I've just purchased a Nikon 950 and the picture quality is great when I access them from the card reader, when I open them in Photoshop they seem to loose quality! I open Photoshop: Open/drive(card reader)/Picture #/Image/Adjust/Curve/Auto-ok/Size, bright, contrast ect. and I still can't get the picture to look as good as the picture streight from the reader??? I've not had this problem with Photoshop in the past when I've scanned photo's before. Am I doing something wrong or setup wrong? I have Photoshop 3.0 If it looks good from the Card reader where am I loosing the image quality? I realize there are lots of variables!!Any help would be appreciated, Thanks, Larry Morgan

-- Larry Morgan (lmorgan@pullman.com), September 26, 1999

Answers

I've never used Photoshop 3.0 (I use 5.0) so I'm not sure what sequence of editing commands you are using. Photoshop (and any other imaging editing program) will progressively change and throw away picture detail as you modify contrast, brightness, and curves. This is especially true if you perform a number of modifications sequentially in your editing session. The newer version has a feature called adjustment layers to address this. The changes are done in multiple layers and don't affect the original until you are happy with combination of changes. If the picture looks good out of the camera, I would load into Photoshop as is and make minimal adjustments before saving. Real World Photoshop 5 by David Blatner and Bruce Fraser has a good discussion of this issue.

-- Dennis Pereira (dpereira@ultranet.com), September 29, 1999.