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Rick

How to Email Your Digital Photos

Emailing Your Digital Photos

A few things to remember:

  • Always save a copy of the ORIGINAL photo

  • You can always go down on resolution, but you can never go up.

  • 72 dpi for email and web – 300 dpi for printing

Photo Restoration

Digital Photo Restoration

Restoring old photos is one of the coolest things you can do in digital photography. The best part is that anyone can do it. All it takes is a scanner and a nice image editing program.

Important Photo Restoration Tools

There are many several tools that you just can't do without when it comes to restoring photos.

Cloning tool

Organizing and Viewing Digital Photos

Organizing and Viewing Your
Digital Photos

The key to organizing your digital photos is sorting them from the beginning.

I begin by saving a folder to my desktop called "Camera pix," but it can be named anything. Inside this folder, I put a folder for each month. Inside each of those folders I make new folders as I need. For example, In my Camera Pix folder for last year I had a folder called December. Inside my December folder I have three other folders, "POL" for Parade of lights, Christmas, and "Misc."

Organizing and Backing Up Photos

Getting organized:

The best way to get your photos organized is to start with a system that works for you.

My system is to create a single folder for all my digital photos on my hard drive. Inside that folder, called "Digital Pictures," I place a sub-folder for each month of the year. In each month's folder I may place more folders for each activity held during that month.

For example: Digital Photos –> April –> Easter –> Grandmas

I then place the digital pictures into their respective folders.

The Magic of Digital Filters

The Magic of Digital Filters

In the world of film photography, filters are transparent coverings that are placed over a lens to enhance or alter the image.

Digital filters serve the same purpose, but in a much more dynamic and dramatic way.

DIGITAL FILTER: Almost all image editing programs contain filters although they may be called by a different name such as Effects or Adjustments.

File Management: Why is it so hard to figure out?

As I have mentioned before on the show and in these articles, I teach the local basic computer classes for the Parks and Rec. department. I teach the classes as a four-part series in which I dedicate an entire two hour session to file management.

Teaching the concept of how your computer organizes information is a huge struggle for me. I don't think it is because if my teaching technique or the inability of my students to comprehend the topic.

The reason that file management is so difficult to teach and comprehend is that it isn't sexy, it isn't tangible and it is isn't universal in it's use. By the latter, I mean that each person can apply the concept differently.

Future proofing your new PC

We have talked at length about the upcoming Windows Vista on our show and eluded to it here on the site. Microsoft says that it will come out in the first quarter of 2007 which leaves us about six months give or take. Adam and I had our first look at Vista during this year's Consumer Electronic Show (CES). We weren't impressed. Since then, I have read many Vista articles, reviews, blogs and even downloaded the beta version of Vista. I'm still not impressed.

All that being said, at some point you may want to upgrade to Vista (or its upgrade). I don't recommend waiting for Vista before buying a new PC because I truly believe that Vista will be a flop for the first six or so months (putting us into 2008). BUT, when you are buying a new computer or laptop, you might as well plan a little for the future. Here's what I'm telling callers and clients this month about what to look for in a new computer.

Solving email problems

When you are having trouble receiving or sending email, here are a few tips to help keep the mail flowing.

  • Never assume the problem is on your end. If you were sending email perfectly a few hours earlier or even yesterday, DO NOT CHANGE ANY SETTINGS on your computer. Instead, shut the computer off and try again. If nothing still, shut off the computer and wait until the next day. When you have tried these two steps and still have a problem, then call your email provider to ask what may be happening.
  • If you are receiving email, but are unable to send, check to make sure that your email didn't get stuck in the Outbox. Sometimes we mistype an address and that will stall the email.
  • If you use dial-up and get disconnected from the Internet every time you check email with Outlook Express, click Tools –> Options from the menus. Click the Connection tab and uncheck the box that says "hang up after sending and receiving.
  • Attached pictures are too big when viewing/printing. Use this tip .
  • You receive a Red X where a picture should be. Read our Red X tip here .
  • Again for dial-up users especially, if you get the same email over and over, and no new ones come through, it usually means a 'stuck' email. This occurs when an email is too large to come through quickly and you disconnect before it finishes downloading the email. In this situation, learn to use your email service's web mail function so you can view your email on the web based interface. Then delete any email that is more than 1000 kilobytes (1 megabyte). Or you can read the message via the web based interface.

When it’s gone, it’s gone

Adam eluded to a trend that he has noticed about failing computers and hard drives lately. Indeed, I have seen the same epidemic. My question to you is, do you really know what the hard drive is and what its function is?

Some computer users point to the box that sits on their desk or floor and call it a hard drive. Others know that it stores data. I think few understand how important and valuable the hard drive really is and why we spend so much time writing and talking about backup. The hard drive, in desktop computers, is roughly the size of a VCR tape. It is a mechanical piece of equipment that has motors, gears and bearings…none of which is made to last forever. Thus the reason for backup.

I love my Treo

Today I helped a couple setup their brand new Motorola RAZR phones. These are do-it-all phones, or at least they do a lot. They have built-in cameras, they do email and Text messaging, they have Bluetooth radios and that's about it.

Motorola RAZR

RAZRs are very popular right now because they are thin and they do a lot. But they aren't very easy to use. Granted, they are some of the easiest cell phones to use, but that doesn't mean that they are easy to use.

In order to check your voice mail, you have to hit the little mail button, then go through a menu to choose voice mail (as opposed to text message, email, and about three other kinds of mail). Everything involved several menus.