I stand on the shoulders of countless people. Some whom I've met, many I never will. Information flows in many streams and I am a grateful participant in the free and open source community. To pay-it-forward to the next generation of photographers I'm starting a weekly series called Tuesday Tutorials. Here's my first!
Taking pictures is just half the fun of photography. A teaser for image post-processing.
What you saw is NOT what the camera saw.
A good deal of work is done behind-the-scenes on a computer to make the original image the best it possibly can be. Rarely does a photograph come straight of a DSLR camera ready for posting on Facebook, Instagram or wherever. Some "translation" is required.
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| My trusty DSLR camera, the Canon T3i, sans lens. DSLR's and mirrorless cameras are most notable for their ability to swap lenses for different purposes, eg wide-angle for landscapes and zoom lenses for sports photography. |
All smartphones, and most "point-and-shoot" cameras will save photographs as .JPG files. The camera does a lot of altering to the original image, making some details sharper, suppressing sensor noise, enhancing color saturation, etc. The camera may give you a few options to alter how this is done but you are fairly limited in those. The end result is a compressed image file of 2-6 megabytes depending on how many megapixels your camera sensor has.
Most DSLR's (digital single lens reflex) and mirrorless cameras (like Sony and Panasonic) give you the choice of saving as a .JPG file or as a lossless file called a RAW file. No image processing is done on the RAW file. It is exactly what the camera sensor recorded. These files are about 20 megabytes in size (again depends on your image sensor size). To get these images from the camera to Instagram you'll need some software to help out.
Shoot RAW for full control over your images.
Digital post-processing gives you maximum control on how your image will end up looking. You can selectively alter the brightness of the image background while raising the foreground into prominence. You can get creative and remove all color from an image except the blood red of a rose. You can also blend different images together for special effects or blend different exposures of the same scene together, as I often do with landscapes, to show of the full dynamic range of an image.
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| Screenshot of Darktable, one of many opensource RAW image editors available today. |
Tuesday Tutorials Coming Out Weekly.
Stay tuned for how post-processing works in an Open Source software environment and gets the images from my camera to your computer screen in my new series: Tuesday Tutorials.
