i am so new to this.... new camera too...wanting to take and PRINT some family photos. the manual and terms are confusing. any help with a basic set up will be soooooo appreciated until i can get in the get some lessons. i want to take them outside, (on auto i guess til i get more direction?) and then send them away to be printed. at times when i attempt to print the store tells me (usually with that dang yellow triangle with exclamation mark) "low resolution" or "file too large". thanks for any help you can offer!
Welcome to the forum. With digital photography, it's is very helpful to develop a 'work flow' for your digital images. Obviously, you use the camera to create the photos. Then you should get the files from your memory card onto your computer (either by connecting the camera to the computer or taking the card out and using a card reader). Once you have the images on your computer, you should have some software that will allow you to look at the images and make adjustments if you like. The camera will have come with software for this but there are many options (Photoshop and such). Here is where you can choose the images that you want and make adjustment, maybe crop or rotate them...even apply special effect if you want to. Then you should save your edited images (probably best to 'save as', so that you don't overwrite the original files). If you haven't resized them or copped too much, there should be plenty of resolution for whatever print size you need. You should then be able to upload these files to an on-line print service, or you could put them on a disk or thumb drive and take then into a lab (most labs probably have a self serve kiosk for this). A lot of people have steps where we back-up the original files. Many of us shoot in 'RAW' mode, which requires that we use software to convert the RAW files at some point in the workflow. The point is that you should figure out a 'work flow' that works for you.
Your users manual has a ton of very useful information. Being a users manual it's not written in a style meant to be engaging and it lacks a glossary of terms. However, the Internet is just chock full of resources. When you encounter a term you're not familiar with you can google it and sift through the hits. I strongly recommend using www.wikipedia.org and it's usually one of the top hits anyway when you google photographic terms or concepts. With your camera set to AUTO, it is making many settings decisions about the scene you are wanting to make an image of, but is way less informed about the scene than the person holding the camera. Once out of AUTO mode the photographer has to start making more of the decisions regarding what settings to use. As it turns out, there are just 3 basic settings that effect the exposure of an image: 1. Shutter Speed. 2. Aperture. 3. ISO. If you look in my siggy below, you'll find a link to my blog Digital SLR Basics that will put you on the road to understanding how your camera works, which is key to consistently making quality images.
See if this Canon XT lesson help. Even it was made for XT, your XTi should be fine. Especially for the section that talks about photography terms and basic concepts. Digital Rebel XT Lessons
