Photoshop with Digital Cameras and Scanners

Scanners and digital cameras are great tools for Photoshop users, providing basic fodder for your image-editing exploits. Scanners and digital cameras are also great resources that let you grab images quickly when you need them most (say, when you’re under a deadline and need to drop that last object into your image or project). This appendix helps you transport images from digital sensor to Photoshop.

Opening an Image from Your Digital Camera
Although importing digital camera images into Photoshop isn’t an open-and-shut case, it needn’t be a trial. In fact, it’s likely that you have two or three different ways to transport your digital pictures from the camera to your computer’s hard disk storage. You can choose whichever method is easiest for you.

Wires and cables: USB, FireWire, and IEEE-1394
Most new cameras are furnished with USB or FireWire connections (or ports) that allow linking directly to a Windows or Mac OS computer (see Figure A-1). All newer computers are equipped with matching USB ports (either the older USB 1.x or the newer, faster USB 2.0), and some, particularly Macs, also have FireWire connections. If your computer lacks either or both of these ports, you can usually purchase a peripheral card that will add the missing connection. Some combo cards have both USB and FireWire ports. Some older cameras use a computer’s conventional serial port (such as the one used with a modem, mouse, or serial printer) or the computer’s parallel port (used with printers). Because such connections are slower and can be more difficult to set up, they have fallen from favor.

Direct wireless connections
A few digital cameras have included infrared capabilities, which allow wireless transfer of images to printers, laptops, or desktop computers equipped with an IrDA-compatible port. (IrDA stands for Infrared Data Association.) Any growth of IrDA applications is likely to be stunted by the coming availability of Bluetooth technology, which will allow rapid wireless transfer of information between many different devices, ranging from cell phones to remote controls to digital cameras. Although Bluetooth digital cameras are only beginning to go on the market as I write this, you can expect to see them become more widely available in the near future.

Removable storage media
Only the least expensive digital cameras use ports and cables as their only means of transferring images. Almost all cameras use storage media that you can remove from the camera and read directly by using a card reader or some other device in your computer. Here are the most common removable storage media options:
- SmartMedia or CompactFlash cards: These solid-state memory cards are thin, convenient, and can hold between 8MB and 512MB of data (some cards can hold even more data) at attractive prices (considering the fact that you can use them over and over). Some digital cameras have a slot for one of these two media. To read them with your computer, you need a card reader accessory, which is usually a small USB device (often with slots for both types of cards), or an adapter (such as a PC card slot found in most laptops and many desktop computers). Some scanners and printers also have memory card slots, which you can use to transfer photos to your computer.
- Secure Digital card: This is the most common memory card in digital cameras. This card is smaller than SmartMedia or Compact Flash cards and also requires a card reader accessory so that your computer can read the card.
- Memory Sticks: Sony uses these memory devices, which are about the size of a stick of chewing gum, for cameras, audio devices, and laptop PCs. (Sony has also offered floppy disks and recordable CDs, or CD-Rs, as storage in its digital cameras.) The same type of card readers offered for SmartMedia and CompactFlash are available for Memory Sticks.
- Mini hard disks: IBM has been a leader in offering Microdrives, tiny hard disks that have storage capacities as high as 1GB or more. Microdrives fit in a CompactFlash slot.
Because a Microdrive is powered by the device that’s using it, not all digital cameras support the drives. Any laptop or desktop computer that can accept CompactFlash cards can read Microdrives.
- Recordable/rewritable CDs: Sony’s nomadic search for the best digital camera media has led it to this novel solution, which uses 3-inch-diameter recordable CD (CD-R) and rewritable CD (CD-RW) media that can store 158MB of information. Although cameras using this option are a little bulkier, mini-CDs are a convenient, permanent (or semipermanent) storage medium that any computer with a CD-ROM drive can read.
- Floppy disks: Chalk up another option for Sony, which has offered floppy disk storage for several of its cameras. Floppies are best suited for low-resolution cameras because they only hold 1.44MB — not a whole lot of pictures. On the plus side, you can access these digital photos by using any computer equipped with a floppy drive, which includes virtually all Windows PCs (but a dwindling number of Macs, which are no longer furnished with a floppy drive right out of the box).
- xD-Picture cards: Smallest of the memory cards, with lower capacity than CompactFlash or Secure Digital cards.

Other media
A few other types of media have been tried with digital cameras, but have fallen by the wayside as less expensive and more convenient options have become available. These include the Imation SuperDisk (a sort of Iomega Zip disk wannabe) and the Iomega Clik disk. Iomega is constantly coming up with new storage products and new names for their old products (the
latest being PocketZip and HipZip), so expect to see at least a few digital cameras with some of these nonstandard storage media in the future.