Reposting Question didnt post correctly

[idontknow97]

Hi all, Please help I have booked a few shoots of a party and baptism comming up and I have a problem, my phots after being saved on a CD are printing not the best they look a tiny bit pixelated or grainy its not huge but enough to bug me about my quality. I have concured with a friend who has the same camera and its on the highest quality setting with 10mp I have the canon xs rebel... She thinks it might be because I use free programs to edit my photos (I do unique edits and basic ones) she said that maybe running the quality. Another person said maybe the pixels or DPI of the photo cus mine seemed low. How do I fix this before I have these jobs and is there a program that if I want to edit I should use so that it doesnt mess up the quality. Please help I want them to be able to print what they see on the screen and see the same thing on the paper. My regular email is idontknow97@yahoo.com I am ready for your suggestions thanks.

[Swisstony10]

It sounds to me like a compression issue when you save your edits. What free software do you use? There's nothing wrong with using free software - GIMP is free, and you can do amazing things with it.

Don't forget that every time you save an image you're editing, the software you're using compresses the file (assuming you're working in Jpeg), and after a while, that can result in a fairly badly mashed image. How big are the files that you take to be printed? (I'm talking in terms of data size, rather than the size of the print)

Russ.

[idontknow97]

Hi I switch betweeen a few programs I use Photoscape, Sherif (sp?), Picasa, and Picnic. I can try Gimp. I think the original image is 2 to 3 mb and yes I save in Jpeg format. I havent tried to print an unedited image I will have to see if that works better but I really like my edits, I may have to go by an actual for real program just I so short on cash and way I can watch when I save them to avoid the compression problems?

[Swisstony10]

If you're short on cash, I'd definitely recommend trying GIMP - it's completely free, and really very powerful.

The compression issues really come out when you make multiple saves of an image. For example, you might start out with a 3M image, but every time you make a change and save it, it's probably being compressed. Have a look at the sizes of the files that you're trying to print, since that's where the problem lies, and compare that with the size of the original file - is there a significant difference?

[idontknow97]

Thanks I talked to someone at a store today and it may have also to do with the dpi or pixels when saving the edits, so I got a free trial of photoshop elements and if that helps I may have to try to get that. Also, every time I download GIMP it installs on the computer and then never opens right?? So I cant use it as of now.
Also, he mentioned the ISO and if its higher takes some or the claity or crispness of the picture, so we shall see if that helps and using more than one program I am saving and using multiple edits and multiple saves so that could be a problem. So I will try all these things and see what works. Thanks

[Swisstony10]

Increasing the ISO will affect the quality of your images by introducing what we call "noise" (you can't hear it 'cause it's on a picture, but it shows up as the image looking grainy), but different cameras deal with the noise with different degrees of success (for example, a properly exposed picture shot at ISO 1600 on a Canon 5d MkII will look a lot better than a properly exposed picture shot at ISO 800 on my old Canon 400d).

Playing with a trial of Photoshop Elements is definitely a good start. It might be worth looking through some of the help forums for GIMP too, to see if anyone can help you with the problems you're having getting it working.

Another thing which might help with the multiple edit/save issue would be to use a file format which is loss-less (ie, there's no compression each time you save, so the image quality is retained) - .psd is the Photoshop standard version of a lossless file, so I imagine PS Elements will be happy to use that, or you could use .tif files, which can be big, but are also great for making multiple edits/saves and retaining the quality.

You can still make the final save to a Jpeg so that you can email files around and get them printed and whatever, but sticking to something like .tif or .psd during the editing stages is probably best.

It depends on what editing you do though - if I'm doing HDR stuff, then I use either 16 or 8-bit .tif files because Photomatix likes them (16-bit if I'm going to finish them off in Photoshop, 8-bit if I'm going to finish them off in GIMP), but if I'm stitching panoramas, I have to switch to a high-quality Jpeg, because I use Autostitch which doesn't accept .tif files.

That's one of the unfortunate (depending on your viewpoint) things about digital photography - if you're going to do anything more serious than just take snaps and print them out or upload them straight to facebook, then you need to start getting your head around a seemingly bewildering array of file types and properties...

Russ.

[idontknow97]

thanks russ appreciate it and I know what you mean

[idontknow97]

I just wanted to say thank you all for your help (I am not still sure that I can change the image size on my actual camera) but I printed out all my attempts and the iso 400 was not bad some of the iso 200s were good the best out of the bunch was one I took on auto and then cropped and saved with my trial of photoshop elements where I set it to 8 x 10 size and 300 dpi I blew it up to an 8 X 10 today and it looked awesome no grainy or mess or anything. I also blew up a raw one that I adjusted the lighting and saved to jpg and it was great to it had a little blur but I think thats cus my little one wouldnt hold still. And, one 4 x 6 of iso 200 outside came out pretty good (a few were dark but at this point I would rather have them a tad darker and better quality). All in all I feel a lot better and a little relieved now, I am thankful for all the help and I will still monkey around with the edits later on but at least now I know I can take an awesome photo and when it prints out for someone it still looks awesome, lol. Thanks all for your help.