ONe for the PhotoShop gurus!

[NiallerS320]

Hi Spinal

I've very surprised with that there should be automatic scaling utilities built into the software at costco or the idiots do not know their job. There's a bloody tickbox in every single print dialogue box that says Scale to Fit ffs.

I'd imagine if you're using an 8 megapix camera your images are going to be around 60mb each in uncompressed format (basing that on my 6mp camera being 45mb) the costco lads just didn't want the hassle of trying to process hundreds of images at that cost.

You can set up a batch action in photoshop and save it as a droplet on the desktop or just point it to a folder and do a save as in another folder, can be pernickety but works fine.

Just seen the mac thing in your sig, just use iPhoto and order the prints from apple, excellent quality and quite quick too.

 

[glojo]

I'd imagine if you're using an 8 megapix camera your images are going to be around 60mb each in uncompressed format (basing that on my 6mp camera being 45mb) the costco lads just didn't want the hassle of trying to process hundreds of images at that cost.

I've enjoyed reading tghis thread but I'm under the impression the files Spinal MIGHT be talking about are huge, or gian-norm-us!!

Ideally, I'm going to back them up onto dvds using tiff, then keep jpegs or something similar. Reasoning? 400mb each tif is a little... high!

If the files are this size then I might be able to see where the developers are coming from.

Hi Spinal,
Did you, or could you simply give them copies of the original files or are you doing some extra work on them? I thought you could tell Costco the actual part of the image you want printing?

John

Edit
My camera has the ability of taking two pictures of the same image, one RAW and the other a jpeg of a nominated size. Have you this option?

 

[Spinal]

Howdy! I've decided to go with Photoshop's resize image feature, usign bicubic resampling. Mainly because it just doesn't drop data as a lower quality jpeg save would do - but it actually tries to resample what is needed.

As for image size; I didn't bring 20-odd dvd's of tiff's; I decided that I could live with 8-bits and brough a single DVD with 4.5Gb of Jpegs, each 30 odd megabytes, at roughly 10k x 15k pixels (which works out to a 80 megapixel camera I'm told).

What I'm doing now is using my "thumbnails" to print (images resized to 2400width; constrained height) - saved as tiffs. Costco seems to like that.

As for Macintosh/iPhoto... just because I handle 600 of them I can tell you there is no way I can like them. Just trying to import my images into iPhoto sends it haywire... (beach-ball-o-doom; here we go again!). I've actually had my Macbook Pro kernel panic (the bad kind, the one with source code appearing interleaved with the helpful info). I've placed an order for the new intel duo cored macbooks (7 of these); so I'll try on that when I get it - but I think its more to do with the (very) limited features that iphoto has.

John: Regarding your camera; to be frank... (hides in the corner) I don't really have a digital camera! My only digitals are the one on my phone and a very old portable 1.3mp camera! I'm looking at a Pentax K100D though (the release of the K10 has brought prices down). Why pentax? Because I've always had pentax, and replacing my lenses would cost WAY too much...

Speaking of which; has anyone bought from this guy? "digital-rev" one eBay?
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110125162153

Michele

 

[NiallerS320]

Spinal

Have you scanned in the photos? If so were they scanned 24/48bit? If you have a 1.3mp camera then you're definitely not getting that image size off a that camera. I've worked in the graphic design industry for the past 17 years as a senior finished artist/IT geek and remember Xpress 2, Illy 88 and Photoshop 1 or 2 that long ago I can't remember, put it this way to montage images you had to you alpha channels for selections (basically you had no layers).

Anyway back to the images, record an action that opens the image resize it to A4 (approx 45mb) RGB @ 300 pixels per inch, once these are saved to jpg they should be or around 5mb each (compressed). This is basically the same size/format that all the photo libraries use so they can't be wrong. I regularly pull 6mp images into iphoto without issue (i've about 7000 images in my iphoto and it still flies, Dual 2ghz G5, 1.5gb RAM).

Also do a search for Automator actions, these place little finder menu items (when you right click) that use core image to do a myriad of actions right from the desktop.

http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Automator-Actions---Workflows/Automator-Fun-Apps.shtml

Automator can be a tad confusing but it's damn powerful.

