Processing digital photos

Contents

This guide is basically an attempt to answer the question "just back from a lovely, scenic trip – what do I do with all those photos in my digital camera?" Taking the photos in the first place is covered in my taking good photos guide.

Importing

First connect your camera to the computer, with the USB cable it came with or by putting its memory card in a card reader (your computer may have one built in). Then copy or move the images from the camera to a suitably named folder, probably under Pictures (Vista/Win 7) or My Pictures (under My Documents, XP). If you’re offered a choice go for the option that leaves you in control – open the folder to view files.

If you have another copy of Windows Explorer open and pointing to the empty folder (I call the one I use for processing new images 0temp so it's at the top of the folder list) you’re going to put them in then you just select the photos you want, Edit, Cut (for Move) or Edit, Copy (for Copy). Then click across into the empty folder on your computer and select Edit, Paste.

I quite often just copy the pictures initially as both my cameras have a delete all function. Copying the images means you’ve got a backup while you process them.

I always avoid (and don’t bother installing) the software that came with the camera and any other software that tries to jump in the way of simply copying or moving the images to a folder of your choice.

For older, printed photos or transparencies you need a scanner. I've got one that does a good job on old slides as well as printed photos. Clean the photo or slide before scanning to cut down on the touching up task once scanned. I often spend a fair while with the clone tool in Photoshop before saving scans from old prints. I scan at 240 or 300 dpi from larger prints, 400 from smaller ones and whatever the maximum is for slides. I always scan straight into Photoshop Elements then save the images as jpgs.

I keep most of my images by year, but do whatever makes sense to you.

First pass

Now run Faststone Viewer  - get it free from faststone.org if you haven’t already got this lovely piece of software - and point it at the new photos on your computer. Travel back and forth through the images.

You should delete, delete then delete some more, until you’ve got rid of all the less good near duplicates and all the shots that didn’t quite work. You can also rotate portrait images at this stage. Note that some cameras put a sort of rotate flag on portrait images. Faststone obeys this and rotates the display but the XP Windows Picture Viewer doesn’t and Photoshop Elements seems to do so just sometimes.

I nearly always then rename the remaining shots – if they’re worth keeping surely it’s worth renaming them from DSG01391 or similar so they are searchable later. In Faststone just tap the F2 key, type in the name you want then tap the Enter key. Renaming can also be used to sort the images into a logical order.  This is especially useful if you are processing images from two or more cameras.

You can then do a search later, eg in Windows Explorer, via the Vista/Win 7 indexed search or something such as Google Desktop. It’s amazing what you can quickly come up with that way.

You’re now almost ready to process the images. But first have a look through them full screen and save a copy of any you think really stand out (and which you might later want to do a larger print of) to a folder where you keep copies of your best originals, just as they came out of the camera (but with sensible names). I have a "classy originals" folder for each year.

Processing

Now you can process your photos in a photo editor. I swear by Photoshop Elements, around £60 at Amazon, although I stick to the Edit function and avoid the Organizer – that has a hissy fit when you move photos around outside its control. If you must you can slum it with the free Google Picasa but that lacks many of the editing tools I find invaluable.  There are loads of free Photoshop tutorials on the web.

To load images into Photoshop I select them (click on the first one then hold down the Shift key then tap the down/right arrow keys on the keyboard), ten or so at a time, in Faststone. Then tap E (for Edit) to load them (you have to tell Faststone which photo editor to use the first time).

In Photoshop I used to crop my images to 7 x 5” at 400dpi. That’s a nice format to view (less square than digicam format) and if I then print them it’s usually at 7 x 5” size so there’s nothing more to do to ensure a perfect fit on the photo paper. But now I generally just crop to fit the image content - with a mini laptop and smartphone I don't print many photos nowadays; just set the crop tool to No Restiction and select the rectangle that looks best:

If you want to crop for printing it's more like this:

The little double arrow left of 'Height' in the crop bar lets you switch quickly between portrait and landscape format. Some purists like to stick to the original image but I find cropping improves many of them. Sometimes I’ll even crop a portrait image from a landscape original, as shown in the screen-grab. With modern digicams the resulting image is fine for viewing and for printing at least up to 7 x 5".

