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What is Digital Image Processing anyway? |
| In the old days, the lab would take exposed film, run it through chemicals, and present you with either slides or negatives and prints. Now, I do a different sort of processing
- I take the raw image, a Nikon .nef file, and process it to deliver images in different
color modes, a CMYK tif file that is used for printing and a RGB jpeg file that is
good for the web. Please see my article on What images are on your CD for more info on this!
But that's not all I do! I also take the time to clean up the image - removing any dust spots that were on the camera's lens or CCD screen (dust is everywhere!), cleaning up dirt from the scene itself (cleaning up mirrors, floors and stainless steel appliances), minor retouching that some photographers would charge for (removing stains from walls, painting over spots or covering up ugly holes in the wall), and most time-consuming for me, color correcting the image. I use a mixture of light sources: natural daylight, fluorescent, halogen, LED, tungsten and my flashes. Each of these produces its own color spectrum - more on that in of a future article. For now, it's enough to say that I do take care with every image I produce to make sure the color is correct. kitchen
image after processing All of this processing takes time: I can spend as much or more time on the computer in processing work as I did setting up the lights, prepping and shooting a room. But I wouldn't have it any other way, you deserve the best image possible, even if it takes more of my time on the computer. |
