Welcome to the Central Kansas Photography Club

Photography and Digital Photography tips page. Attention members, submit your tips, tricks, links to cool software, tutorials sites and what not to help make this page useful for all of us!

Below are are a few very useful image editing/browsing, etc. titles that are available as either freeware, shareware, or full priced, full version software:

ACDSee- ACD Systems flagship organizer, browser, editor. It's great for only 50 bucks!

Adobe Photoshop- The flagship, or even mothership, of all photo and imaging/digital art software. Photoshop tries to be everything for everybody and succeeds quite admirably! Pricey, but worth the investment for the serious user.

Photoshop Elements- A toned down, and much less expensive version, Elements still is feature rich and will do a lot for the photographer. Often comes bundled with camera, scanner, printer purchases.

The GIMP- No matter what platform, or OS, you're running, there is a GIMP for you! The great thing is it's free! The hard part is dealing with the inherent idiosyncrasies of an open source, continually ongoing program that is designed for total geeks by super geeks. The learning curve is mostly uphill and very steep, but practice makes perfect and patience is a virtue.

IrfanView- Free, free, free!!! Cool, cool, cool!!! If you don't have it, get it! It's an amazing little program!

Jasc Software- Paint Shop Pro- WOW!!! Paint Shop Photo Album- WOW!

PhotoFiltre- Ok! Enough jokes about the French! They're really good people and I want to go visit someday! They also developed a way cool image editor/ art program that is, you guessed it, FREE!!! Another must have for the photographer/ artiste!

Picasa- From Google now, used to cost like 40-50 dollars and now it's free, very cool, very free! The latest, version 2, does amazing things. There are a few Google and Gmail haters out there that will tell you google is evil and that they plan on taking over the world. Paranoid drivel! If they do take over the world they'll probably do a better job than the people currently in charge!

Tip#1- Always, I mean ALWAYS!!! back up your image files. Redundant backup is best. That is, burn them to CD/DVD and also have them backed up on another physical Hard Disk Drive on your computer, or attached to your computer. 90% of the time, when you have a crash that cripples your computer and you lose your data, have to re-format, etc. it's your (C:) drive, that is the one your Operating Sytem (OS) runs on. Most of the time, if you have other hard drives, they are unaffected, however, don't put all your faith in hard drives, always burn backup copies, oh, and by the way, skip the ridiculous arguments about will my CDs or DVDs be readable in 10 years, or what about when new storage medium comes out, will I be able to access my stuff? YES! and YES! Can you still transfer data from a floppy disk to your computer, or to a CD??? These questions are posed by worry-worts with too much time and too many what ifs on their hands. Just back up your stuff, ok?

Tip#2- Save your work often!!! Be like a Nike commercial and "Just Do It"

Tip#3- Always work on copies of your images, or alternately, after editing, save the image as a new file name, don't save over the original image. If you open a photo of the Devil's Tower, titled by your camera with the enchanting name of IMG_0967, and you boost the saturation/ color, sharpness, etc. then save it as IMG_0967, you just lost your original image! add a -01, or call it Devils Tower-01, or whatever, just don't save it as itself, or soon you'll regret losing those original images. It's kind of like getting your pictures back from the lab and then throwing away the negatives. It's really better to throw away the prints, then you still have the original shots!