There are essentially four aspects to Digital Photography:-
1. Getting the original photograph.
2. Putting this into your computer
3. Manipulating the image
4. Printing the result.
1]. This can again be split into 2 sections
1.1] using a digital camera
1.2] using a film camera
2]. This has several aspects
3]. There are various image manipulation programmes. Some are more expensive than others. The choice is yours - but the best one is Photoshop at £500 or so! For those just starting we would recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro. These are both in the region of £80. Elements version 2 is now only available via sites like Ebay at about £20 and versions 3 to 11 are now too complex having too many things built in to them.2.1] using a scanner
2.2] direct from a digital camera or its memory card
2.3] from USB Flash Drives otherwise known as Memory Sticks
USB flash drives are often used for the same purposes for which floppy disks or CD-ROMs were used. They are smaller, faster, have thousands of times more capacity, and are more urable and reliable because they have no moving parts.
2.4] via a CD-ROM
Today we are of the opinion that because there are many FREE image editing programs Photoshop is no longer essential. So for this course we shall concentrate of two programs. One is for use if you have Broadband internet connection and the other is for off-line use.
3.1] This is called iPiccy and is a very comprehensive program that will do all we think you will need. See http://ipiccy.com/ to access. We shall begin with this editor.
3.2] The off-line program is called Hornil Style Pix. This is a Korean image editor and again comprehensive in its coverage. This editor can be a portable progam since it does not have to be installed. This allows you to keep the editor on a memory stick and use it on any Windows computer. There is a tutorial available that can be useful to you. See http://hornil.com/tutorial/ for this.
3.3] Later we may have time to cover a third program called Fotosketcher. Fotosketcher is brilliant if you want to make your photographs into art. Very simple to use too. Go to this page and scroll down to the Portable version at the bottom of the list. http://www.fotosketcher.com/download-fotosketcher/
4]. Printing can be done in several ways.
4.1] direct from your computer to your printer.
4.2] directly from another computer via a CD-ROM or a Flash Drive.
4.3] via the Internet e.g. DSColourLabs [see http://www.dscolourlabs.co.uk/]
4.4] directly from a scanner to the printer (not much control available).
On this course we do not propose to look at para 1, but instead concentrate on paras 2 to 4.