No sooner had I lamented the fact that Apple didn't have very many, or any free image viewing/editing apps out there, I discovered that they did indeed have a great one available, and chances are, you probably have it already and don't even know it yet! That's right, if you made the jump to Apple's newest operating system, OS 10.5.2, otherwise known as Leopard, than you have access to a free application that comes bundled with the new OS. The app I'm referring to is Preview. Yep, you heard correctly, Preview.

One question that is bound to come up from time to time is when to use "assign profile" and when to use "convert to profile". First off, let's just answer this question outright. Use Assign Profile on an untagged image (meaning, there's no profile embedded in the image file). You basically have to...

In my travels it's been my experience that people are creatures of habit, even if it's a bad habit. There is one pesky habit that most people are guilty of and that I am going to squash like that spider that's been living in your bathtub for the last 6 months and that you refuse to get rid of. The perpetrator in question

If you've ever saved an image as a JPEG, and being a photographer in the digital age chances are you're familiar with JPEGs, you've no doubt seen the option to save your JPEG as Progressive. Resist the temptation.

So you renamed all your files with a sequence number, and uploaded them to a gallery... but they are not displaying in the order you want them to... why is that?

Computers look at numbers differently than we do - they see only the first digit and use that to sort by first, then they sort by the next digit and so on. So when a computer sees the following numbers:

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14

Perhaps one of the most difficult concepts for photographers and other types of digital artists to wrap their minds around is the concept of "Resolution". No, I'm not talking about that steadfast determination to throw your money away on a gym membership come January 1st. I'm referring to the fundamental principle that must be abided by when viewing and printing your photos at a photo lab or on a consumer grade printer. Hopefully I can answer the question, "What resolution does my image need to be to print correctly?".

Now lets look at a big NO NO when resizing your images to send to the lab. The big bad word in this case is "Resampling". Resampling occurs when you enlarge an image by increasing the resolution (Resing-Up or Up-Resing as it is commonly referred to). When you tell Photoshop or any other digital imaging program to increase the number of pixels per inch you are telling it to literally cram more pixels into every inch. Those pixels aren't just magically created