articles/Digital/digitaltalkingplunge2-page3
by Mike McNamee Published 01/01/2003
Professor Franklin's Instant Photo Effects is from Streetwise Software, Inc., (http://www.swsoftware.com), it is low cost and very useful, many of The Professor's instant functions can also be created in Photoshop, but you have to work at it, all the effects are one click in The Professor's. One word of caution don't "Save" always "Save As", by simply saving, it will default to create a bitmap file, too big and clumsy for your slide show needs, just add a digit like an 'a' and save as a .jpg
Now that we've gone from digital capture, proofing and presentation, we have to think about the marketable digital products we can sell. Well, variations on the proof CD can be quite profitable, but I am thinking more of the images that can go into a picture frame or wedding album. For the most part I intend to touch on that in Part Three, but for now here's food for thought. Those who use GraphiStudio Albums would find sending a CD overseas a lot more palatable than sticking their precious negatives onto a plane in today's climate and Graphi are superbly geared to making digital album products, but more on that next time.
At this point in your learning curve you should be thinking about shooting a couple of dozen digital images, alongside your film cameras, at every event, since you are going to need lots of images to practice on and to learn from. Don't, please don't, go out and shoot a wedding on stand alone digital imaging. Although you are almost there, at this stage there are still a number of issues and pitfalls to overcome, many of which will rear their ugly heads without any encouragement from me, but the time to get the better of them is during this wannabee digital period, when your clients are not depending on the digital pictures.
Just as we did, you can include some of them among your analogue, or film produced images and allow the client to purchase some if they wish, but as with any new discipline you should only go out to inflict it onto the unsuspecting world at large when you have a reasonable mastery of the process and as the weeks go by, trying out these technique as you go, you will find yourself step by step increasing in confidence and skills, until one day you will know that you are ready and the market will love you for it.
To Be Continued.
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