Storing your Digital Photos

As digital cameras and memory cards become better and cheaper, We have all started accumulating a lot of pictures. This is not a bad thing, but it does come with some problems. What can be done to prevent potential precious images from being lost on a hard-drive with millions of others, or lost forever in a catastrophic device failure? As with most things, image storage is both more convenient and more complicated than it was in the past.

Ready for my closeup? alwayz!

Your mom may have had a couple of shoe-boxes full of unsorted photos and negative strips in the closet, but at least she knew where they where, and they where not likely to disappear without notice. With digital cameras, we have the option of never printing our photos at all. There are advantages to making prints. They is not vulnerable to many of the factors that can destroy digital images. Physical prints are also easier to share with the people near you, which is why many people continue the tradition of making scrapbooks and photo albums. Digital images have in fact expanded the possibilities for photo-books and scrapbooks, and there are several services that will print them for you, but for a lot of people part of the pleasure comes from hands-on creation. The most important thing is to start with good quality printing. You should know how archival the materials your printer uses are, and the resolution they are printing at.

Although physical prints are important for archival purposes, a print, unless it is very large, is not going to contain as much information as a high quality digital file, so physical storage should always be used in combination with digital backup.

Digital Storage and Backup:

The two most common places that digital images are likely to be stored are on your camera's memory card and your computer's hard-drive. Unfortunately, these are also two of the worst places to store your images in the long term. Both of these places are for temporary storage. Use your memory card to store photos while you are out on a shoot or on a trip, but upload them to somewhere else when you get the chance. This will free up space on your memory card

to take more pictures, and will also prevent you from loosing what you have already shot in the event (knock on wood) that something happens to your camera.

I always think it is best to take photos in the highest resolution possible, and with the advent of the RAW image format, that it quite high. Shooting in high rez means the pictures are going to be more usable later for printing. It is very important if you want to get the best out of large-format printing of you shots. but it also means that you can't shoot for days without uploading.

TIP: delete photos that you KNOW are bad from the camera before uploading. It will cut down on your editing load later.

Organization:

There are any number of places that files can be stored, but with the sheer volume of pictures a lot of us take, the where can often matter less than the how. I often

just dump the images form my camera onto my hard-drive, without organizing or often even looking at the pictures. This means when I do want to make a print of a picture, I have to search through directories with inexplicable names until I find the one I want. It is important to have some kind of organizational system, the most obvious is to organize them in folders is by date or event (Visit to the beach, august 2011). But you can use whatever system works for you. The most important thing is to have a system, and use it.

Although hard-drives may seem to have a lot of space, most of us use a lot of space for our daily information needs. For this reason it is often not practical or possible to store a lot of high resolution photos on a laptop or even a desktop. Another reason that it is not good to use you computer's hard-drive for permanent storage is the possibility or device failure. If you images are not backed up in at least one other location, a virus or accident could cause you to loose everything.

Cds and DVDs

Cds and dvds make a convenient backup. They are relatively easy to store and organize, and they can be stored in another location than your computer. How

ever, there has been some doubt about the true archival quality of Cds and DVDs. There is also the issue that technology tends to become obsolete, so it may be necessary to transfer your image files onto a new media at some time in the future.

External Hard Drives:

These devices are great ways to store and back up data. There are many not very expensive ones on the market, and for between $150-500 you can get a drive that will hold all of your photos, and even back up your whole laptop. They are small and easy to store and carry around, and can be areal lifesaver if something bad happens to your computer.

Storing Images Online:

There are a wide verity of sites that allow you to store your images (and/or other digital information) online. These include sites that are primarily sharing sites, like flikr, and sites that are really just for storage, like SugarSync or Carbonite. Many of these sites have a free membership level, which allows limited storage, and a pro option that costs money but comes with multiple benefits. You will need to decide which option is right for you. The advantages of online storage are that you images are available anywhere you can access the internet, from any device. They can be shared easily, and they are managed by professionals, meaning you do not have to worry about the data maintenance.

However, be wary or sites that allow you to upload your photos for sharing, like facebook. They often do not store high resolution copies of your files, as the photos are meant for web use.

Sometimes our digital photos can become just an unwieldy mass of information, rather than a treasure trove of memories and beautiful moments. But if you do take the time to look back at what you have, I bet you will find some treasures that deserve to be put up on the wall!

May 8 is Mother's day, and it is coming up!

this is just a quick post to let you know about our special 15% discount in honor of moms everywhere.

