Witchy Tech

Quick Prints of your Digital Pics-From Photobucket and Target!

Photobucket.com and retailer Target have teamed up for an easy and quick way to get prints from your digital camera!   If you have a photobucket.com account, just log in and go to your album.  In the menu in the gray area at the top, rest your cursor on “Buy Prints” and in the menu that pops up, select “Print at Target.”  (There is a bullseye logo in the menu like the one shown here.)

In the next page, select the photos from your album that you would like to print.  It is only 20¢ (twenty cents) for a 4×6 print.

Witchy says:  If you have reduced the size of your pictures for emailing or posting on the internet, they are not “print quality” images.  You will need to upload a full sized, high pixel version to photobucket.com for nice prints.  If you don’t remember if it was reduced or not, DON’T WORRY! The TARGET checkout screen will tell you if your picture resolution is too small with a little exclamation point next to it.   If you rest your cursor on the symbol, the message, “Insufficient resolution for high quality print of this size” will pop up.

If you don’t have your own photoprinter, this is the quickest and cheapest way I have found to get prints from your digital pictures.  If you give it a try, please let is know in the comments!

Prints from your Digital Camera!

The convenience of digital cameras and ease of sharing them online is great, but what about ACTUAL pictures that you can put in your photo album or wallet? How do you get those from your digital camera? There are a couple of ways to do this:

• Print them yourself
• Order them in a photo store/photo department or online

Do you want to learn how?

Read the rest of this entry »

Another Online Editing Page for Digital Pictures

I’ve already told you that you don’t need expensive programs to edit your digital pictures, thanks to websites like photobucket.com and picnik.com. Well, one of those expensive programs now has their OWN online photoediting site! Hooray! My favorite art program, Adobe Photoshop, has established “Adobe Photoshop Express” website for online photo editing! It’s not the full program where you get flustered with weird buttons that have nothing to do with anything you learned in art school. It’s very straight-forward and Witchy Tech readers should be able to do basic photo editing without too much trouble.

If you try out Adobe Photoshop Express, or any online photo editing site, please let us know in the comments below.

Lost Your Digital Camera Cord?

The USB cord is the cord that connects your camera to your computer. (Read about it here on WitchyTech.) Unfortunately, we often lose that cord and think the camera is useless. Not so! Here’s what to do: Read the rest of this entry »

How do I resize/edit my photos?

Resizing and editing photos could not be simpler, thanks to the internet and computers. There are free and easy ways to edit photos available online that do not require any technical knowledge whatsoever. I’m serious! Do not panic! If you have gotten your pictures from your camera to your computer, and understand why they are too big to send via email or share online, you know enough to edit your photos.

Probably the biggest secret to living in the modern age is that it’s all about automation… making things simple. This is hard for the non-technical person to understand. “How can it be simple? I just look at it and my eyes glaze over!” This is because you are trying to figure out HOW it works. Don’t waste your mental energy! It’s like being unable to learn to drive because you want to understand how an internal combustion engine works. Who cares how it works? All you need to know is how to drive.. what button to push to get the machine to do what you want. It is the same for computer programs and the internet.

If you wish, you can go buy a photo editing program and try to learn how to use it, or try to figure out the one that came with your camera. However, for most of us non-technical types, this is an exercise in confusion and frustration. Let me tell you about the easy way:

Read the rest of this entry »

Why Are my Digital Pictures so HUGE?

Well, you have your first digital camera and have taken lots of pictures (or perhaps you have scanned in some snapshots using a scanner). You have looked at your pictures on the computer. Wow! These are great! Isn’t it amazing that you can see your pictures right after you’ve taken them? Now you can share them immediately with your family all over the world! Isn’t technology wonderful? So you send out your 5 best pictures in an email.

Unfortunately, you probably got emails (or phone calls) back saying that the pictures were great, but they were bigger than the whole computer screen! Or that they sure took a long time to download… or worse, that they crashed someone’s email and they had to call their internet provider to clear it out (this can happen on dial up connections).

So what happened? The pictures looked perfectly fine on your computer, didn’t they? You zoomed out to make them a comfortable size before sending, right? Read on to find out about one of the nuances of digital photography:

Read the rest of this entry »

Taking Better Portraits

Since I’ve been thinking about digital cameras, I thought I’d include this video tutorial by a professional photographer. The video is only 6 minutes long and has 10 great tips for shooting portraits with your digital camera.

TAKE TONS AND TONS of pictures. Professional photographers take about a two hundred pictures and only pick 5 to sell. With digital photography, you don’t have those processing fees to worry about and only have to print the ones you want to keep. The more pictures you take, the more likely you’ll capture the perfect moment… a/k/a “The Money Shot”!

Do you have any digital camera/photography tips to share?

(Thanks to this article from Dumb Little Man–Tips for Life for the heads-up on this video.)

Don’t be Strangled by the Cord

Getting pictures from your camera to your computer using the USB cord.

Now that you have a digital camera, you are pretty proud of your new gadget. You’ve been taking pictures with it and enjoy not having to worry about getting your film processed. But how do you get the picture from your camera to the computer? There are 3 ways to do this:

• Using the cord or base that came with your camera
• Inserting the memory stick or memory card directly into a specialized slot in your computer
• Getting the pictures printed at a drugstore and scanning the printed pictures into the computer.

I’m going to tell you how to use the cord that came with your camera. Read the rest of this entry »