Snapping pictures with a digital camera is just the beginning. Sooner or later, most people want to transform those bits and bytes into real-world photographs that they can show to friends and relatives,but in order to do that, your attention must shift from your camera to your PC. That’s because the magic of digital photography lies in the fact that with the right combination of PC software and hardware, you can turn ordinary photographs into stunning visualizations that rival the work of professional photographers.
The fact is, the tools that will allow you to turn your ordinary desktop personal
computer into a full-fledged digital darkroom are within reach of many computer users.
Make no mistake: venturing into the world of digital photography – including the software and hardware you need to mere pictures into artful photographs – is not cheap.
Once you’ve been bitten by the digital photography bug, though, there’s probably no turning back, and you can choose digital darkroom tools to fit tight budgets.
Whether you go out and buy the gear that you need all at once or collect the components piecemeal, you have to start somewhere. So hereÕs a rundown of what you’ll need to create the digital darkroom of your dreams.
Start with the paint program. Basic paint programs – sometimes also called bitmap programs – are the staple of every digital darkroom.
These are the applications that allow you to work wonders on your digital photographs. They give you the power to change lighting and colour, add special effects, and perform so many other nifty tricks on your images that you’ll be limited, in the end, only by your imagination.
The paint programs that come standard with most digital cameras are basic at best. If you want to use the tool that the pros turn to, look no farther than Adobe’s Photoshop,
currently in version 6.0 (www.adobe.com). Photoshop is used by most professional magazines and newspapers to manipulate images before printing, and its steep price – about 1,000 dollars on the street – may keep all but the most dedicated away. The latest from Adobe is Photoshop Elements, a surprisingly powerful tool for the price, boasting many of the same features as the much higher-priced Photoshop.
You can also look to lower-priced paint programs such as Jasc Software’s PaintShop Pro (www.jasc.com), currently in version 7.0 and priced at just over 100 dollars.
If thereÕs one thing that’s noticeably deficient with PaintShop Pro when compared to Photoshop is that some of the tools in PaintShop Pro do not work as quickly as those in its higher-priced competitor.
The other leading paint program on the market is Corel’s PhotoPaint 9.0 (www.corel.com), which now comes in a special “digital camera” edition and is priced very reasonably. PhotoPaint, like PaintShop Pro, contains most of the features of Photoshop.
Regardless of which paint program you choose, be prepared to spend some time learning to use it. Although paint programs look simple – and it can be quite easy to dip into the programs’ basic features – exploiting the full capabilities of these applications will require that you spend some time with a good book or a teacher.
Another essential software tool for the budding digital photographer is a file
management program specifically designed for images.
You’ll find that graphics files, which tend to be large, will quickly proliferate on your hard drive, and you’ll want a tool that will allow you to view these files quickly and delete them, if necessary.
The Windows Explorer file manager will work for this purpose, but it is painfully slow when you put it in “thumbnail” mode, using the View menu’s Thumbnail option.
The two leading file management programs for images available over the Web are ACDSee (www.acdsystems.com) and Thumbs Plus, from Cerious Software (www.cerious.com).
Both applications offer a variety of image editing and image viewing options – including slide show features – in addition to basic thumbnail viewing and file management capabilities tailored to graphics.
If you work with paint programs for any length of time, you’ll probably discover that your PC is deficient in at least one area: the amount of memory (RAM) it has. Paint
programs can be among the most resource-intensive on the market, so no computer that you throw at it can be too powerful.
But regardless of the speed of your PC, you’ll need a lot of RAM to make the paint program work painlessly. Photoshop 6.0, for example, requires a whopping 96 MB of RAM before it will even run.
And if you start editing multiple images at the same time – something that is not
uncommon – you’ll quickly discover that a PC equipped with 512 MB of RAM is not overstocked.
If there’s any area of computing today that will herald the advent of the PC equipped with 1 GB of RAM, it’s image editing. The one glimmer of good news here is that the price of RAM has come down in recent months, and purchasing another 256 MB of RAM for your machine should not cost you more than 125 dollars.
So let’s say you have the right paint program and enough RAM in your PC. Once you start playing with your images, you’ll quickly discover that you’d like to select certain regions of the images, or add artistic effects. Once you do, you’ll see the sense of a drawing tablet. Once thought to be the sole province of artists, drawing tablets are becoming an essential component for a digital darkroom.
In essence, a drawing tablet replaces your mouse with a pen – a much more natural, ergonomic interface for working with paint programs and digital photos. You can still use your mouse for other tasks, but within paint programs, the tablet can take over.
By far, the most popular drawing tablets are those from Wacom (www.wacom.com), the worldwide leader in such devices. Wacom makes a range of drawing tablets for everyone from beginners to professional computer assisted design engineers, but the company’s recently-available Graphire tablet should suit most users. Its cost is generally under 100 dollars at the retail level.
Of course, the final piece of any digital darkroom is the printer. Colour inkjet printer makers Epson and Hewlett-Packard are the current front runners among digital
darkroom enthusiasts.
Epson’s 1270 and 2000P colour printers can produce stunning photographs, easily rivaling what you can get from a professional development studio, and Hewlett-Packard’s DeskJet series of colour printers has long been popular among beginners and professionals alike.
Outfitting your computer with the tools necessary to turn yourself into a developer of quality photographs may take time and money.
Nevertheless, the expense will probably be worth it if you enjoy the creative act of producing eye-popping photography and you covet the artistic control over your photographs that only a digital darkroom can provide.