 

[Godot]

For very good quick initial editing I use google's very own picasa2 & then choose from there what further editing suites I wish to use.

It is a very good system & it is free :bannana:. Well worth a try, it makes very easy using

 

[NiallerS320]

For very good quick initial editing I use google's very own picasa2 & then choose from there what further editing suites I wish to use.

It is a very good system & it is free :bannana:. Well worth a try, it makes very easy using

I think picasa is PC only unfortunately us 2% of mac users have to use photoshop though for all there's GIMP (graphic image manipulation program) that is free and works on all OSes.

 

[Spinal]

Nialler: Thanks for the info; but no; I am NOT using my 1.3mp camera. I'm scanning slides (which is where the initial thread started) at 7200dpi.

As for picasa - its a GREAT program! Like an uprated version of iPhoto - I have practically all my pictures in picasa (at least, a small version of them )

Just because I own a mac or two, (and work with them); I do not consider myself a mac user... you don't "use" a mac - you "share" the mac experience (and if you can get some work done while it feels like co-operating, all the better! )

I've ended up creating two actions in photoshop; one for the autolevels and save as a jpeg; and a second one that does the exact same with the exception that it resizes it down to 2400dpi width before saving it as a jpeg.

My problem now is finding a place to buy a digital camera. fleabay seems to be able to save me £100-odd pounds, but then again; is it worth the extra hassle if anything goes wrong? While we're at it; how long is a piece of string?

Michele

 

[NiallerS320]

Nialler: Thanks for the info; but no; I am NOT using my 1.3mp camera. I'm scanning slides (which is where the initial thread started) at 7200dpi.

As for picasa - its a GREAT program! Like an uprated version of iPhoto - I have practically all my pictures in picasa (at least, a small version of them )

Just because I own a mac or two, (and work with them); I do not consider myself a mac user... you don't "use" a mac - you "share" the mac experience (and if you can get some work done while it feels like co-operating, all the better! )

I've ended up creating two actions in photoshop; one for the autolevels and save as a jpeg; and a second one that does the exact same with the exception that it resizes it down to 2400dpi width before saving it as a jpeg.

My problem now is finding a place to buy a digital camera. fleabay seems to be able to save me £100-odd pounds, but then again; is it worth the extra hassle if anything goes wrong? While we're at it; how long is a piece of string?

Michele

The maximum you need for Commercial Brochure printing is at size 300dpi, the only thing I would ever consider using at 1200dpi would be a bitmap tiff (only 2 colours, black and white) everything else is 300dpi and to be honest for print you can get away with 220dpi@175lpi screen.

Now for digital cameras and camcorders I and a few people I know have used is www.pixmania.co.uk but the camera you're looking at is £100 dearer but guaranteed peace of mind and decent returns policy. Basically a 6mp camera will give you around 45mb Files uncompressed that's A4 in size @ 300dpi, 8mp will be around A3 in size @ 300dpi.

oh and www.dpreview.com is an excellent source for reviews of digital cameras.

 

[Spinal]

The maximum you need for Commercial Brochure printing is at size 300dpi, the only thing I would ever consider using at 1200dpi would be a bitmap tiff (only 2 colours, black and white) everything else is 300dpi and to be honest for print you can get away with 220dpi@175lpi screen.

Thanks again; but you need to remember that I'm scanning in 24x36mm slides. Hence, 300dpi would barely be a 300x400 resolution image if scanned at just 300 dpi. So, if I plan to print 7x5 inches, I would need 2100x1500 dpi - but my biggest gripe is that I don't want to go stumbling through houses, lofts and basements looking for old slides again if I ever need to get a bigger print made. Hence the reason to scan them as high resolution as I can and file the disks all together somewhere. (This will take a while - I have a few hundred rolls here, at least a thousand in Italy, a few hundred in Gambia and probably some littered in various other places....(I've lived here and there))

pixmania seems good; I'm still trying to beat the £360 that my high street Jessops was offering. dpreview seems very good, I like their review of the K100d! Another site I like is ephotozine; but the forums aren't half as good as these (hence the reason I ask for photography advice ever here )

