not professional but trying to work up to it Almost any digital point and shoot camera will do. This said, you may be better off buying a DSLR (Nikon or Canon) and get some skills at shooting at a professional level. Having to relearn your shooting skills seems like a waste of time. If you cannot afford a DSLR, get a good used Nikon or Canon film camera and then when you are ready to go digital, you will already have some of the lenses for the DSLR.
If you already have a point and shoot, then at this point just learn how to use some of the features that pros use most of the time. In bridge, we append our XMP files to put all the information in the meta file on the image. Examples would be your name, address, phone number, email address, copyright information, name of the client, keywords and things like that. We also re-size images for use on the Internet, adjust levels and do touch up when needed.
If you are not a student I would think spending $700 on software would be like putting the cart in front of the horse. Professional shooters, while they are no strangers to the darkroom, prefer to shoot and let techs do the darkroom or photoshop work. Not even sure how to answer that. I guess you need to be able to get the files onto the computer. Photoshop is software that is able to do additional p[ocessing to your picture.
Most people save their pictures as a JPEG. This format saves space but uses a type of compression called "lossy". It achieves compression by throwing away information. This degrades the image a small bit. And every time you open and save any changes to the image, it degrades it a bit more.
If you want to be able to make changes to your image without losing any quality, you want a camera that can save in RAW. RAW processing takes more expertise but you can open and save the image 100 times and you won't lose quality.
If you expect to continue learning about Photoshop and you want a camera can you can use a year from now when you're really good at it, get a camera that can do RAW. Even better, get one that has the option of saving two copies of the pic. One in RAW, the other in JPEG. Offhand, I know the new Olympus SP-550 can do this, I presume some other cams can as well. The image. |
