4. Digital Photo Studio

4. Digital Photo Studio
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Choose Graphics → Photo Management from the main menu to launch digiKam. The 1^st time you are asked to provide a folder to store pictures into. You can accept the default /home/your_user_name/Pictures.

4.1. Building a Photo Album

Choose Album → New Album from the menu and fill album properties (see Figure 2.8, “New Album Settings”), then accept your settings to create the album.

Figure 2.8. New Album Settings

Choose Album+Import → Add Images from the menu and use the standard file dialog to select the pictures you want to add to your newly created album, then click on Add.

	Tip
	You can add all the pictures contained in a given folder by choosing Album+Import → Import Folders from the menu and browsing for a folder, instead of files.

4.2. Touching-Up Pictures

Double click on a picture to open the image edit window. Note that all touch-up operations may affect the quality of the picture's on-disk file. Also bear in mind that on-screen rendering is quite different from printing your digital pictures on photographic paper. So if you intend to both print and publish your pictures for online viewing, it might be wise to treat both copies differently from the beginning.

	Tip
	Press Ctrl-Z to undo the last transformation operation. However, once you have saved the image, changes cannot be undone.

Rotation

Simply choose one of the entries (90º, 180º or 270º) of the Transform+Rotate menu.

	Note
	When rotating pictures “by hand” it is better to correct the EXIF orientation information in order for EXIF information to reflect the picture correctly. On the album browsing window, select the image and choose the appropriate entry of the Image → Correct Exif Orientation Tag menu.

Brightness, Contrast and Gamma

Choose Fix+Colors → Brightness/Contrast/Gamma from the menu and use the sliders to adjust the brightness, contrast and gamma of the picture using the picture copy as a guide.

Sharpen

Choose Fix → Sharpen from the menu, drag the square to the part of the image to be used as a guide, and use the slider to sharpen the picture.

Red-Eye Reduction

Select the pupil of the eye to fix, choose Fix → Red Eye Reduction from the menu, and then select the aggressive (only part of the eye selected) or mild (more than the eye selected) option to reduce the red-eye flash effect. Repeat for the other eye, if needed.

Image Resizing and Cropping

Multi-megapixel images are excellent for photographic paper print-ups, but are far from adequate for e-mailing or publishing on the web. Choose Transform → Resize from the menu, then select the desired size, either in pixels or in percentage, and whether or not to keep (recommended) the aspect ratio.

You can also crop an image to a desired size while keeping the aspect ratio. Choose Transform → Aspect Ratio Crop from the menu, drag the square to frame the part of the image you are interested on and select the aspect ratio, orientation, width and height (one follows the other according to the aspect ratio selected).

Tip

For electronic publication, the usual aspect ratio is 4:3, while for printing the usual aspect ratio is 3:2.

Usually a size of 640x480 is enough for e-mailing a photo, while 800x600 is enough for web publishing.

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