Digital Imaging (Part IV)

The Digital Darkroom (Part 2a)

Today we’ll discuss the term photoshopped, and the software program Photoshop from Adobe for which the term was created sometimes a reference almost to seem as a byword.

What is Post Processing? Weather film or digital, the image that is in front of the lens will be different than the image on the screen or paper. Film had the ability to capture light burn, known as exposure, and through post chemical processing the image that was captured could be manipulated based on the chemicals used, or the amount of time that the film is exposed to the chemicals crossed with the type of chemicals the film was to be made out of.

All these things went together to produce a final image, change any part of this triangle and you change the image.

Let’s go digital. Photoshop has become the premier tool for post processing the digital image. Monday I wrote about the digital sensor. Completely simplified, there is a whole lot more that goes into producing a digital image. Consider this, each square is represented by a series of one’s and zeros. Those numbers don’t sound very interesting to look at. Compare these two images below, I would much rather look at the image on the right.

   

The limitations of the digital color spectrum compared to what our God given eyes can see through the visible light spectrum, is quite drastic and may probably never be truly reproduced, because of this we will never be able to capture what was truly there. Photography is, has been, and will always be, a representation of what was.

This is where we briefly delve into the photoshoped image, created by none the less Photoshop. The software is designed to take what is on the right after the camera’s computer processor (which I have not discussed) takes the numbers converts it into something similar to the mountains in what is called a RAW image. Or a digital negative.

Photo editing software has the ability to tweak or change each square as individually or as a whole, by color, saturation, luminance or hue. Photoshop specifically can add, hide, move or completely take away the pixels to create a fake scene by using effects in much the same way I compiled this document in Microsoft word, I took a few images from one place, an image from another, changed the font size and even placed some in bold.

Leonardo painted the Sistine Chapel by hand with a brush, he mixed colors and changed the perspective, photoshop isn’t new, it’s just different. And its here to stay.

Tomorrow I will compare Ansell Adams images with a few of my own using Lightroom 5. I’ll show you how he did it in the same way that I do it.