Use the code "lovemom" when you visit USA on canvas to order your personalized mothers day canvas. upload a photo of you and your mom, or any picture that you know your mom would love, and have it reproduced on a fine art canvas and shipped directly to mom.

if you don't have a picture in mind, browse our galleries of classic paintings and get mom an image of timeless beauty.

you know best what she likes, personalize a canvas for her today!

order now to be sure it gets to her in time!

Digital Cameras and Digital Printing

We are living in the golden age of digital photography. Compared to 5 years ago, the technology has both improved in quality and decreased in price. This puts the capability to take good quality pictures in the hands of almost anyone. Digital cameras are actually quite different technically from film cameras, although they are operated in much the same way. This is just a quick overview of how digital cameras work, it is just meant to give you better idea of the process, so that you know what you camera is and isn't capable of.

One advantage of digital cameras is that they capture the image in a (digital) format, so they can be both displayed on digital media and printed easily. A film camera captures an image on a negative, which must be developed before being printed, and scanned before being displayed on screen. Digital images are much easier to convert into many different digital formats, and just as easy (if not easier) to print as film.

however, quite a lot of information conversion does take place when going from the world to camera to paper. Both film and digital cameras record the light that is bouncing off the subject by focusing it through the lens. Film cameras use a chemical process. The focused light hits the film, which is coated with a light-sensitive material. In a digital camera there is no film. In it's place is a sensor that reads the light focused by the lens and converts it into digital information (1'a and 0's).

Here is a really short explanation of how the sensor in a digital camera works.

Once the camera has received the light information and converted it in electrical information, it stores the data on it's memory card. Unusually when it does this is it compresses the image file so that you can take and store more pictures! The pictures are stored as either JPG files, TIFF files, or RAW files.

JPGs are the most compressed and RAW the least, with TIFF somewhere in the middle.

Here is a chart of the different file and image sizes of the different compression formats.

Image Size (pixels)	TIFF (uncompressed)	JPEG (high quality)	JPEG (medium quality)
640x480	1.0 MB	300 KB	90 KB
800x600	1.5 MB	500 KB	130 KB
1024x768	2.5 MB	800 KB	200 KB
1600x1200	6.0 MB	1.7 MB	420 KB

You can often change the settings on you camera to set the compression rate. If you are using the images on the web or on the computer, and want to shoot a lot, lower quality is no problem. But if you are planning to print them and enlarge them, is is always better to shoot at the highest possible quality. I personally find it better to always shoot in the highest available quality. it does not cost more, and it gives you more options if you do happen to get that picture worth a thousand words.

Tip: Make good use of your LCD display. Rather than waiting to get home to edit your pictures, delete photos that really don't work from the camera's memory card while shooting, to make room for new pictures.

Pixels and Print Quality

As you can see from the chart above, there is no strait correlation between pixels, file size, and quality. A larger file can have fewer pixels, and a file with fewer pixels can be higher quality, depending on the compression. The quality of the photo also depends a lot on how good the lens is. A better lens will give the sensor a sharper image work with in the first place. If you start from the point of taking picture, it is pretty simple to get the maximum quality file that your camera can produce. Just set your camera to the highest quality setting in the menu.

When transferring files over the internet, be aware that further compression can occur. Some email platforms compress files. Facebook always reduces the resolution of files, so it is not a good idea to store photos on Facebook, or use it as a source for photos to print. this is because images intended to be viewed on a computer do not need to be as good quality as images intended for print.

Print verses Screen Display

Just as no-one is going to appreciate your photographs when all you have are the negatives, no-one is going to admire them when they are stored on your hard-drive. Digital photography gives you many options for displaying your images, but they can be divided into two categories, Print and Screen:

When you are looking at an image on your computer monitor, the image quality is determined by the number of pixels the monitor is set to display. A monitor set to 640x480 pixels displays fewer pixels than a monitor displaying 1024x768 pixels, so each of the pixels on the 640x480 pixel monitor will be larger than each of the pixels displayed on the 1024x768 pixel monitor. A very high resolution image and a lower resolution image can look the same on you monitor. The difference will be that you will be able to see greater detail when you zoom in on the high resolution image. When you zoom in on the lower resolution image, you will quickly see the pixels, as they are much larger.

When you print a digital image, the resolution (number of pixels) and image size interact to determine the quality of the print. Printing is a way to display the true beauty and detail of your photos without the limitations of the screen. Imagine watching Titanic on you ipod, all of the work that went into making that movie beautiful, the costumes, the cinematography, the makeup and million-dollar sets, is displayed at maybe 10% of it's potential. the same is true of looking at a beautiful photograph over the web. The is often more information and detail available than your screen can display.

