Getting to know how to edit digital photography is important
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Adobe’s Photoshop software is a very powerful image editing program that is by far the market leader for editing image files. I use Photoshop extensively when creating, and editing images for the web sites that I design. Almost all professional photographers and printers also use Photoshop to create all of the wonderful images that appear in magazines, billboards, and even on television. I am not the best artist in the world, but with Photoshop I have enough power to create brilliant images with tools that are built-in to the software. The coolest thing about Photoshop is that even as powerful as it is out of the box, there are many different plug-ins to make Photoshop even more powerful. The Photoshop plug-ins can be grouped into a few major categories which include 3D, color management, digital asset management, photographic, retouching, and special effects.
Several computers have different formats for pictures. RAW is a good format that is available for many cameras especially SLRs. One of Ansel Adam’s better know expressions, drawn from his early experiences as a concert pianist, was “The negative is the score, the print is the performance”. In digital photography, the image file is your score and your photo-editing program is where you perform. For the highest possible quality, you want to start with the best possible score-a RAW image file. These files contain all of the image data captured by the camera’s image sensor without it being processed or adjusted in any way. This lets you move the images to the computer and interpret this data the way you want to instead of having the camera do it for you. When you want total control over exposure, white balance, and other settings, this is the format to use because only four camera settings permanently affect a RAW image the aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and focus.Other camera settings are saved as metadata and affect the appearance of the thumbnail or preview images but not the RAW image itself. One thing to keep in mind is that RAW images are not always noticeably better. Where they shine is when you have exposure or white balance problems. Because RAW images have dramatically more information to work with you can open up shadow areas, recover lost details in highlights, and make fine adjustments to colors.
When the image is then opened and displayed by any application, the compression process is reversed more or less depending on which form of compression was used lossless or lossy. Lossless compression compresses an image so when it is uncompressed, as it is when you open it, its image quality matches the original source nothing is lost. Although lossless compression sounds ideal, it doesn’t provide much compression so files remain quite large. For this reason, lossless compression is only used by the highest quality image formats-namely TIFF and RAW.
RAW files are quite large. If you use this format a great deal you will need more storage space in the camera, and computer processing times may be slightly longer. When shooting images, you may have to wait longer between shots because the buffer gets filled more quickly and the camera is tied up longer processing the last image you took, and moving it from the buffer to the memory card. Since RAW images aren’t processed in the camera, you have to process them on the computer and export them in a usable format when you want to e-mail them, post them on a Web site, print them, or import them into another program to create a slide show or publication. When you are done shooting for the day, there is still work to do. Since each camera company has defined its own proprietary RAW format, many operating systems and even photo-editing programs are unable to recognize some or all of these files. For this reason camera manufacturers always supply a program to process RAW images along with their cameras.
Folders are used to organize files on a drive. Imagine working in a photo stock agency where you’re told to find a photo of “Yosemite” only to discover that all of the photos the agency ever acquired are stored in unorganized boxes. You have to pick through everything to gather together what you want. Contrast this with an agency that uses a well-organized file cabinet with labeled hanging folders grouping related images together. For example, there might be a hanging folder labeled California National Parks. If a further breakdown is needed, labeled manila folders are inserted into any of the hanging folders-basically, folders within folders. There might be one labelled Yosemite containing images of the park. With everything labelled and organized, it’s easy to locate the images you need. The same is true of your memory cards and drives on your computer system. Both are equivalent to the empty file cabinet-plenty of storage space but no organization. The organization you need to find things on the camera’s memory device (which we discuss here) is created by the camera, but on your computer, you have to create it yourself (as you will see later).
When an image is saved, the camera assigns it a filename and stores it in the current folder. Filenames have two parts, an 8-character filename and a 3-character extension. Think of them as first and last names. The name is unique to each file, and the extension, separated from the name by a period, identifies the file’s format. For example, a JPG extension means it’s a JPEG image file, TIF means it’s a TIFF image file.
Exif (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a specification that spells out how information about a JPEG image is stored in the same file as the image. This information, including a thumbnail image, describes the camera settings at the time the picture was taken, and even the image’s location if the camera supports GPS (Global Positioning System). Digital cameras record this information as metadata in an area of the image file called the header. This information isn’t just for managing images, it can also be used by some printers to give you better results. Basically, any camera control set to auto at the time the image was taken can be manipulated by the printer or other device to improve results. Those set to one of the camera’s manual choices is considered to be a deliberate choice and is not manipulated.
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