Zooming, cropping and saving...
Nikon D750 - Sigma 28 - 105 f/2.8 - Sigma 50mm f/1.4
Nikon 70 - 200 f/2.8 VR
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#1. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 0
glxman Nikonian since 04th Oct 2008Mon 30-Nov-15 07:12 AMHi Dale,
I highly recommend Lightroom, does the job easy and fast
I use a Mac also,
I see you have LR 5
........GaryMy Nikonians Gallery
I used to have a photographic memory but never got it developed -
#2. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 0
Ferguson Nikonian since 19th Aug 2004Mon 30-Nov-15 11:39 AMYour question unfortunately is a bit like asking "what tool does one need to work around the house".
You'll get lots of enthusiastic answers, but in the longer run it will depend on what it is you are trying to fix. Same with photos.
There are a lot of areas to your answer:
Organization tools: if you do photography for a long time, or a lot, you'll end up with far more photos than you have memory of what they were of or why you took them. Some tools aim to help you organize - make notes, sort, keyword; in more sophisticated version to archive to offline storage, to publish to web sites, etc.
Simple post processing tools: crop, lighten/darken, tweak colors, etc. There are a huge number of them, but I would suggest thinking of the organizational aspect and whether you want to solve that problem first, as what is ideal is to have the same tool either do both, or have the editing tool integrate with the organizational tool.
Specialty post processing tools: Building composites, panoramas, doing high powered editing like adding special effects or 3D look, correcting them (e.g. removing undesirable items that were in the photo), etc. Sometimes tools like Photoshop have families of products that go from simple to very complex, sometimes you step outside and buy a special purpose one, e.g. portrait tools that automatically smooth skin and tame wild hair.
The difficult aspect of this is to pick where you may want to land a year or two from now on the spectrum. The mentioned Lightroom is my favorite as well, but it is like a whole toolbox, and a bit daunting when you first dive in. There are also a lot of free tools out there (I'm a fan of InfanView, but not sure if it's available on the Mac) that tend to do simple things simply (simple viewing and editing). And of course there's always Nikon's ViewNX2 which is free and also pretty simple.
Almost every one of these offer free trials. I'd encourage you to just sit down and play with them for a while. Rotate through them, as your perspective will change as you dig more into one or the other. But give some thought to the whole range of what you might do. Don't think of it as looking for a tool, think of it as beginning to build up a workshop and what kind of workshop and tools you need.
Or... if you just want a favorite, choose lightroom and dive in. Lots of video and written tutorials out there, and ask questions here or on the LightroomForums.net where there's huge expertise.
Linwood
Comments welcomed on pictures: Http://www.captivephotons.com-
#3. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 2
Powerstroke2000 Registered since 03rd Nov 2015Mon 30-Nov-15 07:05 PMThanks Linwood...I'll do just that. I originally didn't have much of an understanding of Lightroom when I first got it, and imported far too many photo's initially, so I should perhaps clean all that out of LR and re-enter just photo's I want to make changes to, such as all my RAW files perhaps? Not sure if there is an easy way to do that, but I'll have to look at it.
Then I'll spend some time watching some Youtube video's on using LR, to get a better handle of it's many features. As you say, it's quite extensive for a newbie for sure.
Thanks.Nikon D750 - Sigma 28 - 105 f/2.8 - Sigma 50mm f/1.4
Nikon 70 - 200 f/2.8 VR-
#5. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 3
Ferguson Nikonian since 19th Aug 2004Mon 30-Nov-15 07:45 PM>Thanks Linwood...I'll do just that. I originally didn't
>have much of an understanding of Lightroom when I first got
>it, and imported far too many photo's initially, so I should
>perhaps clean all that out of LR and re-enter just photo's I
>want to make changes to, such as all my RAW files perhaps?
>Not sure if there is an easy way to do that, but I'll have to
>look at it.
I do have one suggestion (and it is at odds with some others around here) but, learn early to cull heavily. With Digital and lack of needing to print or find (physical) storage space, there's a tendancy to keep everything. "I may want to come back and edit that and use it". You won't. Shoot often and a lot, but cull heavily as well.
That said, you can do all the culling and edinting and organization in lightroom. You can flag photos with different indicators (which you can make up to suit you) to mean "come back and edit it" or "probably trash but keep for a while and if I don't use it in a year delete it" or whatever you want to do.
