Projecting images as a background

LaurieCat7

I am a beginning photographer. I would like to take photos that could be used as backgrounds for projected words in our church on Sunday mornings. I showed some of my photos to the visual tech guy at the church and he said they needed to have higher resolution. He is familiar with and uses Photoshop in his web business. He will help me edit the photos when I get some with the proper resolution.

I don't have an editing program aside from the the free one on my laptop since I am not sure what to get for my needs. What settings should my camera be set at to take high resolution and what would make the best shots for backgrounds? Also what do recommend for editing. Thank you! - Laurie

robbo

Hi @Laurie - To get the best quality images, set your camera to Image Size: Large, Quality: Fine and ISO: 100. It's best to use a tripod or other methods of steadying the camera to avoid blur.

There are several free photo editors (see here), like Gimp, Artweaver, Paint. I use Irfanview for basic editing like cropping and changing brightness, contrast and colors.

Best shots? Depends on what is required as backgrounds! I would think something that isn't too distracting, makes the text easy to read.

Moose

Howdy @LaurieCat7 - He could just be referring to the overall image size. Did you show images straight from your memory card/camera, on a disc or attached to an email? If you sent him images via email, chances are your email service probably "re-sized" the images for web.

As for recommended software, Picasa by Google is one of the most user friendly photo editing programs. It allows you to organize your collection and make basic edits like brightness, contrast, sharpness and saturation.

If you want something a bit more advanced, I would look at Adobe Lightroom (see here). It's basically a beefier version of Picasa, with more advanced editing tools.

As for recommended shots, I would focus on simple, abstract scenes like open meadows, lakes, rivers, skies, etc... Happy shooting! :)

LaurieCat7

Thank you @Moose and @Robbo for your comments. They are very much appreciated. There is so much to learn and I am having a great time shooting. I'm sure I will have more questions. As Moose says..."happy shooting" :)

ebilpirate

Going to dive in on this one, even though I am new to dslrs, AV projection is what I do for a living, (well, I sell solutions based around it to blue chip clients and art galleries).

I would be surprised if the average photo is lower res than a low end professional projectors native resolution;

Projectors tend to be WXGA at the most and thats 1280 x 800, more likely they will be XGA which is 1024 x 768, maybe a very expensive unit might come in at 1920 x 1200 which is WUXGA.

Bear in mind my highend christie and barco's projectors run at around 20k lumens and those are just over 1080p resolution. For the money those cost you could buy a very nice little sports car so I would be impressed to see one in most worship environments.

I guess I am suggesting you take a look at the projectors specs before worrying too much. On the minus side you may need to exercise a bit of diplomacy in explaining things to the AV guy.