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Learn the ropes of Digital Photography

By: David Peters

The camera has one small, slow chip and very little memory to do that interpolation. Your computer has a big, powerful processor and lots of memory, not to mention, no particular need to compromise their software routines to fit into a small amount of memory or trade quality for speed to avoid long delays after taking a picture. In short, your computer will do a vastly better job at interpolating the picture than your camera will, and to top that off you can choose different algorithms (often named after the mathematicians or programmers who created them, like Lanczos or Mitchell) and experiment with how well they work on a particular image. You can even save different versions of the file, including the original, which you can't if the camera is doing the work. There's nothing to be gained by compromising image quality, which is exactly what you're doing if you don't use the best filter you can get your hands on. The interpolated image even takes up more space on your camera's memory card, but it doesn't hold any more information than the original. Finally, as I mentioned above, it adds time between shots, as the camera has to grind away at reshaping your picture before you can take another one.

Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) data, saved by modern digital cameras in each picture file, is a powerful tool for both keeping track of your work and learning more about how to use your camera and how to take advantage of its capabilities. Created by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, this standard is now used by almost all digital cameras. EXIF data stores, as part of the picture file, information such as the date, time, camera model, and settings such as focus mode, flash mode, ISO sensitivity setting, white balance, and many more facts about the state of the camera when the picture was taken. The EXIF data actually envelops the picture data, be it compressed (usually JPEG format) or uncompressed (RAW or TIFF format) data. The data does add anywhere from 100 bytes to 64 kilobytes to the size of the file, but it is invaluable for anything from keeping track of work, indexing large numbers of photographs, or learning more about how your camera's settings affect the quality of the final product.

Rough Side of RAW: RAW formats differ from camera to camera and there are debates about camera programming that provides some control over your RAW files by the camera manufacturer. Where protests have been issued, there is an effort to provide standardized RAW formats that would better serve the consumer where general market software could be used to edit the RAW material. If your computer is equipped with lots of processing memory, RAW data will not be as much a problem, however presently, RAW files take a lot more time to open and process than JPEG and TIFF files. That is where the option to capture in RAW and JPEG simultaneously is a strong benefit. While standard editing software is now offered on the market, the way that software processes RAW files may differ depending on how the software from the manufacturer is recognized by the software. Thus, be sure to find and ask a savvy sales expert. Most sensors record light over a 12-bit range, with intensities of more or less 4096 possible values. Each sensor with 12-bit output is one and a half bytes. So our small chip with 20,000 light cells gives a raw output of 30,000 bytes. In an actual file there is some non-image information, but that can be ignored for simple calculations.

Analog or film cameras use the term ASA speed, however it is important to remember that a single digital camera can capture and store images at several ISO speeds. Amplifying the image signal in a camera can also amplify noise and thereby higher ISO speeds may produce progressively more noise in the photo. The character of an image in a photo can also change noise. Where lighter areas in analog or film photos tend to have the most noise, it is the darker areas of digital photographs that have the largest amount of noise. Digital cameras produce three types of noise called random noise, fixed pattern noise and banding noise. Random noise describes the abnormal intensity of color fluctuations compared to the rest of the photograph. It is most influenced by the ISO speed however the pattern of random noise may change even if exposure settings remain the same. Random noise may be the least objectionable, but the most difficult to remove where the noise is too often mistaken for true image characteristics. Fixed Hot pixels or fixed pattern noise describe pixel intensity that far exceeds that of ambient random noise fluctuations.

This editor offers many of the common features any photo editor may need. There is a freeware photo editor called Image Forge Image Forge lets you paint and edit many of your photographic images. You can create some special effects and make one of a kind prints with Image Forge! With Image Forge, you can easily correct any problems that you find with your digital photographs. Whether you want to touch up a person's face, erase a tree or add stunning color, you can do it with this software. If you want to instantly find and edit any and all of the pictures on your personal computer, there is no better tool to use than a freeware called Picasa! This program works to help you organize and sort through all of your digital pictures. You can make stunning photo collages and albums, as well as edit any problems you may have with any given picture. Picasa also allows you to create a photo "album" that you can send to a website to share pictures with your friends and family. If you take pictures, especially digital, then you know how important it is to be able to edit. Whether you are a professional photographer or it is a hobby, you will want your pictures to be the best that they can be, right? Well, most photographers, novice and beginners alike, are not perfect. Therefore, they will not produce a perfect picture. The vast majority of the pictures taken will need to touched up in one way or another.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you can take advantage of the extremely short duration of the flash in low-light situations. Flash firing time can be as short as 1/50,000 of a second, and while the camera's CCD sensor will remain active longer than that, almost all of the light in a dark scene that reaches the CCD will be from that flash event. This can effectively "freeze" the action as if you were using a shutter speed faster than your camera can support. Small built-in flash units have a very short "reach," often providing effective light only as far as two or three meters. This weakness, however, can be turned into a strength if you think about how you want to compose your scene. Certainly for "isolating" or emphasizing your subject, the ability to move only a short distance from background objects and radically reduce their light level is handy. In night shots outdoors or low-level indoor shots, the "weaker" flash gives more control over the content of the shot by dramatically reducing the "foreground" and magnifying the effect of distance.

Memory Sticks are used only in Sony products, and Sony is serious about keeping the technology in use. Unfortunately it seems like no one else is. They're available up to 4 Gigabytes in capacity, have good speed, but if you're using a Memory stick, it's probably because you're using a Sony camera and you don't have a choice. The newest common storage media are xD-Picture cards. Developed by Olympus and Fuji as a replacement for the older Smart Media cards, xD cards are compact and durable, with a heftier shell than older designs. They are stable in the market and likely to be around for a while, but they are gaining neither market share nor size rapidly - currently the largest xD cards are 1 Gigabyte. This is probably because only Olympus and Fuji now use this standard. Wide and wafer-thin, Smart Media cards define "legacy technology." Available only as large as 128 Megabytes, this is one technology I would have expected to have been "voted off the island" by now. Alas, they were used in tens if not hundreds of millions of cameras and smart phones, so they are still being made and will be available for some time. You won't find them in any new cameras, however.

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