Edit Your Digital Photos - A Fast Effective Guide

Author:  David M 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.

Image files are huge compared to many other types of computer files. For example, files captured by a 12 Megapixel camera can range up to 18 Megabytes. As resolutions continue to increase, so will file sizes. To make image files smaller and more manageable, digital cameras use a process called compression. During compression, data that is duplicated or that has little value is eliminated or saved in a shorter form, to reduce a file's size. For example, if large areas of the sky are the same shade of blue, only the value for one pixel needs to be saved along with the locations of the other pixels with the same color.

When choosing between JPEG and RAW formats, here are some things to consider about each format. Because you can't easily add pixels and retain image quality, or remove the effects of compression after the fact, it's usually best to use the largest available JPEG size and the least compression available. If you have to reduce either, you can do so later using a photo-editing program. If you shoot the image at a lower quality setting, you can never really improve it much or get a large, sharp print if you want one. The only problem with this approach is that higher quality images have larger file sizes. RAW images are always captured at the largest file size, and any compression used is lossless. Images in this format used to require an extra processing step but since the latest programs such as Aperture and Lightroom were designed from the ground up after RAW formats were introduced they handle them as easily as they handle JPEGs.

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.