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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. 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. 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). Extensions play another important role. An extension can be associated with a program on your system so if you double-click a file, the associated program opens and then it in turn opens the file you clicked. Also, when you use an application program's File > Open command it often lists only those files with extensions that it can open. (You can list other file types but it usually requires an additional step or two.) If you change the extension, your system may no longer know what to do with the 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.
Article Source: http://www.associatedigest.com
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