Going digital opens up a world of artistic and practical possibilities that you simply don't enjoy with traditional photographic prints. Here are just a few advantages of working with digital images:
- You gain quality control over your pictures. With traditional photos, you have no input into an image after it leaves your camera. Everything rests in the hands of the photofinisher. But if you snap a digital photo, you can use image-editing software to touch up your pictures, if necessary. You can correct contrast and color-balance problems, improve a poorly focused shot, and crop out unwanted objects from the scene.
- You can send an image to friends, family members, and clients almost instantaneously by attaching it to an e-mail message. This capability is undoubtedly one of the biggest benefits of digital imagery.
- You can include pictures of your products, your office headquarters, or just your pretty face on your company's site on the World Wide Web. One picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words, especially when you're trying to do business with people who live halfway across the planet.
- You can add sizzle to your multimedia presentations. Many presentation programs enable you to download pictures from digital cameras directly into an open presentation file. But you can display your photos to a large audience without ever launching a presentation program or even using a computer if you want. Most digital cameras on the market today offer a video connection so that you can play back your pictures on a TV and record them on a VCR. Some cameras offer a slide-show mode that displays all the pictures in the camera's memory, one by one, with just one press of a button. And a few cameras even enable you to record and play audio clips and text along with your pictures.
- You can include digital images in business databases. For example, if your company operates a telemarketing program, you can insert digital images of your products into the product order database so that when sales representatives pull up information about a certain product, they can see a picture of the product and describe it to customers.
- You can have a heck of a lot of fun exploring your artistic side. Using an image-editing program, you can apply wacky special effects, paint mustaches on your evil enemy, and otherwise distort reality. You can also combine several images into a photo montage.
- You can create your own personalized stationery, business cards, calendars, mugs, T-shirts, postcards, and other goodies. The figure offers a look at Adobe PhotoDeluxe, which is one of many consumer image-editing programs that provide templates for creating such materials. You just select the design you want to use and insert your own photos into the template.
Now tell me the downside
As wonderful as digital photography may be, the technology is not without its drawbacks. In the interest of fairness, the following list discusses some of the problems facing digital photographers:
- One problem with digital images is print quality. Manufacturers have accomplished great things in this regard over the past two years; for about $300, you can now buy photo printers that produce results startlingly close to traditional film prints. But to get that kind of quality, you need a high-resolution digital camera, which costs a minimum of $300. Lower-priced cameras deliver lower-resolution images, which just don't contain enough picture information to produce decent prints at anything but very small sizes — a maximum of about 3 inches wide by 2-1/2 inches tall. Low-res images are perfectly okay for on-screen display in a Web page or multimedia presentation, however.
- Images from lower-priced digital cameras often require a little touch-up work to correct problems with color balance, focus, and contrast. High-end cameras deliver better images — depending on the photographer's skills, of course — but also need a little help at times. Fortunately, today's image-editing programs make easy work of these types of corrections, and most digital cameras ship with image-editing software.
- After you press the shutter button on a digital camera, the camera requires a few seconds to store the image in its memory. During that time, you can't shoot another picture. With some cameras, you also experience a slight delay between the time you press the shutter button and the time the camera actually captures the image.
These pre- and post-exposure lag times can be a problem when you're trying to capture action-oriented events, such as a tennis match.
Generally speaking, the more current and more expensive the camera, the less lag time you encounter. With some of the new, top-flight models, lag time isn't much more than you experience with a point-and-shoot film camera using an automatic film advance.
Many digital cameras also offer a burst or continuous-capture mode that enables you to take a series of pictures with one press of the shutter button. This mode is helpful in some action scenarios, although you're typically restricted to capturing these sequential images at a low resolution or without a flash.
Becoming a digital photographer does involve learning some new concepts and skills. If you're familiar with a computer, you shouldn't have much trouble getting up to speed with digital images. If you're a novice to both computers and digital cameras, expect to spend a fair amount of time making friends with your new machines. A digital camera may look and feel like your old film camera on the surface, but underneath, it's a far cry from your father's Kodak Brownie. This book guides you through the process of becoming a digital photographer as painlessly as possible, but you do need to be willing to invest the time to read the information it contains.
As manufacturers continue to refine digital imaging technology, you can expect continued improvements in quality and image-capture functions.
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