Editing Your Digital Photos Just Got Easier

The Photoshop plug-ins which are available can help perform tasks much faster and more efficiently than performing these tasks by hand. The 3D plug-ins are used to create 3D images and type very quickly and elegantly. The color management Photoshop plug-ins can create new colors to correspond to the printer that you are using, or the monitor that you are using to create your graphics. The digital asset management plug-ins are used to organize all of the digital images that you have created so that finding the correct image is much easier than without it. The photographic ones give many different professional lens techniques that you can apply to any picture to create amazing effects.

In the camera world there are dozens of formats, each format has something unique and some are more common than others. DNG (Digital Negative) Camera companies have introduced many different, and frequently changing, raw file formats. For example, one source states that there are over 140 RAW formats with more coming-some of them specific to a single camera model. On top of this, manufacturers are often pointlessly secretive about their specifications so there are almost always RAW files your software can't read-at least until someone reverse engineers the formats so they can support them. This lag time and inconvenience can be laid at the doorstep of the camera companies. These proprietary RAW files are at risk over time since companies come and go and interest waxes and wanes. One solution to this growing problem is a new Adobe format called the Digital Negative (.DNG). This publicly defined and openly shared format for RAW files is an attempt to ensure that you will be able to access your image files in the future. If your camera doesn't capture RAW images in this format, you can convert them to DNG using a program such as Photoshop or Lightroom. When you do so, you can even choose to store the original RAW image inside its DNG file so you can extract it at some future date should you need it. The DNG format is supported by Photoshop and other Adobe products, some other software companies, and a number of camera companies. As with all things in computing, only time will tell if the format becomes widely accepted or gradually fades away.

Lossy compression (rhymes with "bossy") can dramatically reduce file sizes. However, this process degrades images to some degree and the more they're compressed, the more degraded they become. In many situations, such as posting images on the Web or making small to medium sized prints, the image degradation isn't obvious. However, if you enlarge an image enough, it will show. The most common lossy file format is JPEG and many cameras let you specify how much they are compressed. For example, many cameras let you choose Fine (1:4), Normal (1:8), and Basic (1:16) compression. This is a useful feature because there is a trade-off between compression and image quality. Less compression gives you better images so you can make larger prints, but you can't store as many images.

RAW files are quite large. If you use this format a great deal you will need more storage space in the camera, and computer processing times may be slightly longer. When shooting images, you may have to wait longer between shots because the buffer gets filled more quickly and the camera is tied up longer processing the last image you took, and moving it from the buffer to the memory card. Since RAW images aren't processed in the camera, you have to process them on the computer and export them in a usable format when you want to e-mail them, post them on a Web site, print them, or import them into another program to create a slide show or publication. When you are done shooting for the day, there is still work to do. Since each camera company has defined its own proprietary RAW format, many operating systems and even photo-editing programs are unable to recognize some or all of these files. For this reason camera manufacturers always supply a program to process RAW images along with their cameras.

If you use operating system tools or applications to look at a storage device in the camera or card reader, you will find it is listed like the other drives on your system. If it contains more than one folder, the one photographers care about is named DCIM (for Digital Camera IMages). If you delete this folder, the camera will recreate it (but not any images it contained). The purpose of this folder, called the image root directory, is to keep together all of the images you capture with the camera. If you use the same card with other devices, there may also be other folders on the same card holding MP3 music or other files.

The first four characters in an image file's name, called free characters, can only be uppercase letters A-Z. The last four characters form a number between 0001 and 9999 and are called the file number. Canon uses the first four free characters IMG_ followed by the file number, Nikon uses DSC_, and Sony uses DSC0. Once transferred to your computer, or sometimes while transferring them, you can rename images with more descriptive names.

IPTC: Using an image management application, you can add information to an image such as keywords, a copyright notice, or a caption. The problem is that when you send the image to someone else, that information is usually not sent along because it's stored on your computer in the database and is not part of the image file as Exif information is. (As you will see shortly, one solution to this problem is the xmp file.) To solve this problem, the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) defines a format for exchanging such information. Programs that support this standard let you add, edit, and view this information that's embedded in a file just as Exif information is.