using film and that it will transform your photography.

Enjoy! HTH

 

[Steve Maskery]

Mike
640x480 is perfect for putting on this forum. Most people will have their screens set to a resolution of 800x600 or maybe 1024x768. A few will have higher settings. 640x480 will look a good size on any of these. If you made them bigger, say 1024x768, then anyone with a 800x600 setting would have to scroll to see different bits of the pic. It's a pain when people do that.

Also consider compressing the pictures (most image software, such as PaintShop Pro has this feature). You can get an almost identical image but it takes up a fraction of the space andis therefore much faster to load, an important factor for people on slow connections.

Adam has an excellent Sticky on putting photos on here too, if you need it.

 

[Alf]

I use 640x480 on the forum, but I shoot in a larger size and crop the image down to avoid uploading unnecessary background. Worth having a play with some photo editing software - on Windows I use Picasa which is free and nice and simple fwiw. Or Gimpshop which is free and complicated. :lol:

Cheers, Alf

 

[mr]

Mike
640x480 is perfect for putting on this forum. Most people will have their screens set to a resolution of 800x600 or maybe 1024x768. A few will have higher settings. 640x480 will look a good size on any of these. If you made them bigger, say 1024x768, then anyone with a 800x600 setting would have to scroll to see different bits of the pic. It's a pain when people do that.

Screen resolution is not a case of 800 x 600 or 1024 x etc which is rather a description of screen size, resolution is to do with the dot per inch rating of the display which will typically be between 72 and 96dpi. The most dominant screen size in use today as far as Im aware is 1024 x 768 with a user base in the region of 56% (last years figures) with 800 x 600 trailing in at 28%. Those percentages will diverge even further as years pass. The resolution (dpi) that the picture is taken and displayed at will mean that the picture will appear at different sizes on different screen sizes. For example

Width × Height Megapixels 72 ppi 230 ppi 300 ppi
1735 × 1157 2MP 24” × 16” 7.5” × 5” 5.8” × 3.9”


It's all horribly confusing

Cheers Mike

 

[Mike.C]

Thanks everyone, your advice is really appreciated.

I got PaintShop Pro from a car boot sale a few weeks, so I will have to install it and see what it can do.

At the moment I have Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition and I took Alf's advice and messed about in the "Fixes" section, cropping, colour, contrast etc. It is really surprising what you can do with a photo and best of all the original is not affected if you mess up, just great for a novice like me.

So really what everyone is saying outside the workshop (especially if you are going to print the photo) take the highest definition you can. And for forum photos use 640x480, crop to size, and to help those with slower connections compress the pictures.

Will I be able to see exactly what the picture will look like on the forum (size etc) before I upload it, or if I get it wrong will I be able to sort it out after I upload it?

Roger, thanks for the picture's, it is much easier to understand what you are saying when you see it in the flesh so to speak.

Cheers

Mike

 

[CHJ]

Thanks everyone, your advice is really appreciated.

...snip..
Mike

Sorry I looked at this thread late Mike, but currently away from home, you might find THIS LINKand the associated thread of interest.

 

[Mike.C]

Chas thank you for the link, and yes I did find it interesting.

Cheers

Mike

 

[Shultzy]

Mike.C - As many people have said always take pictures at the highest definition possible as cropping at low res (as shown on RogerM's post) is not very good.
Always keep these files in a secure place and make copies of them to work on (ie DON'T crop or change originals).
The advice in picture sites is to use no greater than 800x600 as this is the biggest size that is easily downloaded even using dialup.
I use a free viewer called XnView which will batch process various operations including resizing.
If you want to see what the sizes look like on your screen there are a number of pics on my site at different resolutions. The pic frog01.jpg in the misc section is at both 800x600 and 2560x1920
http://shultzy.fotopic.net/

 

[devonwoody]

MikeC
If your camera hasn't got zoom dont worry too much, you can always zoom in to your picture when you use paint shop pro. (it might pay to use the higher pixel resolution if you are going to do that often.
If you need to get wider angle pictures (from your workshop) take 2 or 3 pictures side by side and get a bit of overlap on each scene and the join them up again in PSP. It should occupy the mind one evening atempting that perhaps!!!

 

[Mike.C]

Shultzy thankyou very much for the link. The hawk is absolutely beautiful.

DW over lapping the photos is a great idea.

Thanks to you both.

Cheers

Mike