A printed image of course no longer has pixels. The pixels become dots of ink that the printer prints on the paper or canvas. With large-format printing, you can make use of all of the detail captured by you high resolution digital camera to print beautiful, large, high quality prints that can be put on permanent display. You camera captures images that where meant to be printed, as they often have more information than digital media can handle, and have to be shrunk when displayed on the web.

There are some websites, like stock photo sites, where you can download high resolution images. Most web-based images will be difficult to print at any reasonable size. This is because the image has been shrunk to transfer it more easily over the internet, reducing the overall number of pixels in the image. If the image has fewer pixels, than the dots that the printer makes will have to be larger. This can result in the pixels becoming visible, if an image is printed too large. this is what is referred to as pixelation.

Re-sampling

Re-sampling refers to a digital procedure that an image program uses to increase (or decrease) the number of pixels in a image. Very basically, the program uses an algorithm to create new pixels based on the pixels that already exist. This tool can work very well to allow us to create larger images from smaller files. There is of course a limit, this is not CSI Miami, and you can't zoom in on the reflection in someone's eyeball from a grainy surveillance video. The program is only able to guess based on available information. It is not able to put new information into the image.

Printing Options

The really great thing about Digital imagery is it gives you so many options for displaying the images you create. From simply posting them on facebook or flikr, you can import them into Photoshop or MS Paint and mess around with them to create something really original. When you want to print the image, you can print the whole thing, or a selection, at a wide range of sizes, as many times as you want, without altering the original. It also makes available almost every printing method that the modern world has invented. These include printing on traditional photo paper, whether matt or glossy, printing on fabrics such as canvas or satin cloth, printing on non-traditional photo papers like metallic paper, or other material such as vinyl or acetate. All of these printing methods are also available to traditional photography, but often the most convenient way of printing an analog image is to to first digitize the image by scanning it. There will always be a place for analog photography, but digital photography is it's own art form, and the convince it provides is really unbeatable.

St Patrick's Day

Today is a day of drinking a celebration all over the western world. It is the day when “everyone's Irish”, and we have the excuse to drink beer and wear green with pride. I am maybe 1/8^th Irish, as these things go, but St. Patrick himself was actually from Britain, where he was kidnapped into slavery at the age of 16 by Irish raiders. I just learned this from love146 blog .

Irish art is often associated with literature and music, be it the modernest masters James JoyceWilliam Butler Yeats, or chart-toppers like U2 and Senead O'Conner. I am reminded of a quote I once saw in a pub “The curse of the Irish is not that you don't know the words to the song, but that you know all the words to all the songs”. There is also a great tradition of visual art in Ireland.

Francis Bacon is Probably the most famous Modern Irish painter. He lived between and 28th of October, 1928 / Died - 28th of April, 1992, and focused mostly on painting human figures and portraits. He work evokes great internal tension and turmoil. His most famous painting is perhaps “Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X” 1953.

Susanna Drury is a much less famous Irish artist, but she created an extremely influential work when she painted 2 views of the Giant's Causeway, in 1740. These paintings where later reproduced as engravings, and used in the famous french Encyclopédie of 1768. these reproductions of the original paintings, although unattributed, brought much attention to this natural wonder of the Irish landscape.

Another painter who's work is historically significant, but who's name is not very well know is Leo Whelan, (1892-1956). Whelan was know as a painter of portraits and of domestic scenes, and followed the traditions of the academy, which emphasized colour theory, composition and draughtsmanship. Whelan created a body of work which documents life in the early days of the Irish republic, and painted portraits of political figures and leaders of the rebellion. His paintings are an valuable historical record of the politics and life of the time

Thomas Ashe, one of the founder of the Irish Volunteers.

For a bit of variety, this last artist is an illustrator, not a painter. His name is Harry Clarke, and he drew the illustrations for books by Hans christian Anderson and Edgar Allan Poe. These days his work is often reprinted on posters, as people are still mesmerized by the detail of his line work and the elegance of his composition. Harry Clarke was born in 1889 and dies in 1931. he apprenticed as a stained glass maker, a trade that he pursued all his life along with his illustrations.

Digital Scanning for Fine Art and Photography

The wonderful thing about digital images is their infinite promise...the promise of infinite copies, that is! As long as that file exists, your work of art or treasured photo can be altered, touched up, re-sized and re-printed as many times as you desire.

