Getting to know how to edit digital photography is important

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.

In the camera world there are dozens of formats, each format has something unique and some are more common than others. DNG (Digital Negative) Camera companies have introduced many different, and frequently changing, raw file formats. For example, one source states that there are over 140 RAW formats with more coming-some of them specific to a single camera model. On top of this, manufacturers are often pointlessly secretive about their specifications so there are almost always RAW files your software can't read-at least until someone reverse engineers the formats so they can support them. This lag time and inconvenience can be laid at the doorstep of the camera companies. These proprietary RAW files are at risk over time since companies come and go and interest waxes and wanes. One solution to this growing problem is a new Adobe format called the Digital Negative (.DNG). This publicly defined and openly shared format for RAW files is an attempt to ensure that you will be able to access your image files in the future. If your camera doesn't capture RAW images in this format, you can convert them to DNG using a program such as Photoshop or Lightroom. When you do so, you can even choose to store the original RAW image inside its DNG file so you can extract it at some future date should you need it. The DNG format is supported by Photoshop and other Adobe products, some other software companies, and a number of camera companies. As with all things in computing, only time will tell if the format becomes widely accepted or gradually fades away.

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.

If you use operating system tools or applications to look at a storage device in the camera or card reader, you will find it is listed like the other drives on your system. If it contains more than one folder, the one photographers care about is named DCIM (for Digital Camera IMages). If you delete this folder, the camera will recreate it (but not any images it contained). The purpose of this folder, called the image root directory, is to keep together all of the images you capture with the camera. If you use the same card with other devices, there may also be other folders on the same card holding MP3 music or other files.

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.

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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