Tips and tricks to help take better pictures

If you’d rather be out in the sunshine than in front of your PC you’ll need to do some preparation to make sure you can get your images and video organised and out there with the minimum of effort. Do the legwork now and you can relax and take pictures instead of processing them.

Below I’ve suggested a few ideas to make processing your photos and videos less of a time-consuming chore and more of an automated process. Mostly, these are things that I’ve done myself to make my life easier. I’ve also written about many of them in more depth in individual Hands On columns in the past few years. Where this is the case I’ve provided a URL so you can look at them on our website.

Whether you are shooting for fun or for business, implementing just some of these ideas will give you the free time to take more photos, or put your feet up and enjoy the sun.

Clean your sensor
If, like me, you own an older digital SLR that doesn’t have automatic sensor cleaning technology, unless you never change lenses (in which case, why have a digital SLR at all?) you’ll get problems with dust on the sensor.

This appears as nasty blotches on all your photos that can take hours to retouch away. Sensor cleaning kits, consisting of special cleaning pads and fluid, are one solution (no pun intended), but you need to take care or you’ll be putting your warranty at risk. If you find that a bit on the scary side, you can get your camera manufacturer to do it for you.

Further reading: PCW November 2006

Tag, caption, keyword
Finding photos once you’ve taken them can take forever, and with every passing year the growing mountain becomes more difficult to access. Take control now, before it’s too late! Even if the backlog is too much of a nightmare to deal with, you can start by keyword tagging your photos in an album application as soon as you download them.

Simply adding captions to your photos can make them easier to locate in future, and most album software will let you add the same caption to a bunch of photos ­ it takes a couple of seconds and could save you hours of searching for your 2009 holiday photos in 2029 ­ it’s closer than you think.
Further reading: PCW February 2006

Join a photo-sharing site
Photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr, are the easiest way to distribute your photos, whether it’s a portfolio for clients or a holiday photo album for friends and family. Many album applications can link directly to photo-sharing sites, so you can upload your best shots for everyone, or just a select few to enjoy.

If you’re feeling ambitious, you can create and upload your own web galleries to a photo blog. And if you’ve got relatives, like my dad, who don’t have a PC, buy them a digital photo frame and send them an SD card of photos. These days you can get a 2GB SD card for less than £10.

Further reading: PCW August 2007, PCW January 2007, PCW April 2006

Get in on the action
If your photo editor supports scripting, you can use it to apply an afternoon’s worth of photo processing and manipulation in less than the time it took to read this sentence. Add batch processing and you can do the same thing to a card’s worth of images.

Recording a script is easy: press the Record button, then do exactly what you were planning to do to your image. When you’re done, press the Stop button and the script is ready to go.

You can use scripts for making colour and tonal corrections, removing red-eye, adding a watermark or frame, just about anything. And you can download ready-made scripts produced by others from the web.

Image-editing applications that support scripts include Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 and Gimp.

Further reading: PCW September 2008