Getting to know how to edit digital photography is important

By David Peters


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.

There are a few formats for digital photography, different formats have their own advantages. For instance the jpeg format is the default format used by almost every digital camera ever made. Named after its developer, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (and pronounced "jay-peg") this format often lets you specify both image size and compression. At the moment you capture an image in this format a processing chip in your camera manipulates it based on the camera settings you used, and then compresses it to reduce its size. The changes made to the image cannot be undone later because it's the final, altered image that is saved in the image file. Some of the original image data is lost for good. This is a handy format because it is the most basic and commonly used.

Lossy compression (rhymes with "bossy") can dramatically reduce file sizes. However, this process degrades images to some degree and the more they're compressed, the more degraded they become. In many situations, such as posting images on the Web or making small to medium sized prints, the image degradation isn't obvious. However, if you enlarge an image enough, it will show. The most common lossy file format is JPEG and many cameras let you specify how much they are compressed. For example, many cameras let you choose Fine (1:4), Normal (1:8), and Basic (1:16) compression. This is a useful feature because there is a trade-off between compression and image quality. Less compression gives you better images so you can make larger prints, but you can't store as many images.

RAW lets you decide on most camera settings after you've taken the picture, not before. For example, when you shoot a JPEG image under fluorescent lights, the camera adjusts the image to remove the yellow-green tint. Any changes you make later are on top of this initial change. If you shoot the image in RAW format, the camera just captures the images as is and you decide what white balance setting to use later. You can even create different versions of an image, each with its own white balance. RAW images can be processed again at a later date when new and improved applications become available. Your original image isn't permanently altered by today's generation of photo-editing applications even if they don't support non-destructive editing. You can generate alternate versions of the same RAW image. For example, many photographers will adjust highlight and shadow areas and save these versions separately. Using a photo-editing program, they then combine the two images as layers and by selectively erasing parts of the top image layer let areas of the lower image layer show through so all areas have a perfect exposure.

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).

The first four characters in an image file's name, called free characters, can only be uppercase letters A-Z. The last four characters form a number between 0001 and 9999 and are called the file number. Canon uses the first four free characters IMG_ followed by the file number, Nikon uses DSC_, and Sony uses DSC0. Once transferred to your computer, or sometimes while transferring them, you can rename images with more descriptive names.

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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