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Regular readers will appreciate this week's
departure from the usual subject of getting better images from
your digital camera with Photoshop.
Instead, we're going to examine a few practical
uses with camera and application.
In my travel writing activities, I use my
digital camera as a visual notebook, dropping the resolution
down to Basic and shooting anything I think may come in handy
for future references.
Historical markers are notoriously verbose and a
single shot can later help glean out the useful information
about what happened on that spot 300 years ago, While I usually
pocket business cards, matchbooks, brochures, maps and the like,
I'll shoot street signs (for correct spelling), menu pages,
official notices (in Germany I shot one that read "photografen
verboten"), and any other information that's not quite portable.
Some digital cameras have a black and white copy
mode. Mine unfortunately does not but I've found Basic JPG at
ISO 400 lets me shoot data under nearly any condition. It's
important to immediately reset the resolution and sensitivity,
otherwise I'll take a batch of over-pixeled pictures. The
restaurant listing shown above gave me a list of addresses and
phone numbers without having to carry home an entire magazine.
For nearly a year, I poo-poohed my digital
camera's MPG movie feature. Then, a friend said he was having
difficulty describing to his wife the stairwell and hall
arrangement of a new home which she'd never seen.
Puzzling through the menu to the never used
movie function, I walked through and shot the arrangement and
within the hour, he was emailing the crude little movie. His
wife immediately understood the setup.
A traveler acquaintance makes digital photos of
purchases abroad to be used with her credit card guarantee in
case an item is broken in shipment home. Lots of folks make
digital photos of their valuables for insurance records. I heard
from one man who did so and stored the images in his laptop
which was stolen at an airport.
There's a backup moral here.
Photoshop 6.0 has a useful feature that seems
often overlooked: Annotations. It's right there in the toolbox
beneath the Pen tool and the icon may look like a NotePad or
Speaker.
I use the Note tool frequently, especially in
constructing screen shots for online or magazine tutorials.
Notes can be saved as part of a PDF image file and then
circulated among workgroups for comments and further annotations
in Acrobat.
The same goes for Audio annotations, a feature I don't use since
I don't have a mic hooked to my computer. Voice annotations can
accompany actions, even pausing where an action pauses.
Unfortunately, Notes do not print from Photohop
but do in PDF files. To learn more about this useful feature, go
to page 80 of the Photoshop 6.0 User Manual.
I'll be happy to hear from readers who put their
digital cameras (or Photoshop) to practical uses. |