Circle?

[ivinjay]

I got an extra lens for my digital mavica cd350. For closeups. But the problem is unless I zoom in there is a circular black border around all the photos. I don't mind but everybody else does. What is the best way to blow up and crop the picture without loosing the quality.

Thanks,
ivinjay

[Norfindel]

If the camera has macro mode, use it. Optical zoom could be an alternative, allways use optical zoom instead of digital zoom. Digital zoom decreases the image dimensions, in fact, it's really only a crop of the original picture.

[Michael Fanelli]

I got an extra lens for my digital mavica cd350. For closeups. But the problem is unless I zoom in there is a circular black border around all the photos. I don't mind but everybody else does. What is the best way to blow up and crop the picture without loosing the quality.

Thanks,
ivinjay

The manual with the extra lens should have mentioned that these converter lenses do not work over the full zoom range of the camera. Use a setting that does work and move yourself arround to get the effect you are looking for.

[ivinjay]

It zooms fine. It's excellent. The full range is not important cuz closeups are not needing full range anyway. But it's pretty close. 3x optical zoom is there on er. I'll play around with macro though which I thimk is there.

But what about if I use Photoshop Album or something. I have Photoshop Album 1. Not sure what they did to Photoshop Album 2. Relaly worth the upgrade. Or does any other software do good croping, lightning, etc? Or software depletes too much quality. Reediting and making a new picture takes away from the quazlity too right?

Thasnks,
ivnj

[Norfindel]

Software cannot bring back quality that isn't in the picture, so it's always better to get the picture right from the camera, and modify it in the less amount possible. That way, the image has the best quality the camera can provide.
Enlarging a picture really makes every pixel bigger, so you really don't have any more detail than before. Croping and printing to the same size is the same case, the printed pixels will be bigger.
However, croping small amounts of the picture won't be notorious at all on small print size. If you print big pictures, it could be a problem.
With a picture in 3072x2048 you could print a picture with a size of 10 x 6 inches at 300 dpi (26 x 17 cm). However, note that going below 300 dpi is possible with the picture still looking good.
I don't know Photoshop Album, but a crop is really a very simple operation, i don't think it will be much different from a program to another.
Finally, modifying a .JPG file and saving again recompresses the image. As jpg is a lossy algorithm, picture quality is degraded every time you do this. Normally, it won't be noticed the first time you do this, but subsequent editing could introduce noticeable degradation. Always save the original picture, plus any edits.