One of the biggest selling points for digital photography is that it is so simple; you point, click, and then you can send your images out to friends and family, or print them out on your computer. It's like having a Polaroid camera, only better. Unfortunately, the ease of digital photography falls under the same category as the supposed savings for switching away from film to digital. While things certainly are as easy as point, click, and download, the problems begin AFTER the download. Once you have the image on your computer, certain things must be done before you e-mail or print your images.
The first item to remember is that you must now do everything. You are the photo lab, and it is no longer a case of dropping off your film and picking up the prints in a day or two (or in a few hours, if you use a 1 hr lab). As a result, you must be the one to download the images, edit them on a photo editor, and then print them out or e-mail them to friends. There is much more involved than you might expect.
First and foremost, you need to be very comfortable with using computers. Seems like a trivial issue, but it's something to keep in mind - you have to be good with a computer to be good at digital photography. Next you will need to learn how to use a photo editor. Again, it seems like a trivial issue to bring up... until you actually start to use an image editor! In most cases, photo editors are not very simple to learn. Learning to properly adjust color balance, resize images, and all the basics take time to get used to and do well. Advanced operations, including special effects, take a very long time to learn. The powerful image editors, such as Photoshop, easily take 6-9 months to learn them well. Less complicated software such as those programs included with digital cameras today, take much less time to learn (only a month or so), but also don't have nearly as many features. In short, you will have to dedicate a few months time to learn how to use a photo editor on your computer.
When printing digital files, you will need to calibrate your monitor and printer so that what you see on the screen is what you get from your printer. Just how much of a problem is this? HUGE. In fact, most serious digital photographers consider this the biggest problem in digital imaging. If you do not calibrate your monitor and printer properly, you will find that you will spend hours editing an image only to end up with a print that looks nothing like what you wanted. And the differences aren't small; what appears on your screen and what gets printed can be horribly different, as brightness, contrast, and color balance can (and will) be skewed greatly on uncalibrated systems. Tools like Adobe Gamma (a monitor calibration tool included with Photoshop) can get your system in the ballpark of being usable, but true calibration requires months of testing or buying serious calibration tools (such as $300-400 tools that connect to your monitor, and recalibrate your system for accurate color representation). Unless you spend time calibrating your system, getting good digital prints out of your printer will be extremely difficult and frustrating.
Earlier I mentioned that while taking the images was as simple as point, click, download, the real troubles began once you download. When e-mailing photos to friends, you often need to resize the images, lower the resolution, and compress them into a J-PEG or GIF format that they can easily download to their computer and view. Raw image files from digital cameras are often large; easily 500k or more. Such a large file is difficult for other people to load on their computers and view, particularly if they use a standard 56k modem to get on the internet. Images need to be 100k or less in size for e-mail, and 50k or less is ideal. Likewise, images for a web page should not be more than 50k unless you want people to sit for a long time while images download. So once you download your raw digital image from your camera, you will need to spend a little time editing and resizing them for e-mail or web use (at least 5-10 minutes for each image you want to e-mail or put on the web). For printing out images, you will likewise have to spend time working on them. To get a rough print, you might only need 15 minutes to do some rough color balancing and resizing to what you want. But if you want to dodge, burn, adjust color, and perfect your images, plan to spend at least an hour on each image (if not much, much more - some digital photographers spend days on one image before they make a final print).
To make a long story short, digital photography isn't as simple as the salepeople make it seem. There is much more involved in digital photography if you want good results, and you need to know a great deal about both computers and working with digital images to do digital photography well. Digital can be very fast and easy if all you want are images to e-mail or post on the web, but even then it takes more time than most people expect. On the other hand, if you are looking for high quality prints made at home rather than dealing with a lab, expect to spend significant amounts of time and effort working on your images.
But what about all those annoying boxes of old prints and negatives? Digital might take significantly more time, cost, and effort than it first appeared, but wouldn't it all be worth it if you just get rid of all that useless clutter? Read all about it in the next section:
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