Do remember that when printed you’ll typically lose a little slice around the edges of the photo so don’t crop too tightly – leave a bit of margin.

Next is one of the most important steps. It is amazing how many otherwise good images look a little lifeless because they are over or under exposed.

Photoshop has a brilliant Levels control (Ctrl L is the shortcut) to fix this. I call it up for every image after cropping, to correct exposure.

If the histogram (mountain range) covers the entire width between the outer little triangles then the photo is well exposed and you just hit Esc to get out. But if there’s a gap either side (as in the badly exposed example shown) just slide the little triangular handles towards the edge of the histogram and you’ll see your photo come to life. You can also pull the centre triangle left or right to change brightness.

At this stage there may be nothing else to do in Photoshop. But a proportion of images need something fixing. It could be redeye or getting rid of powerlines or a double chin. It all depends on how much you feel like doing. Practice and you’ll soon get fluent at the sort of editing jobs you need to do repeatedly. If confused there are plenty of tutorials online. You could even learn fancy tricks such as how to cut someone out of one picture and slide them into another.

There are also all sorts of controls for adjusting saturation, colour temperature and so on. But I mostly avoid them because they can make a photo look artificial. Ones that can be useful on over-contrasty images are the controls to lighten shadows and darken highlights.

Next I save the image (Ctrl S) over the top of the original at medium high jpg quality (9 in Photoshop Elements) and close it (Alt FC). Repeat with all your images and you’re done, with classier and more printable images than came out of the camera.  You can now move the remaining images to their final destination folder.

There is just one problem - Adobe seem to hate anyone using Photoshop Elements offline (so they cannot do anti-piracy checks) and I've twice had them prevent me using it when on holiday with a computer and no internet connection (it comes up with odd "problem" messages then refuses to run, needs an uninstall/reinstall when back home). So I've actually got quite good at using the daunting but free Gimp photo editor on holiday.

Publishing

Once you have a lovely collection of images you can decide what to do with them. You can print a selection (I usually send mine down the wire to Bonusprint), resize some and email them or post them to an online photo sharing site such as flickr – there are well over 1,700 of mine on flickr. To ready them for transfer to flickr I put copies into a 'flickr bound' folder, load them into Photoshop, crop them freeform to suit each image, resize them to 1000 or 1024 pixels on the longer side then upload them, add tags, locate them on a map etc. Here are some flickr images shown via the CoolIris viewer on a laptop:

I also edit some to the perfect size to be a Windows desktop background and a selection for a digital photo frame. I keep a few albums of photos on my smartphone and our entire collection is on our mini laptop we take on most trips. I get a few printed at larger sizes and often incorporate photos into cards for birthdays, Valentines Day etc.

I've also produced a few photo books. With Blurb I found their layout software weak and ended up making up entire pages in Photoshop - the results were very good. More recently I've found that myphotobook (.co.uk) has superb layout software that lets you make images any size and aspect ratio, overlap images, add text anywhere etc. The books are printed in Germany and the quality is pretty good.

Finally, what would you feel, having gone to all this effort, if your hard disc died and you lost them all? Lots of people do lose lots of their digital images. Do get into a routine of making regular backups. I regularly mirror all our photos between our desktop and laptop computers and make full data copies on an external USB drive regularly.

But best of all I pay under 5 dollars a month to Carbonite to make automatic backups (who knows or cares where) as I add, change, delete or rename files.

In the Windows Explorer folder view on the right, the green dots mean everything under those folders is backed up online with Carbonite. The orange ones are not (in this case because I was offline in the Pyrenees at the time). And no, I'm not a Carbonite shareholder!