Published July 26, 2000
Sharing vacation photos among friends and colleagues is now much easier, on the Internet.
Everyone wants to see themselves in photographs, to flip through the stack of hand-held moments in time. The drug store sends your film to the processing lab and in a few days a stack of beautiful color four-by-sixes are in your grasp. One set goes to sister Arlene in Kansas and another to show the bridge club next Tuesday.
Wouldn’t it be easier, and more interesting, to have your photos stored on the computer, organized and accessible to show others? Photo digitization is becoming very popular.
Photo finishing services from around the country are competing for your business, just a few keystrokes away on the Web (see Web Links, this column). They develop your film, scan the images to magnetic files and post them to their Web site. You’ll receive an email with the URL address and a password for immediate viewing of your private photos. The prints arrive in your mailbox a few days later.
Choose your film processor carefully. Patrons of some wholesale retailers like Walmart complain consistently of blurry pictures with a bluish haze. Others like that look.
Here’s another feature: at an additional cost, your pictures are stored on your own CD in different sizes. The smaller ones can be attached to outgoing Emails, and look good on the computer screen; the larger ones are adequate for printing from an inkjet or laser printer.
Friends can now see where you’ve been. Send colleagues, clients and prospects images of work in progress via email or the film processors’ Web site. Be aware that your corespondents on AOL are not likely to receive attachments without mangling.
Home scanners are more available to cost-conscious consumers these days. Move the image from paper directly into your computer. Setting up a new scanner may be a bit tricky for Windows users, but should be no difficulty for the Macintosh equipped family. Learning to scan is more than just pushing one button, but can be an enjoyable task.
Then there’s the digital cameras which eliminate film entirely. Plug a digital camera into your computer and see all those just-taken shots. Store them on your hard drive and dump them into a cataloger for sorting. Send them to friends or display on your personal web page.
Are these digital devices any good compared to film? For everyday snapshots, they’re okay, but for brochures or magazine quality, film is still the best.
Digital pictures are very course representations of their film cousin. Except for the commercial quality digital cameras, over $10,000, the resemblance to photographs is not even close.
The consumer grade digital camera images are saved in a compressed file format that degrades the quality when viewed in print or on the screen larger than a few inches square. Although the 3-megapixel cameras costing more than a thousand dollars, are delivering impressive results and a huge time-saver for newspapers, none are yet good enough for the magazine or fine printing medium.
Digital photos are colored dots, compared to film that smoothly blends colors from one to another as water colors would flow on paper. An arms-length view on a computer monitor of a picture from a digital scan or camera looks strikingly good, especially for those who admit to being over 50. But that’s because its colors are accentuated, often overly contrast and blurry when magnified.
Just for fun, enlarge a compressed digital picture on your screen to 400% or more. Notice the funny looking squares; those are water-droplet looking pixels.
Commercial printers and graphics professionals refer to digital camera output as “pleasing color.” That means the sky is some shade of blue, the grass a single shade of green, and red somewhere in the rest of it. The highlight brilliance is muted.
Quality magazine publishers rely upon rather expensive equipment to faithfully reproduce good photos. They use laser drum scanners, not flatbed scanners. Nothing in photography or digitization will match the perfection of the human eye.
The best photographs make the best digital scans or Web site images, but all require enhancement adjustments so they appear nicer on the Web or in your scrapbook.
Pull the slide projector out of the coat closet; unhook the framed landscape to bare a white wall; darken the living room and relive those vacations as they were recorded on 35mm film. Aren’t those skies a little too blue?
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Web links
http://www.ezprints.com
http://www.fototime.com
http://www.gatherround.com
http://www.myfamily.com
http://www.ofoto.com
http://www.photoaccess.com
http://www.photoisland.com
http://www.photoloft.com
http://www.photopoint.com
http://www.photoworks.com
http://www.primeshot.com
http://www.shutterfly.com
http://www.snapfish.com
http://www.webshots.com
http://www.yorkphoto.com