Editing your digital photos just got easier

by Dan Brown

The retouching plug-ins can intelligently change the contrast, color, sharpness, and many other common filters to make a picture look as crisp as possible. The special effects plug-ins are my favorite, because they can make a rather plain image into something fantastic. If you use Photoshop on a regular basis, then you need to look at some of the plug-ins that are available, because they can make your life much easier, and your graphics look much better.

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.

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.

As you take pictures, your camera automatically creates and names subfolders within the DCIM folder to hold them (like placing manila folders in a hanging folder). The first three characters in a folder’s name, called the directory number, are numbers between 100 and 999. The next five characters are known as free characters and can be any uppercase alphanumeric characters chosen by the camera manufacturer. When a new folder is created, as one is when the current folder is full, it is given a number one digit higher than the previous folder. Some cameras allow you to create and name your own folders, or select among folders the camera creates. This lets you route new images into a specific folder and also play back images from just one folder rather than the entire card.

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.

When you take a picture, the camera stores information about it along with the image data. You can also add additional information using some cameras and photo-editing or image management applications. The more information you have to work with, the easier it will be to find an image later. Metadata can sometimes be lost if the file is opened and then saved in another file format. (Or even lost when using the camera’s own rotate, crop, or other commands that write to the disk.) However, most applications now preserve this information, although camera companies sometimes store secret metadata that can be lost.

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