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 My
guess is if you assembled a group of typical high school
publications advisers and asked them what their biggest
production headache is, you would get the same response
from each and every one of them: photography.
During the 19 years that I advised the yearbook and newspaper
at Hagerstown High School, I felt the same way about photography
as I did about the prospect of having a root canal. And
I had a strong background in photography. I can imagine
how advisers who don’t have that background must feel.
Perhaps a firing squad would be an accurate comparison.
Well, those days may be over or at least slowly coming to
a close.
Enter digital photography. This field isn’t new. As
far back as 1988 I was hearing about digital photography
at summer workshops, but not until the past few years has
image resolution sufficiently increased and price sufficiently
decreased to make it an option for high school publications.
In the next five years, it’s safe to assume that film
photography for just about everyone except those who want
to continue working with it will be a thing of the past.
Publications staffs are beginning to hear from their printers
that those shops are prepared to accept files with digital
photos embedded into the layouts. As high resolution digital
cameras become cheaper and cheaper, more and more schools
will begin boarding up the old “wet” darkrooms
and turning to the computer to work with their photos before
placing them on layouts and sending them to the printer
in a variety of formats from pagination software files to
portable document format files (pdf).
Digital imaging software is just as important as the front-end
digital cameras and scanners that produce the images and
image files. From the dawn of digital photography, the Big
Kahuna of digital software has been and continues to be
Adobe Photoshop. The latest release, 7.0, has enjoyed unprecedented
pre-release orders from hobbyists and professionals. Make
no mistake; if you stay with digital photography long, you’ll
eventually own this program, expensive as it is. However,
for many publications staffs Photoshop at $600, or even
a couple of hundred dollars less for the education version,
is too much money, and, frankly, is a lot more software
than most staffs need.
Enter shareware. In the early days of software development,
shareware programs were lightweight, often pretty clunky
applications that an individual or small software company
offered to the public for trial and possible purchase at
a modest cost. Today’s shareware programs are as powerful
as their big commercial brothers, and in some cases are
just as effective. What they aren’t is expensive.
You
can purchase a digital photo editing program that boasts
just about all the features that Photoshop offers for as
little as $38. My favorite is Photo-Brush from MediaChance
Software. It will do all the usual photo retouching including
adjusting brightness, contrast, color hue and intensity
and removal of blemishes and other imperfections. It will
also perform cropping, image resizing that is necessary
to downsize digital images, and it supports all the popular
imaging formats. A fully functioning version can be downloaded
for 30 days at http://www.mediachance.com/pbrush/.
Other inexpensive image editing programs are: Paint Shop
Pro, $99 (http://www.jasc.com), Photo Impact, $89.95 (http://www.ulead.com/pi/runme.htm),
Picture Window, $49.95 (http://www.dl-c.com/update31.html),
and Photo Suite, $49.95 (http://www.roxio.com/en/products/index.jhtml).
In addition to these shareware programs, Adobe offers a
scaled down version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements
(http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopel/main.html). The
program has many of the features of Photoshop and the shareware
programs and costs about $100. One important note: Many
flatbed scanners bundle photo imaging software like Adobe
Photo Deluxe with their products. These are usually very
lightweight applications that are really no substitute for
a full-blown photo editing program.
Many of the programs described above are available only
for the Windows platform. A few offer Mac Versions.
So high school publications advisers need not dread photography
any more. Finding the right photo editing software for your
publications program is as simple as downloading a trial
version and using the program for a month before deciding
which software is right for you and which one fits into
your budget.
About
the author:
Dan Diercks is the former chair of the English Department
at Hagerstown High School where he also advised award-winning
publications. Diercks formerly coordinated the photography
sequence at the High School Journalism Institute at Indiana
University. He has spoken conducted photography workshops
around the country.
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