We recently scanned a Persian scroll that our client told us was over a thousand years old. It was a secret map signed with name-stamps by more than ten people. Once we got the high-resolution file we printed it on Satin Cloth (see last week's post). Now the customer can display the print and keep the original safe.

Digitizing your images

The best way to make a digital copy of an original image is using a scanner. It is also possible to use a digital camera, but that's a little trickier. Flatbed scanners are pretty common and can produce good quality scans that are editable and printable. The process of scanning is quite easy, but there are a couple of tips that will help you to get good results.

Tip: Output Type

Scanners usually have a couple of different settings for how they will see an image. This is called the 'output type' and you need to set it before you hit scan. You usually have a choice between “millions of colors” color palettes of various sizes, gray scale and black and white (sometimes called 'line art'). Millions of colors works best for photos and artwork, and 'line art' works for scanning text documents. This setting creates an effect that looks like an photocopy.

Tip: Set the resolution

All scanners can copy at various resolutions. The higher the resolution, the larger the file, and the more information the scanner will pick up. So if you want to increase the size of the image, it is a good idea to scan at a higher resolution, say 600 dpi.

-72 dpi (ppi) is the size of most web images.

-300 dpi is print standard for many types of print media.

So if you are not looking to increase the size of something, 300 dpi is enough. There is no need to make a meticulously large and hard to handle file. Especially since often the thing you are scanning does not have any more information that 300 dpi.

Tip: Adjust the white point

Most newer and higher quality flatbed scanners have an option to set the white point on the scan before capturing, this is like setting the exposure on your digital camera. It allows you to optimize the image your scanner captures by aligning the darkest part of you image to true black, and the whites part of your image to true white. Basically, you can do this by using the “levels” tool in the scanner interface. This shows you a box with a histogram of the distribution of white and black in you image. By adjusting the whitest and blackest points available to match the lightest and darkest points in your image, you can force the scan to expand the tonal range of the image. This is a little complicated but worth it. For a more much more detailed explanation see here.

High Resolution Scanners

Some pictures are too large or too detailed to scan using a desktop flatbed scanner. If you want to get a good, reproducible image of original art work, especially large paintings with lots of detail or texture in the paint, an ordinary scanner will not be able to give good results. Here at USA On Canvas, we use a Cruse brand scanner for fine art reproduction. This is a large flatbed scanner that can scan objects up to a depth of 4 inches and 42x78 inches square. This scanner allows us to produce giclees on canvas that get as close to the original as is possible with digital technology. With this service, artists can produce prints of an original, which means more people can enjoy the work, and the artist can make a little more money!

We also have an Epsom Perfection Scanner available to our clients for scanning prints, and especially slides and negatives. Negatives and slides provide great resolution and can be blown up to surprising sizes. So looks for treasures in yours or your parents old boxes of photos. you might be surprised at what you have!

Scanners are a great tool for artists. They facilitate all kinds of printing and editing options, and they are essential if you want to display your work on the web. Some artists even use scanners to produce work, using a technique called scanography, but that will be the subject of my next post.

Durable Delicacy, Satin Cloth Printing

Satin cloth is a new material developed by Lexjet for the giclee process. It has a very smooth texture which does not conflict with the fine detail in your image. Some people describe it's look and feel as being like vellum. It's translucency allows for highly creative and beautiful mounting options. It has many of the advantages of canvas, and offers new possibilities for displaying your art. It can be sewn, stretched or hung like canvas, and it has even been hung outside!

Satin cloth and canvas printing have various pros and cons. We have created this chart comparing them:

attributes	Lexjet Water-Resistant Satin Cloth Giclee	Canvas Giclee
texture	Smooth texture, good for capturing fine detail and sharpness. Vellum-like feel	Woven texture, good for softening images and masking defects, traditional canvas feel
Color response	Excellent. Accepts high levels of ink saturation. PreLume technology provides brighter white points.	Excellent. High levels of ink saturation and bright white point.
opacity	90% (translucent)	Greater that 99%
weight	Very light-weigh (130g per sq meter)	Heavy (410 g per sq meter)
Stretch-mounting?	yes	yes
Water resistance	Very high	High

Mounting Options:

Lexjet water-resistant satin cloth is stretchable like canvas, and can be mounted for wall hanging. Other mounting options offer the possibility of taking advantage of the material's transparency. Mounting using back-lighting works very well with this material, because the smooth weave of Satin Cloth acts as a natural diffuser, making the whole image glow with light.

