Digital Photography

Digital Photography Tips 5

Choosing the right software is important in photo manipulation and post processing of digital photo images. A good image editing software package such as PHotoshop or Paint Shop Pro is necessary as well as software such as Lightroom or Aperture(for the Mac) that will process RAW digital camera images. A file browser is indispensable as well. There is a file browser integrated with Photoshop that works quite well. You can edit the view option on Browser to show information such as exposure and file information.

Good working practices are a necessity to get the best out of your digital camera. Store and label your files so that they are easy to retrieve. Fill in the file information so that your digital ownership is not under question. The most common file formats for photographic images are JPEG and TIFF and each have their own uses. Just remember that every time you save a JPEG file you are introducing artifacts and or compression into the image. A TIFF file is large in terms of MegaBytes because the data is not compressed. This file is used for magazine or book form because it contains so much information and will reproduce with high quality images with sharpness that have a smooth and continuous tone.

Sharpening

Some digital cameras allow in-camera sharpening which may range from zero to high. It is probably a better option to set the camera sharpening to zero and do any sharpening last in the post-processing in Photoshop. Many images will benefit from a bit of sharpening and the Unsharp Mask Filter in Photoshop is the most common method of doing any sharpening. Sharpening filters add local contrast at the edges of certain pixel values. But do not overdo it because the image may look over-sharpened. Carry out any sharpening at the end of the digital image post-processing workflow. Unsharp Mask Filter changes the contrast of pixels that are around them. A threshold determines the amount of the effect. If the threshold is zero, then all pixels will be sharpened. A larger threshold number will only contrast those pixels with a larger amount of contrast surrounding them. An Amount or Intensity will bump up or down the amount of the contrast change.