Digital Techniques
The Digital Darkroom
So, you have your fancy new digital camera, or your
great new scanner, and have collected yourself a bunch of digital images.
Now what? You can print your digital pictures to your printer, and with
the right paper, and a good enough printer, they should look nearly as
good as regular photographs taken with a film camera. Still, if this is
all there is to it, why not just get a Polaroid, or pick up one of the
better SLR's and use a one hour photo lab? People who simply utilize their
new digital cameras as electonic versions of film cameras, are missing
many of the real strengths of this new medium. Much of digital imaging
has to do with the digital darkroom, and desktop publishing.
Make yourself a "negative" of your photos. This is
easy enough to do, and will save you some real grief if you ever inadvertantly
damage, modify, or delete a photo. The proccess is easy enough. before
you touch your photographs, store a back up copy on the native, uncompressed
format of whatever made the image. In some cases, this will be a bitmap,
in others a proprietary "raw" format. It is unlikely that these pictures
will be
file types
viewing programs
graphic arts programs
printing and publishing
web pages
taking other people's work. some secrets.
copyright, legal issues, and all that other junk