You can pick which ones you want and edit as you like - crop, lighten, adjust colors, etc. None of that takes any significant space, lightroom just remembers your edits and applies them anytime you look at that shot.
Ideally you will shoot raw when doing this, but it also works with JPG.
As you load them in, do add some words. Even if you don't want to get fancy with organization, at least put a title on each group like "November driving vacation" or even each shot like "Uncle Ted and Mary" so 15 years from now you will remember. With Lightroom you can search by text anywhere -- keywords, captions, titles, etc. So you can always look for "Ted" and find that one no matter where else you put it.
Some people agonize over physical (i.e. on disk) structure, should it be by date or subject or camera or photographer or... it really does not matter much, since you can build virtual collections and add keywords and search any way you want later. And within reason rearrange later.
And once in, pick the ones you want (e.g. flag with a star or something) and you can do slide shows right from Lightroom, or export to a web site, or print. It takes a while to find all that, but what a lot of us like about it is that it is a full lifecycle tool. You can do almost all aspects of post processing with it -- some better than others, and there are some great other tools -- but for the basic stuff it's like a Swiss army knife.
>Then I'll spend some time watching some Youtube video's on
>using LR, to get a better handle of it's many features. As
>you say, it's quite extensive for a newbie for sure.
The hardest thing for most people is that they are used to the idea on a computer that things go like this:
- Find a file
- Open a file (load it into view)
- Edit a file
- Save the edited file, either elsewhere, or overwriting the original
Lightroom doesn't work like that. There's no "save". All your edits are there as soon as you make them, but there virtually to view. So once you turn over a file to lightroom from your camera ("import"), you leave it alone EXCEPT through lightroom. Let Lightroom do everything, including move it to a different place on disk. And every change you make (edit wise) is just always there and always safe, there's no need to open a file to edit it (just point to it and go into "develop"... ok, maybe that's like opening) and anything you do is continually "saved".
Linwood
Comments welcomed on pictures: Http://www.captivephotons.com
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#4. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 0
>What are the choices out there in which one can do this?
>
All image editing applications that I have ever seen can do this. BTW, Photos can do all the things you mention.
Rick Walker
My photos:
GeoVista Photography
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#6. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 4
Powerstroke2000 Registered since 03rd Nov 2015Mon 30-Nov-15 08:05 PMI came across this website - http://www.wired.com/2015/02/photos-for-mac/ that explained just that Rick, so last night was moving around in the Photo's menu, and found where I could do that. The actions available are somewhat minimal, but worthwhile indeed. As it was, I did a bit of cropping, and it worked great.
I used an online program for file/photo sizing, and found it to be incredibly slow, but it did work. Would be nice if I can find an app that will do that for me in a faster fashion, so I'll have to spend some time doing that. Overall, things are coming slowly, but I suppose it was like that for everyone starting out in digital photography!
Thank you.Nikon D750 - Sigma 28 - 105 f/2.8 - Sigma 50mm f/1.4
Nikon 70 - 200 f/2.8 VR-
#7. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 6
bhiggins Nikonian since 04th Jan 2015Mon 30-Nov-15 10:57 PM | edited Mon 30-Nov-15 11:03 PM by bhigginsAt first glance I thought Photos was a crippled Mac Preview - BUT - on the contrary although it is not their old Aperture program it is fairly good and has all the critical basics only problem they are hidden in an attempt to get the edit windows clean of menus. Once in the Edit pane and first click on "Adjustments" then click on the blue "Add" text to see the hidden controls. Close to PS Elements on a pure digital photo processing basis although PS Elements can go well beyond digital photos and yet again the full PS goes even further.
I forgot to mention the bad thing about photos is is you want to print any - all the exports default to 72 ppi and I have not found any way to boost it to 300 min for larger printing. Seems they are exporting for 3.5X5 or 4X6 formats only..... maybe they will fix that in upgrades.
Attachment#1 (jpg file)
Barry
Visit my Nikonians gallery.
