Setting up the small lightbox makes getting pictures so much easier. Learning more about the Cannon Rebel XS has made getting higher quality pictures possible. Getting better pictures for the internal inventory system is important but maybe not as important as getting great pics for the website. Lets talk where things are at currently.
One of the first things changed was the exposure on the camera, I bumped it all the way up. The next change was taking pictures in RAW not JPG mode. This change along with downloading the Cannon photo editing software changes editing in a major way. A JPG is the equivalent of the processed film photo of old. When using a photo editing software like Photoshop or GIMP every change actually removes quality from the photo. If your camera can support RAW the camera writes tags which the manufacturers editing software can read. Even if a third party software can use the RAW format they might not be able to read all the tags so not all editing will be available. The third change made on the camera itself was setting the mode to NEUTRAL. Here is what the RAW photo looked like:
The only thing that cannot be completely corrected is if the photo is over exposed. All of the settings that you can do on the camera you can do with the Cannon software. Here is that same photo after making adjustments with the software:
The original RAW photo was cropped down to just the pen blank.
| RAW | EDITED |
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I’m sure that as more time is spent working with the camera and the software changes to what is being done will happen. Taking photos with my phone or Bill’s (his actually has a better camera) is great. I’m sure that other phones do an even better job. Since we had this camera and the software download is free it’s a great option for us.
When we started doing the inventory I was struggling to take the pictures. Even after editing them they did not have enough clarity or reflect the color clearly enough to do more than just let us know that we had a blank. Today I took pics of an entire box of pen blanks. They need to be cropped and adjusted then saved and added to inventory. The process hasn’t changed just the quality has. Because of having the setup designed for getting the photos it goes much faster.
Use what you have, learn, grow and have fun.
