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 Subject: Photo Tip of the Week!
 
Author: Papa bear
Date:   9/16/2007 4:17 pm EDT
The digital darkroom! I can’t be understated as to how important it is to the digital shooter. I am not talking about put a fish head on your mother-in-law either, I am talking about manipulating the light that you have captured with your camera.
I am going to start out with RAW and go down from there. If you have the capability of shooting in this format do so! You can do so much more with the image. With the right program you can change the setting of the camera after you have shot the picture, that’s right you can change most of the settings including an amount of focus and a lot of the exposure settings can be changed and manipulated. Think about what happens when your camera takes a picture. You are exposing the CCD or CMOS to light and the camera is storing the information in its memory. Each camera and manufacturer has written a program telling the camera what to do with the information in order to produce a picture for you.
You can take that RAW information and process it through a program that allows you to do what the camera does. This time you control exposure, saturation, color, and contrast. So just like in the film days you can control the exposure as in the developing process. So you can see RAW gives the most control over the end product.
The next best would be TIFF if your camera will allow that format. The TIFF file is the raw data and the program telling the computer all the info to reproduce the image. Therefore the TIFF file is larger than the RAW file sense it holds all the RAW and the Program Data. As a side note I recommend that you always print from a TIFF file sense it holds all the info and is not compressed.
The next is the standard among most compact and auto cameras and that is the JEPG format. If this is your choice always pick the highest quality as possible in this setting. The problem with this format is that it is a compression file in order to manage file size. The draw back is that every time you close this file you lose information. It compresses and recompresses witch means you are degrading the image each time.
Now that you have the file on your computer you have choices. How are you going to display the image? What about lack of color in your Ocean shots taken below 20ft? Well you can use a lens filter or a good program. As I stated above you can manipulate the image and add back the reds that were lost. You can darken, lighten, and color and even fix blemishes. You can sharpen, soften, or distort you image and add effects as well as eliminate Back Scatter. The Digital Darkroom is the one most important tool in your arsenal to a better image. Underwater photographers need and use this tool more than any other because of the physics of water and light. You are working in a medium that is 800 times denser than air.
So the tip is getting the best program your money can buy and you do get what you pay for. There are many decent programs and some come with the camera that will let you adjust your image. Many of them are under a $100.00 and do a very good job. Programs are like cameras and you can spend a lot of money on them. In my opinion it is better to spend the money on a good editing program than the camera itself. A great underwater setup will not fix those image problems like a good editing program.



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 Photo Tip of the Week!   new  
 Papa bear 2/13/2007 1:10 am EDT
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 Papa bear 2/19/2007 10:52 pm EDT
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