Window Display:

Many photographers and artists are using Lexjet satin cloth to create banners, examples can be found here on the Lexjet blog. This could be done by using poster hangers like these:

or these,

OR by sewing a pocket into the top and bottom of the cloth, and inserting a dowel to suspend the banner from.

The satin cloth is water resistant, so consider using it in outdoor applications as well. Here is story from the Lexjet web page that attests to the durability of this material

“ [the artist] took the [satin cloth] screen down to the beach for a marketing shoot, he placed it in the water and shot it. Then, the screen tipped over into the surf and was soaked with salt water. He took it home, rinsed it off with a garden hose and left it standing outdoors exposed to the elements for two months. The colours remained totally colourfast.”

Commercial Banner Display

Another mounting option is using a commercial banner displays like these, which can be back-lit, or use the ambient light in the room or outdoor area to show off the Satin Cloth's transparency. Displays like these are available here.

the Lexjet blog has a great post on innovative business ideas using this material.

Light-boxes

the last option I will talk about is something we are very exited about at USA on canvas. The qualities of satin cloth mean that we are able to create light-boxes with custom-printed images. A light-box is a framed box that with light mounted inside, and a translucent image on the front. They are often used commercially and by professional artists, but Satin Cloth printing allows them to be created affordability for home decor.

A Light-box turns your image into a creative ambient lighting solution, as well as highlighting the particular beauty of your image. Back-lighting increases the presence and richness of saturated colors, it lends an ethereal quality to soft or misty images, and it makes skin really glow in portraits.

Cost comparison: Satin Cloth Mounting Options

for a 20x30 print ($61 printing cost)

mounting	Do we do it?	Cost	Advantage
Stretch mounting	yes	$62.00	Finished and, ready to hang. Beautifully textured fine wall art.
Poster Hangers	no	$16.95	Simple to order and install, can be hung on wall or window for natural light back-lit effect.
Commercial banners	no	$49.00	Professional displays for trade shows or point of sale displays
Light Boxes	No right now: check back soon	$250-300	Original and beautiful wall are and lighting solution. Makes any photo come alive.

Digital Coloring Book.

Here at USA On Canvas we see a lot of beautiful photographs, both professional and amateur, but we also see some really inspiring and innovative digital art. Program like PhotoShop allow artist to create on screen, and this has many advantages. You can test ideas and concepts without wasting resources, and you can make several versions easily. Unlike physical media, you never have to experience that stomach-dropping sensation you get when hours of work is ruined by a single brush stroke. As a painter friend of mine lamented, water color does not have an undo button.

PhotoShop can be a daunting program to learn, but it is very rewarding. Recently, with the help of the amazing catalog of public domain black and white images available here and a few simple PhotoShop tools, I created a little project that is pretty much as fun as coloring books used to be when you where 5. As a bonus, it can help you get familiar with the PhotoShop toolbox.

Step 1) download a file.

I picked this one: the files with file names ending in .svg.hi.png‎ because they are transparent, which will make things easier later.

Step 2) Open the file in PhotoShop.

If PhotoShop shows the drawing on a blue and white checkered background, this is good! If not. It will be a bit harder to work with.

2a) If the image has a white background, get the magic wand tool, set the tolerance to 1, click on the white area and when the selection is made, press delete. You may have to unlock the layer first. There there might be several white areas separated by black outline. Select each one and delete the white

Step 3) Make the image the size you want (ctrl+alt I)

Step 4) Use the “paint bucket” tool to start colouring! Pick the colour you want using the colour picker, and fill in areas with colour.

Step 5) If the color leaks into an area you don't want it to, don't panic! Press “undo” (ctrl-Z) and then use the magnifying glass to find the hole in the outline. Once you find it, use the paint brush tool to complete the outline.

Step 6) Keep colouring!

Step 7) You will notice that there are some white areas that are too small to paint with the paint bucket tool. Once you have filled in all you have the patience for, you can use this (slightly complicated) trick to colour all of the remaining white areas in one go.

First, pick a colour. You only get one, so choose well.

Next, make a square using the rectangle tool that covers

the whole image. The shape will automatically be placed on it's own layer. Drag this layer under the layer with the picture.

Select the layer with the picture. Us the magic wand tool to select the area around the outside of the picture.

Select the layer with the

solid color. Use the eraser tool to erase all the color in the selection. While a selection is active on a layer, the eraser will only erase within that selection.

Step 8) for a final touch, use the paint bucket and the gradient tool to ad some color to the background.

Don't forget, you can make your digital art into a beautiful wall piece by printing it using the Giclee canvas printing process!