Digital Imaging
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Trying to treat digital photography the same as
conventional photography is doomed to disappointment. Image
prints either at home or in photographic laboratories are
simply too expensive.
Most of the images from digital cameras will stay
digital for their entire lifespan. Born of a digital
camera, growing up on a PC, spending their old age on a
cd-rom and occasionally being reassembled from bits onto a
PC display.
It is common now for PC displays to support true color
and be capable of providing photographic quality rendition
of images that look really good on 17" and 19"
screens. Does your display run in true-color? Want to check
it? This
true-color check requires IE5 or Netscape 4 to display PNG
images.
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The electronic world is providing more and more options every day.
We have:
- email, direct distribution of your photos to those most
interested.
- free web sites where you can upload your photos and tell your
friends about them
- personal web sites
What the Internet gains in speed of distribution it loses in
quality. The image has to be practically destroyed with size reductions
and JPG compression to get it down to around 20Kb for transmission over
the Internet.
It does have its place. It is a great way to share images quickly
with people who have no long term interest in the shots. Its a bit like
passing the photographs around the office after you get them back from
the processing lab.
It is inadequate where you want to share quality 'prints'.
The paper print replacement of the electronic era has to be the
cd-rom. The cd-rom can contain over 1,000 quality JPG images at a
production cost of a couple of dollars.
Digital cameras with no direct processing costs, immediate image
previews and low image storage space are going to increase the number
of photos we take and keep several times over.
What do we do with all those images? The production cycle is
something like:
- Photograph is taken
- Preview checked for framing, exposure and general quality. If
not adequate then back to step 1
- Image transferred to computer
- Image manipulated in image editor until satisfied. This may
result in the production of one or more offspring
- Master image and offspring archived to cd-rom
Somewhere in this process there has to be included a method of
finding an image again, a method of viewing selected images only.
Our opinion at CyWarp is that a cataloging
program must be used to describe the images, record their location and
to retrieve them. Accordingly we have produced the CyPics program to do
precisely this.
There is an issue with offspring and tying them back to the original
master. Our image cataloging FAQ suggests one simple alternative.
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