Foto Slate – Part 2

It seems that there an awful lot of people going the digital photography route at the moment and with good reason.A decent digital camera will give you prints that you can’t tell apart from those produced by a film camera and you have the benefit that your pictures are in a format that your computer can understand.
You then have the opportunity of fiddling to your heart’s content e-mailing your pictures around the world, manipulating them if you want, and using them to make greetings cards or whatever.
The possession of a digital camera does mean, however, that you’re faced with the problem of storing and indexing all your pictures and also with the high price of ink cartridges and photo paper for your inkjet.
I’ll get to the storage question on another occasion but in the meantime I’ve found a little program which makes printing digital pictures a breeze. The program is produced by ACD Systems (www.acdsystems.com) and is called FotoSlate.
It can be used to produce album pages of your pictures or print layouts so that you can get the maximum use out of your expensive photographic paper. You can print multiple copies of an image or a number of different ones on the same sheet of paper.
FotoSlate is potentially very useful but it does print the images that you give it without analysing whether the image will print well at the size you want it to. It also crops part of the image when printing if the proportions are different to the print size chosen. You’ll be OK if your images are correct proportionally and are large enough to print at the size you need.
And while we’re talking about digital imagery, take my advice and don’t touch a digital SLR camera unless you positively intend to buy it. I speak from the bitter experience of having played with Canon’s new D-10 camera last weekend and fallen hopelessly in love with all R25000′s worth of it.