Photo editing and trying to keep best quality

Hi everyone

First of all I do apologise if this question has been raised. If it has been discussed somewhere then someone please point me to the right thread. I looked around and couldn't find any.

I am basically trying to understand how you all store the pics with relation to the sizes. I have the impression that I am doing something wrong and it could be improved.

I will run briefly what I do so someone please suggest me what or how to do in a better way.

First of all I keep the setting for recorded pixels to the maximum on my K20D (not sure if this is generally the idea, would like to know what most of you keep at)

Consequence of this is my files come out at approximately 10MB.

What I would like to know is whether this is from where you generally then use the editors to reduce the pixels and store them, or if you store them as they are and you just edit them before uploading somewhere or what is the general consensus on tackling this.

Do the images lose a lot in quality and if they do how much does it affect, and if its just negligible to the common eye and for pictures for general use only and occasional printing at normal post card sizes.

And in case if I want to maintain the highest quality of some of the shots I intend to keep then what do I do? Should I just save them as they are or in this case should I shoot and store in RAW format.

Suggestions, advice any recommendations please would be of great help.

Hi Amin,

keep the original be it RAW or jpg (taken at the highest possible quality every time), and work on a copy of it. Always.. always.. always keep the original image from the camera safe and unmutilated. Did I say always keep the original.

Whether you choose to shoot jpg or RAW is a debate for another day.. it's been covered here more than once. If the K20 does both at the same time (I beleive the K10 did) then do that. Memory is cheap these days.

You may find that you have to buy a bigger hard drive to store everything, but they're so cheap it doesn't matter. Probably looking at £80 for a 1tb HD. (that's 100,000 images at 10mb.. should be enough for now.. ) When you've had some practice at post processing, you may want to come back to your pictures and have another go at editing them. If the only copy you have has already been edited, you can't do much with it.

And don't forget to back up. If you stuff the only hard drive you have, you lose the lot. If you'd happily pay someone £80-100 to fix your computer and retreive all your pictures, documents etc. spend it now on a second hard drive. External; USB or firewire will do. Firewire is quicker, but if it's only for backup then either will do.

You say that you will print at postcard size.. give it a while..

My DL is only 6mp, but it happily produces quality prints at A3. Your K20 will go to A2 and above. When you become more profficient, you might want to see your work on the wall.. or even sell the odd image. If you've saved it as a 72dpi web image, you'll be able to print it at passport photo size if you're lucky.

Hope that helps..

Cheers

Liam

Excellent advice there from Liam. Take all your pictures at the highest resolution and store the original in more than one place. I use an external hard drive and download the originals onto DVD as well. Always work on a copy when editing. I now take everything in RAW. I used to do it all at the highest resolution JPEG but as I got more confident with digital photography I started doing everything in RAW. You soon learn its just as easy to process RAW as JPEG and you have more control over the finished image.
Hope this helps a little, david.

One other point worth mentioning.

If your editing an image and have to save it to continue to work on it later DO NOT save it as a jpeg, save it as a PSD (photoshop file) or TIFF, saving as a jpeg will degrade the quality EVERY time the image is saved, not such a loss if you've followed the advice above and retained the original but a pain in the ass having to re-edit it

thank you so much everyone for all the advice. I will follow it all to the minute details as I notice even in one of the threads that someone has had his external HD faulty and all the pictures gone with it.

So I should then continue to shoot in the highest quality that I get, been doing that since I got the K20D. Excellent.

Not started with RAW still but I am sure I will swiftly be diving into it soon . Regarding the bigger prints , how did you guess that I am already entertaining in my mind one day being able to do that and hang around some bigger prints in the house(to see the smile in my wife's face and hopefully get my budget for photographic gadgets increased while still getting warm dinners and goodies cooked happily )

Saving files that are still incomplete while editing in PSD or TIFF format, will make sure to remember that once I get back into editing. I am starting a 10 week course in photography and photoshop editing next week and I am so looking forward to that.

And regarding backup, I will flag an extra importance to that also thanks for your advice, I have a seagate external HD hooked with USB with freeagent running which backs up every day all my data files and pictures included. Got my home and kid's movies in there and as the collection is growing I have been seriously considering to get another backup as well. I have some family movies in there that I have digitalised from old VHS tapes over 20 years old and dread to lose them.

Am quite thankful to get all your advice. This way I can continue to shoot with more confidence knowing that its the way I should be doing.

Thank you so much

Amin

I really helpful thing when saving your images is to keep the camera's filename in all future names, so if the file is 'IMGP0359.JPG' then the edited version would be 'IMGP0359-baby-in-pram-800px.jpg'. This way in 2 year's time you can search for the first part of the file name to find the original.
I also never use spaces or unusual characters because they can cause problems with email or web links or CD burning.

Great idea. It really never crossed my mind this detail even with so many digicam pics I have accumulated along the years specially of my little ones.

Time now to sort those ones out, while there aren't many of those edited versions. Because I know the collections has started growing with the arrival of my dear K20D.

Thanks

Amin

You may also consider RAID 1 (2x 1TB) solution (harddrives are quite cheap now) + external backup.

But as far as I understood you look for a some tool to manage / catalogue different picture versions? Well, I tried to find something like that, no success. I use KPhotoAlbum (on Linux), it allows you to add multiple tags to each picture. But it would be better if I could assign different versions to each picture (ie unchanged, changed, 800x600). If I will get desperate enough I'll finally write my own photo-management application