Michele

 

[NiallerS320]

Thanks again; but you need to remember that I'm scanning in 24x36mm slides. Hence, 300dpi would barely be a 300x400 resolution image if scanned at just 300 dpi. So, if I plan to print 7x5 inches, I would need 2100x1500 dpi - but my biggest gripe is that I don't want to go stumbling through houses, lofts and basements looking for old slides again if I ever need to get a bigger print made. Hence the reason to scan them as high resolution as I can and file the disks all together somewhere. (This will take a while - I have a few hundred rolls here, at least a thousand in Italy, a few hundred in Gambia and probably some littered in various other places....(I've lived here and there))

pixmania seems good; I'm still trying to beat the £360 that my high street Jessops was offering. dpreview seems very good, I like their review of the K100d! Another site I like is ephotozine; but the forums aren't half as good as these (hence the reason I ask for photography advice ever here )

Michele

Hi Michele

What I actually meant was to scan them at A3 or A4 which is good for 8"x12" prints but keep the resolution 300dpi, I'd preferably go for A4@300dpi RGB giving you around a 36mb file, save as a jpg with maximum image quality and that'll drop to around 5-8mb depending on the amount of yellow in the image (jpg hits the yellow plate I've been led to believe).

An 8x12 (approx A4) would be 2400x3600 pixels @ 300 dpi hang on I'll run up to photoshop and check yup 2400x3500. Now most desktop/slide scanners run at around 600dpi-1200dpi so if you are scanning at 2400dpi it's actually interpolating that data and adding in pixels that it's not capable of picking up only for you to remove them when lowering the resolution. All of the commerical repro houses that I've used in the last 17 years would scan an image (to size ie whatever size we wanted) at 2400dpi on a laser drum scanner then supply the final file to us @ 300dpi beit A5/A4/A3 etc.

Be very careful what you save the files onto for archiving purposes, DVD or any optical media fades over time, external hard drives (one that you can put away) are a much better option.


Niall

 

[Spinal]

An 8x12 (approx A4) would be 2400x3600 pixels @ 300 dpi hang on I'll run up to photoshop and check yup 2400x3500. Now most desktop/slide scanners run at around 600dpi-1200dpi so if you are scanning at 2400dpi it's actually interpolating that data and adding in pixels that it's not capable of picking up only for you to remove them when lowering the resolution. All of the commerical repro houses that I've used in the last 17 years would scan an image (to size ie whatever size we wanted) at 2400dpi on a laser drum scanner then supply the final file to us @ 300dpi beit A5/A4/A3 etc.

Be very careful what you save the files onto for archiving purposes, DVD or any optical media fades over time, external hard drives (one that you can put away) are a much better option.


Niall

Thanks again for the advice! I'm using a film-specific scanner, which has a maximum hardware resoltion of 7200 dpi (it will happily interpolate up to 24,000dpi for some odd reason)

For archiving, I'm using TY-dye DVD's in a light-proof case; with a probability of having everything put on one of my raids if I have the time/space (this would help even if a drive fails...). I'm definetly keeping the "thumbnails" (2000x3000) on my desktop, I have 1.5TB of space on this box.

I need to seriously look into external/portable hard drive though; prices are dropping and my needs are going up!

Michele

 

[NiallerS320]

Cool, my preference for externals are Seagate first, maxtor and then forget about anything with a Western Digital drive in it, I've experienced nothing but failures on them from a lot of my clients. LaCie have a FW800 bigger disk (4 drives) that'll configure to RAID5 but it's expensive at 1500 euro, Stardom (a german manufacturer) also do raid enclosures that are absolutely fantastic and speak volumes for german engineering and reliability.

 

[Spinal]

Speak up... whos the spy?! There MUST be someone here whos reading this and works for Jessops!

I just got an email; the K100D is now £299! Thats better than eBay prices of the other day! Yehaw!

I'm placing an order now and collecting tomorrow!

Michele