Back in the film era, when film was the only medium to capture photos and digital was still mostly avoided for various reasons, life was, relatively speaking, easier. Many hobbyists and amateur photographers were conservative about the amount of film exposed. Good slide films were expensive and developing film was even more so. This led photographers to be very selective about the number of images made, which in turn meant relatively easier sorting back at home. Most photographers were happy to get a small set of decent images which they either used for slide-shows or digitized to present as a digital slide-show. However with digital capture there is no such linear progression. Memory cards and storage media are getting cheaper every day, increasing the amount of clicks in the field and leading to more chaos. Everyone tends to think, “I'll fix it later using Photoshop” and takes many images. Imagine a wonderful image of your kid taken this year dumped in a cryptic folder which the camera created for you. Fast forward a few years and you want to show it to your kid or relatives. Can you locate it? It is like finding a needle in a haystack – possible but very time consuming and frustrating. Enter the buzzword 'workflow'.

Text and images copyright Tim Grey, all rights reserved.

Sharpening continues to be one of those topics that photographers seem to struggle with the most. It is certainly a subject that attracts a considerable number of questions in my Digital Darkroom Questions email newsletter (www.timgrey.com/ddq/), and one that inspires considerable debate. In an effort to address these concerns, I’ll present a series of articles on sharpening here at NatureScapes.Net.

Modern digital cameras require us to choose a file format for saving our images. The JPEG and RAW formats are the most common choices, but which one to use has sparked debate and led to confusion. This article examines the RAW file format, and provides guidance on how to use it to improve the quality of digital photographs.

My first article for NatureScapes.Net was a whirlwind tour of the world of inkjet printing. It provided an overview of the essentials, such as equipment choices (printer, ink, and paper) and color management. (previous article)

The aim of this article is a little different. It assumes you are familiar with inkjet printing already and want to take your skills to the next level. I hereby present MadManChan's Ten Tips for Better Prints: a collection of tips, tricks, and techniques that I've found useful when preparing my own images for print. I have tried to choose tips that do not require you to spend additional money – e.g., buying custom profiles, your own profiling packages, or additional software plug-ins – but I do assume that you have a recent version of Photoshop, such as CS, CS2, or CS3. I have also tried to choose tips that seem to be less well-known (or at least, I don't see them discussed as frequently).