See my portfolio.-
#8. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 7
walkerr Registered since 05th May 2002Tue 01-Dec-15 07:22 AMAre you talking about exporting something like a jpeg for printing elsewhere (like an on-line service) or the direct printing options where you can print an 8x10 or other size?Rick Walker
My photos:
GeoVista Photography-
#9. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 8
bhiggins Nikonian since 04th Jan 2015Tue 01-Dec-15 10:52 PMRick - both...Photos only exports edited images @ 72 ppi (that I can find or through research about the app) there is no option for larger counts for prints home or custom printed. Pretty much the focus is on web use, internet and social media sharing, and snapshots sizing. Even the basic preview app allows you to change the ppi size on save/export. Guess they hobbled print publishing to avoid potential problems like people trying to send too big of a file to mass consumer print services. It is also tightly tied to the iphone user sync and share so it would not do well to have people tring to make a large print from an image and get dissatisfied with the results of such an attempt.Barry
Visit my Nikonians gallery.
See my portfolio.-
#10. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 9
walkerr Registered since 05th May 2002Wed 02-Dec-15 07:42 AM | edited Wed 02-Dec-15 08:09 AM by walkerrBarry, the 72 ppi parameter doesn't matter if you're sending images to an on-line printer; the parameter is actually ignored by them. Only the overall pixel dimensions matter, along with the size that you request them to make. If you're sending the image to a company like MPIX, which uses a 250 ppi standard, and you want an 8x10, you just make sure the long edge of the image is ideally at least 10*250 or 2500 pixels long. The Photos app supports that just fine. Quite honestly, prints would still look okay if they were slightly smaller, too. For direct printing, it supports whatever your printer is capable of in terms of size. While I don't use Photos for much beyond iPhone shots, it's more capable than it appears on the surface.Rick Walker
My photos:
GeoVista Photography-
#11. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 10
bhiggins Nikonian since 04th Jan 2015Wed 02-Dec-15 01:43 PMThanks Rick - I understand the on-line printing setups and I tend not to even work with them most half way decent home ink jets that I am familiar with have a max of 250. Agree Photos is better than it appears on the surface. The algorithms they have for some of the image enhancement are quite good.
I have a fellow that does my printing of my artwork on a large scale Epson system that supports up to 360 ppi.. He recommends 300 ppi master images and for optimal results he gave me this formula as a sizing guide:
A 24mp is approximately 6000x4000
6000/300=20"
4000/300= 13"
From there the quality (IQ) will drop as you either go bigger in print size or decrease the total ppi by down sampling or cropping. He does not recommend printing larger prints with less than 180.
But the bottom line is that Photos is not going to give you an option to retain the the higher formats on export. I thought I had this figured out but might still be confused in some aspects. Feel free to straighten my path..Barry
Visit my Nikonians gallery.
See my portfolio.-
#12. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 11
walkerr Registered since 05th May 2002Wed 02-Dec-15 10:34 PM | edited Wed 02-Dec-15 10:35 PM by walkerrBarry, we must somehow be talking past each other. The 72ppi number is completely meaningless. It doesn't change the pixel data - it is just one potential way the image could be printed. That same exact image could also be printed at 240 ppi, 300 ppi, or 360 ppi, etc. Each print would be smaller than the previous one, but with increasing print resolution. The Apple Photos app can definitely export images out at full resolution.
I just imported a D810 raw file into Photos and then exported out a 16-bit, full-resolution tiff. That tiff is 7360 x 4912 pixels, with a file size of 217MB. Anyone receiving that file can print it out at a number of sizes without changing one bit of the image data. It could be 102 x 68 inches at 72ppi (which you wouldn't do), it could be about 30x20 inches at 240ppi or about 20 x 14 at 360ppi. It could also be a bunch of ppi values in-between or outside of all of those. The 72ppi figure doesn't keep you from doing any of that - only the person and the software that is printing it. Does that make sense?Rick Walker
My photos:
GeoVista Photography-
#13. "RE: Zooming, cropping and saving..." | In response to Reply # 12
bhiggins Nikonian since 04th Jan 2015Thu 03-Dec-15 12:01 AMThanks again Rick - I have always stayed away from the printing end of things and farmed it out to those who seem to know. I will take what you have said above and previous post replies and study it more. It is now midnight here and not a good time to think this through - but I do thank you for taking the time to explain it further. Much appreciated...Barry
Visit my Nikonians gallery.
See my portfolio.
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G
I use a Mac, and in using the "Photos" program on it, one can zoom in on their photo, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to crop it, and then save it to the zoom/crop element you want it saved as?
What are the choices out there in which one can do this?
Thank you!