Toolkit For The Digital Photographer Part One - Software

By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Peter_Phun]Peter Phun

Just as a wood-working artisan has special chisels for his trade, every working professional digital photographer has over time put together his own "toolkit."

On the software or post production end, these are necessities:

1) "Rescue Pro" software is something no one wants to think about, but in the real world, is a necessity.The digital photographer who foolishly thinks it will never happen to him, just needs to be burned once and he'll become a believer.

If you buy a SanDisk high-end memory card like those "Extreme III or IV" variety, not only is there a lifetime warranty, but they also ship with this file recovery utility.

Never wait till you have an actual corrupted file to test the software. The best thing you can do is after you're done downloading and archiving your images, erase and format the memory card. Then launch this file recovery utility to see how many of those images can be recovered.

Remember, Dirty Harry said, "Man's got to know his limitations."

2) Genuine Fractals or Extensis' Smart Pixel. Either one of these photoshop plug-ins allow you to scale up a image which you might have shot with perhaps an old camera which didn't have the megapixels you need for a huge print.

3) Picture Code's Noise Ninja.($80) This plug-in with Photoshop reduces the inherent noise in digital images shot in high ISO.

4) Finally, a disk utility application like Disk Warrior or Micromat's Tech Tool Pro and that install disk that came with your computer should be included in that toolkit. These applications are for the Macintosh platform but I'm certain there are similar counterparts in the Windows world.

If your internal hard drive crashes and you can't boot up, these dvds or cds can be your only salvation. What these discs allow you to do is boot up your computer, attempt to repair or "band-aid" the hard drive allowing you to safely download your data from your suspect internal hard drive.

Peter Phun is an adjunct photography instructor at Riverside City College. He is a freelance photographer, web designer and stay-at-home dad. He previously worked as a staff photographer for 18 years at The Press-Enterprise, Southern California's 4th largest daily newspaper. Peter was among the first on the staff at the newspaper who embraced the change from film to digital, but like most photojournalist his age, has shot miles and miles of black and white and color film.

Peter is the webmaster for the Mac user group in the Inland Empire. For more information about this Riverside based photographer, visit http://www.peterphun.com

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