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Putting a Polish on Your Pics:
Steps Towards Image Improvement

So you've gotten back from Las Vegas with tons of digital gem pictures and you want to put the best results on-line. There’s just one problem: images that may be good enough to show your staffers are not good enough to show customers. Here’s how to get from flawed to flawless.

by Tony Siedeman

Giving punch to the rainbow: Tony Seideman snapped a jumble of colored stones, then used freeware to give them their final snap, crackle and pop.

In today's digital world, the image of a gem or piece of jewelry you captured with your camera is just a start. Now you need to clean up your shots.

Once a well-equipped darkroom, an arsenal of X-Acto blades and a sophisticated knowledge of photography and graphics were needed to do sophisticated image manipulation.

Today, however, powerful computer programs are available for free that will allow you to fix many common mistakes and put a fairly professional sheen on your images. These programs are neither simple nor easy to use; but, when I’m creating images for clients such as Devon Fine Jewelry, they are absolutely essential when it comes to putting together presentation-worthy images.

Don’t balk. Image management is crucial if you’re a store looking to win in today’s crowded market. You must put good images on the Internet—preferably ones of your own taking. This is a matter of necessity since very little stock photography is available—and the little that is gets used by everybody. You have to show what sets you apart—and you must do so in a way that sets you apart.

Getting from camera to computer: cable versus flash card
If you’re going to be working with images today, you need to start with some basic tools and strategies. I’ve worked with numerous jewelry stores, and I know how tough it is to run a small business. So my focus is how to get the most done for the least money—and effort.

That holds true for everything from storing your photographs to working them over. Images are relatively useless until they’re moved from your camera into your computer. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can attach a cable directly to your camera, and download from it, or you can pull your flash card from the camera and put it into a card reader.

Don’t be stingy with bits
If you’re shooting in any kind of a professional way, you’re going to be taking a lot of pictures. Bits are cheap. Bring plenty of batteries and just keep shooting away. Whether I’m photographing a party for a client or taking pictures of pieces of jewelry, I consider it a slow day if I get less than 200 images.

Take a photo dump every day
Even though my flash card can hold more than 1,500 photos, I follow a simple rule: at the end of every day, I move all the images from the flash card to my computer. Once I’m absolutely, positively, totally certain the images have been safely relocated, I erase the flash card to get it ready for the next day’s work. That’s because date and time are crucial elements of my way of tracking the images I take.

Don’t forget time and date
Since date and time are important, it’s well worth taking the few minutes needed to set the date and time on your camera. If you don’t, there’s a good chance all your new images will have the same date and time, which can make searching through them a huge pain. I say this from very personal experience.

Keep a photo log book
When you’re shooting semi-professionally, you need to keep track of the pictures you take. It’s easy to get into a situation where you’re accumulating thousands of images a month.

Although there are many different programs for managing images, I take a home-spun approach. Why? I'm uncomfortable about getting trapped into anybody's image management package and reluctant to make unnecessary expenditures. Here’s how I log my photos.

Dealing with images means understanding some computer fundamentals—my apologies to those who might already understand this stuff. The smallest piece of information on a computer is a bit. Computers work with pieces of information called “bytes,” each of which is made up eight bits. They assemble these bits and bytes into files. These files are then put into information structures called directories, or folders. Directories and folders can have many, many levels of folders.

So, whenever I arrive home with images I've taken, I go to the folder that's on my computer which is rather uncreatively labeled digital camera images. This folder is divided up into a number of subfolders, or subdirectories, as they're sometimes called.

Some kind of discipline is essential when you’re working with photographs. If you’re doing serious photography, chances are good you’ll be shooting hundreds of images a day. Things can get lost very easily in that kind of environment.

My digital camera images folder is divided into many different sub and even sub-sub folders. It’s like a huge filing cabinet with drawers within drawers within drawers. Digital camera images have several different subfolders. New pictures go into the images subdirectory. The images subdirectory is divided into years. Each year is divided into months. Each month has a subfolder for every day’s worth of photographs.

In effect, the structure looks like this:
M: Digital_Camera_Images > 2009 > May_2009 > 051609 > Estate_Jewelry_Sale_Images

When I process a lot of pictures, I will create subfolders within the day to hold the processed pictures—and then moved the processed pictures over to the client images subfolder in my consulting subdirectory on another part of my hard drive.

Keep untouched originals: Use “save as” not “save”
One of the most important rules for dealing with digital images is to always, always make sure that you have an original untouched version somewhere around. Once again, I learned this the hard way. Working on an image can take a long, long time. I work on PCs, which don’t crash as much as they used to, but have earned my distrust. So I tend to hit the save key a lot.

Once you hit the save key, you’ve eradicated your original image. If you’re changing something, there’s a chance you’ll make a mistake. In addition, JPG files lose resolution every time they’re saved. So, instead of simply saving an image, the first time I open it, I do a “Save As,” and then I give the photo a name directly relating to its function or history.

Facing the impermanence of hard drives
Backup drives are an essential for successful digital photography. One fact of digital life is this: your hard drive is going to fail. It is a mechanical device, and mechanical devices ALWAYS fail. So you should make sure your images are in two places at the same time.

One of the best strategies is to have a drive inside your computer and one outside of it. I actually do almost all of my work on my external drive? Why? Because that means that WHEN my computer crashes—which it will, since it too is mechanically based—I can quickly and easily get at the content that is so crucial for my working life.

This is the second in a series of articles. In our next article, we’ll look at some very powerful tools that are available at no cost and which can help you make dramatically improve the quality of your images.

About the author: Tony Seideman is a journalist, marketing and public relations consultant and photographer who is also a lapidary. Please feel free to contact him at tony@tonyseideman.com or at 914-737-8776 if you have any questions.

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